THE MISSISSIPPI RIVER STOOD AT THE CENTER, literally and figuratively, of the United States’s westward expansion during the nineteenth century. By far the most prominent name in taming the powerful river was James Buchanan Eads. From the 1830s through the 1850s this supremely capable engineer salvaged hundreds of wrecks with a series of ever-larger diving bells, gaining in the process an intimate knowledge of the river’s bottom.

The Panama Canal

I WAS AMAZED TO SEE THE MlRAFLORES Bridge in the Panama Canal cover picture of the Fall 1996 issue. It is plainly visible at the entrance of the lock, on either side, a drawbridge in its open position. The Bridge of the Americas replaced it; I would have thought it had been dismantled. When I lived in Panama, between 1951 and 1959, the Miraflores Bridge and the nearby Thatcher Ferry were the routes across the canal.

DURING THE 1960S AN OVERBURDENED Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) sought to ease the work of its air-traffic controllers by introducing computers. Like any government agency, it awarded its contracts to the lowest bidder. The system that resulted was obsolescent almost from the start, and when the FAA’s managers tried to improve it, they couldn’t. They could only change bits and pieces at a time, which left the traveling public relying for safety on a makeshift patchwork.

MATAGORDA BAY, TEX. : In 1995 a team of archeologists found the wreck of the French ship Belle off Texas’s Gulf Coast, where she had lain since running aground in 1686. The ship had been part of an ill-fated expedition led by the French explorer Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle, who was exploring the area in the mistaken belief that it was near the mouth of the Mississippi River.

IN THE WINTER 1997 ISSUE OF THIS MAGAZINE, DAVID E. AND Marshall Jon Fisher chronicled the take-no-prisoners battle over whose technology would define color television, CBS’s mechanical system or RCA’s electronic one. Peter Goldmark of CBS finally conceded defeat to David Sarnoff and a triumphant RCA in 1953, but the story doesn’t end there. I was one of a small group of dedicated Westinghouse engineers who inadvertently opened the old wounds more than a decade later. We had to pick a system for NASA’s Apollo Television Camera Program.

HAVING RECENTLY READ WHY THINGS Bite Back: Technology and the Revenge of Unintended Consequences , and having assigned the book in my undergraduate course “Society and Technology,” I was delighted to see an interview with its author, Edward Tenner, in the Spring 1997 issue of American Heritage of Invention & Technology . Because the book leaves the reader with some key ambiguities, I looked to the interview for clarification.

ANTIQUARIANS SAY, “THE MORE THERE WERE , the fewer there are.” By 1927 fifteen million Model T Fords had been built, and to shelter these tin lizzies, thousands of tin garages were bolted, screwed, and banged together in back yards from Cape Cod to Puget Sound. Not many T’s are still around, and even fewer tin garages. Some of them, built carelessly or cheaply, just rusted to pieces and collapsed. Most of them outlived their usefulness. As the auto industry matured, cars grew wider and longer until by 1940 most tin garages couldn’t hold them.

DECEMBER 22, 1845, A GERMAN IMMIGRANT NAMED JOSEPH FABER exhibited a mechanical device to the public at Philadelphia’s Musical Fund Hall. Outwardly it was similar to many curiosities of the era: A figure dressed like a Turk sat on a table, its face staring out at the crowd. The workings of this dummy, however, were far from the usual fare.

I WAS LUCKY. THE MOMENT I DROVE UP TO LAKE Okeechobee to cross over to Torry Island the bridge shut in front of me, blocking my way. A heavyset man in a wide-brimmed floppy straw hat ambled onto it and pulled down a gate at each end. Then he walked to the middle of the bridge, picked up a 10-foot-long pole, stuck it into a hole in the roadway, and turned it. Pretty soon the whole 140-foot-long steel span was rotating under him like a railway turntable, until it had swung ninety degrees.

ON DECEMBER 19, 1937, THE HARTFORD Courier described a demonstration that Harold Edgerton had just given at the local Bushnell Motion Pictures and Lecture Course: “About 2000 persons sat for about two hours in Bushnell Memorial last night and saw things happen that happened a long time before they reached the hall, but which really happened at the time they saw them happen. S’elp us, that’s what happened!

