NEW YORK, N.Y. : “While the artistic genius of Leonardo da Vinci has been almost legendary since his lifetime (1452-1519), his equally extraordinary genius as a scientist has remained little known.” So ran the caption at an exhibit of Leonardo’s Codex Leicester at New York’s American Museum of Natural History (from which it has since departed). The assertion is debatable, to say the least.

Tours of the West Baden Springs Hotel will be held between May and October of 1997 on Saturdays and Sundays, hourly between 10:00 A.M. and 3:00 P.M. , beginning at the site’s main entrance on state route 56. The tour is ten dollars for adults, five dollars for youths aged thirteen to eighteen, two dollars for children aged six to twelve, and free for children younger than six.

FOR THE FIRST QUARTER OF THIS CENTURY, ALMOST all automobile bodies were painted by hand, with brushes. Nothing held back car production like painting. It was the manacle, the iron boot of the industry. Paint technology had not kept up with advances in other areas of mass production. Major automakers could assemble a car in four to five hours, but it took three to eight weeks to paint it.

IT’S THE OLD STORY : A glamorous movie actress and a brash avant-garde composer get together to invent and patent a device that controls torpedoes by radio. Naturally their foray into militarytechnology innovation affects the way defense satellites are designed in the next half-century.

“PATCHWORK CLEAR-CUTTING IS THE BEST THING for those owls,” Wayne Giesy tells me. “In the wild there’s less food for them. Lewis and Clark nearly starved to death in that damn forest before they got out to hunt and fish. The ecology people are missing the boat.” Wayne Giesy works for the Hull-Oakes Lumber Company, in Monroe, Oregon, twenty-five miles outside Eugene. Hull-Oakes is a sawmill that, as Giesy’s words may suggest, specializes in cutting extremely big old-growth logs.

In the early decades of the nineteenth century, Josiah White pioneered a striking number of technological fields. He made major advances in iron and steel manufacture, he built the earliest example of an important type of bridge, he taught Americans how to burn a new kind of coal, and he invented the country’s first railroad of any importance. Like most inventors, White is little remembered today. Few biographical directories contain his name, and even histories of technology tend to ignore him.

The Switch Back Gravity Railroad was scrapped in 1937, but the Switch Back Gravity Railroad Foundation, a nonprofit group in Jim Thorpe, Pennsylvania, is dedicated to bringing it back to life. The group has arranged the construction of a twenty-eight-foot working scale model of the railroad (which is on display at the Mauch Chunk Museum), produced a video using original photos, drawings, and 1920s motion-picture footage of the line, and commissioned feasibility studies on the prospects of resurrecting it.

ONE OF THE most visible innovations in late-twentieth-century architecture has been the huge unsupported dome. In the familiar form of the domed stadium it has popped up across the continent. The era of domed stadiums began in 1965, with the opening of the Houston Astrodome. Yet an unsupported steel-framed dome of breathtaking size has been standing since the very beginning of the century in southern Indiana, far from any metropolitan center. It was built not to protect sports fans from the elements but to fulfill a businessman’s whim.

QUITE A FEW PROMINENT HISTORI ans of technology have been trained in engineering, and some of them have had careers as practicing engineers before turning to the study of the past. But not many have attained such eminence in both realms as Walter G. Vincenti, who in 1997 marks his fortieth anniversary on the faculty of Stanford University.

ON A COLD NIGHT IN FEBRUARY 1871, the New York Central Railroad’s Pacific Express rounded a bend seven miles south of Poughkeepsie, New York. All of a sudden the engineer, Doc Simmons, saw with horror the wreckage of a freight train sprawled across a drawbridge dead ahead. He blew the “down brakes” whistle, and trainmen between the cars jumped to turn their brake wheels. But it was already far too late.

WHILE YOU’RE READING THIS, IF IT’S DAY time, a man is slowly walking under forty feet of water in the Gulf of Mexico a mile or two off the Florida coast. He is leaning far forward into the current and examining the dim ocean floor in front of ,him, rhythmically turning his head from side to side. Periodically he sees a sponge, gathers it with a rake held in his right hand, and deposits it in a wire basket. Most likely he is a Greek-American doing the same thing his father and grandfather did: professional sponge diving.

WHEN THE SPACE SHUTTLE CHAL - lenger was destroyed in 1986 by the failure of an O-ring, it tragically brought home the familiar technological truth that the breakdown of a seemingly insignificant part can trigger an enormous catastrophe. A complex system like the space shuttle contains hundreds of components and subsystems that can go wrong, and the seals and connections between them greatly multiply the potential for failure.

IN 1963 NEW YORK CITY’S HISTORIC-PRESERVATION movement lost its greatest battle, and the Pennsylvania Railroad proceeded to demolish the architect Charles Follen McKim’s elegant Pennsylvania Station, in the heart of Manhattan. The new commercial structures that rose in its place offered none of the architectural distinction of the splendid Beaux Arts building they replaced, and ever since then railroad passengers have had to make do with a sterile, low-ceilinged subterranean facility.

Flash Man

I KNEW HAROLD EDGERTON (“THE MAN Who Stopped Time,” by Joyce E. Bedi, Summer 1997) very well, beginning in my days as a graduate student at MIT in the late 1930s. While his fascination with high-speed photography led him to many unusual endeavors, such as a fruitful collaboration with Jacques Cousteau in undersea exploration, the most extraordinary was that of setting off all the atomic and hydrogen bombs the United States tested.

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.

INNOVATIONS IN EQUIPMENT HAVE dramatically reshaped many sports, often in very unexpected ways. In the 1980s aerodynamic engineers redesigned the javelin so that with a precise, technically perfect throw, it would fly farther than the strongest athletes had ever thrown it before. In the hands of techniqueoriented athletes it set new records, but it proved dangerous, too, when it landed in a judges’ tent at the 1984 Olympics.

HEDY LAMARR AND George Antheil were among the more prominent celebrity inventors, but the entertainment world has had many other stars who were inventive off-stage as well as on. The magician and escape artist Harry Houdini, for example, was issued patent 1,370,316 in 1921 for a diver’s suit. In 1952 the comedian Danny Kaye received design patent 166,807 for a “Blowout Toy or the Like,” based on those rolled-up snakelike paper toys that children blow into at birthday parties.

AT FIRST GLANCE THE PICTURE OPPOSITE RESEMBLES A photo of a pile of junk. Look closer, however, and you will see a propeller, a wing, and a belly tank. Far from being junk, it is a Japanese “Zero” fighter plane from World War II that went on to be of inestimable value to the United States. Aviation buffs and historians know it as Koga’s Zero, for the name of its pilot, or as the Akutan or Aleutian Zero, for the crash site.

THE ZERO WAS JAPAN’S MAIN FIGHTER PLANE THROUGHOUT WORLD War II. By war’s end about 11,500 Zeros had been produced in five main variants. In March 1939, when the prototype Zero was rolled out, Japan was in some ways still so backward that the plane had to be hauled by oxcart from the Mitsubishi factory twenty-nine miles to the airfield where it flew. It represented a great leap in technology.

The Seaway Saga

What a great article by Daniel J. McConville (“Seaway to Nowhere,” Fall 1995). My husband and I marveled through the entire story, wondering why all that work hadn’t reached the consciousness of our family in the 1950s. Both of us thought the Seaway had been completed several decades earlier. We could scarcely believe that America had so shortchanged its cooperation with Canada. And the part on the problems encountered with the glacial till was dumbfounding.