I WAS AMAZED TO SEE THE MlRAFLORES Bridge in the Panama Canal cover picture of the Fall 1996 issue. It is plainly visible at the entrance of the lock, on either side, a drawbridge in its open position. The Bridge of the Americas replaced it; I would have thought it had been dismantled. When I lived in Panama, between 1951 and 1959, the Miraflores Bridge and the nearby Thatcher Ferry were the routes across the canal.

AS AN ELECTRICAL ENGINEER I HAVE always enjoyed Invention & Technology and I share Walter Vincenti’s interest in history (“What Engineers Know: An Interview With Walter Vincenti,” by Robert C. Post, Winter 1997). But I differ with him on the relationship between technology and culture. While he sees our culture as the age of technology—as opposed to the Middle Ages, the age of religion—I see all cultures as driven by technology.

THIRTY-FOUR CANOES IN ALMOST AS MANY COL ors glide down a forty-foot-wide channel of smooth water and gather by a weathered wood-plank wall under the blue Oregon sky. Their paddlers grab on to long cables tossed down from a walkway a dozen feet above, and all tie up together. They have entered the Willamette Falls Locks, cut into the rocky basaltic riverbank in the early 187Os. The scene looks utterly placid.

ON A FRIDAY AFTERNOON IN APRIL OF 1916, a crowd of 2,500 music lovers and curiosity seekers gathered at Carnegie Hall in New York. As they took their seats, they saw a fine mahogany phonograph alone on the stage. A white-gloved man emerged from behind the curtains. He placed a record on the turntable, wound up the mechanism, and silently disappeared.

IN AUGUST 1940, AS AN INDUSTRY COM mittee wrestled with transmission standards for television, a young, accented voice momentarily disrupted the rush toward commercial broadcasting. The voice belonged to Peter Goldmark, CBS’s Hungarian-born Wunderkind , who had emigrated to the United States only seven years before.

HARTFORD, CONN.: In the late 1880s, when Mark Twain began his tale of a time traveler who brings modern technology to the Middle Ages, he had to decide what sort of character would work best in the central role. He did not choose a steamboat pilot, despite his own experience in that capacity. Nor did he choose a railroad man or a telegrapher or an electrician. Instead Twain used the chief of a firearms factory as his agent of transformation.

To ALFRED ELY BEACH, THE BEST WAY TO MOVE PEOPLE from one place to another underground was to put them in capsules and shoot them through tubes by means of air pressure from huge fans. The year was 1870, New York City’s need for a subway was becoming desperate, and many rapid-transit proposals were being put forward. Beach insisted that his was the best. “A tube, a car, a revolving fan!” he cried. “Little more is required.

THE FIRST HURDLE IN DEVELOPING THE MODERN GASOLINE PUMP WAS RECOG nizing that such a thing was needed. Early in the century, when cars were still rare, gasoline was essentially a nuisance for petroleum refiners, a byproduct of kerosene distillation that had to be disposed of somehow. It had a variety of minor uses: as a solvent and as a fuel for lamps, stoves, and engines. Automobiles were somewhere near the bottom of the list.

IS OUR TECHNOLOGY LEADING US TOWARD AN ideally frictionless and disembodied information society and a world where hunger and disease have been finally vanquished? Or, on the other hand, is it dragging us down in a calamitous decline that will end only in a global environmental apocalypse? Neither, of course, argues Edward Tenner, the author of a bracing new book titled Why Things Bite Back: Technology and the Revenge of Unintended Consequences (Alfred A. Knopf, $26.00).

UNTIL THE AGE OF SEVENTY -six Frank Henefelt of Buffalo, New York, had led an active life. He had been a parts inspector for an optical firm and before that the chief tester for the old Fierce-Arrow automobile company. In retirement he could still mow his lawn or climb a ladder to install screens. “I was one hundred percent,” he said—until the day in 1959 when he began having blackouts. “I had one while I was in the bank, another down in the cellar,” he later told an interviewer.