IF THE STATE OF WISCONSIN HAS AN IMAGE OF ITSELF, IT IS SURE ly a rural and agrarian one. Even our license plates proclaim us to be America’s Dairyland. In fact, Wisconsin also has a good share of manufacturing, but it’s rarely mentioned when discussing the “good life” of the state. We may be grateful to have industry in Wisconsin, but we don’t seem to talk about it much.

NEW YORK, N.Y.: Good industrial design comes in two varieties. The first one turns mundane items into works of art, revealing the potential for beauty in something as humdrum as a wastebasket or pencil sharpener. The second one goes to the opposite extreme, merging form and function so completely that the object’s appearance seems ordained by nature instead of thought up by a man at a drawing board. In the best cases one might just as well ask who designed the sunflower or who designed Niagara Falls.

THE MODERN SPEEDOMETER evolved from the odometer, which goes back to Roman times. To determine how far they had traveled, Roman legions rolled a wheel as they marched and multiplied its circumference by the number of revolutions. By the sixteenth century the odometer had been combined with a clock to yield a kind of speedometer. Through the stagecoach and railroad ages, calculating average speed over an interval was usually good enough. No one felt much need for an instant speed reading.

“AMERICA certainly can not pretend to wage war with us,” a London newspaper declared on June 10, 1812. “She has no navy to do it with.” Such was the disdain for American sea power on the eve of the War of 1812 that the British politician George Canning dismissed the infant U.S. Navy as “a few firbuilt frigates with hits of hunting at the top.”

POLITICIANS LOVE THE LIME -light, and so, it is said, do performers. But people familiar with the theater know that there is no limelight anymore, and there hasn’t been for ages. Most people don’t even know what limelight actually was.

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.

PHILADELPHIA, PA.: The year 1996 sees two major American industries, cars and computers, celebrating anniversaries. In both cases the date is somewhat arbitrary. As early as 1805 Oliver Evans drove a steampowered vehicle through Philadelphia; as for internal combustion, at least three such cars were successfully operated in 1893 and 1894. The so-called centennial of the American automobile industry turns out to commemorate a more arcane milestone: the first multiple production of a gasolinepowered car, the 1896 Duryea.

IN 1833 A NEWSPAPER IN Albany, New York, printed a rave review of a demonstration of nitrous oxide gas presented by an itinerant lecturer named Dr. Coult—Dr. Coult of London, New York, and Calcutta.

THE FIRST ANESTHESIOLOGISTS found that they could harness the very power of sleep. With nitrous oxide, ether, or chloroform, they discovered a passageway leading to an insensible sleep known as narcosis. Their successors managed to explore that shadowy route, charting each individual patient’s course through it, and over the past 150 years anesthesiology can be said to have been fully realized as an instrument of medicine, to have been mastered.

COKE, A FUEL USED mainly in iron and steel manufacture, is essentially pure carbon. If it came out of the ground that way, life would be a lot simpler—and cleaner. Unfortunately, coke starts out as bituminous coal, a mixture of carbon and various impurities. Separating the impurities is not particularly hard; you just heat the coal to drive them off. The problem lies in disposing of the unwanted portions. For decades each new solution simply replaced an old environmental peril with a new, unexpected one.

HALF A CENTURY AGO AMERICAN PHYSICISTS created two of our era’s most important inventions. At Los Alamos, New Mexico, the Manhattan Project built the atom bomb. At Bell Telephone Laboratories a much smaller group of scientists made the transistor. The director of the latter project, Mervin Kelly, parlayed his achievement by building Bell Labs into the nation’s greatest industrial research center. Until its offspring, Silicon Valley, came to the fore during the 1960s, the institution Kelly built stood alone at the top.

Form Vs. Function

GLENN PORTER, IN “TROUBLED MAR riage: Raymond Loewy and the Pennsylvania Railroad” (Spring 1996), very nicely explains the conflict between the design consultant and the engineer. One is truly interested only in aesthetics, the other in the measured performance of the machine. That dichotomy has probably not disappeared from the scene, but it has evolved into more beneficial relationships in some industries.

BUILDING ANY TUNNEL CAN PRESENT A HOST OF difficulties, from getting soil out and construction materials in to performing precision alignment deep inside the earth. When the tunneling takes place underwater, a whole new set of obstacles arises.

IT ALL BEGAN ON AN AUTUMN DAY in 1899 behind the family home in Worcester, Massachusetts. The seventeenyear-old Robert Goddard had climbed a cherry tree to trim some dead branches with a saw and hatchet. Up in that tree he was possessed by an idea that was to propel him on a lifelong path.

“I BELIEVE THAT I HAVE solved the problem of cheap as well as simple automobile construction. … The general public is interested only in the knowledge that a serviceable machine can be constructed at a price within the reach of many.” With these words Henry Ford boasted to reporters about his new design triumph. It was January 4, 1906, and the car in question was not the legendary Model T but its predecessor, the Model N.

GLENN PORTER, IN “TROUBLED MAR riage: Raymond Loewy and the Pennsylvania Railroad” (Spring 1996), very nicely explains the conflict between the design consultant and the engineer. One is truly interested only in aesthetics, the other in the measured performance of the machine. That dichotomy has probably not disappeared from the scene, but it has evolved into more beneficial relationships in some industries. For example, the aerodynamic shapes of modern automobiles not only look pleasing but also cut drag to improve engine efficiency.

John Carlsen, the fireman for P.S. 73 in Brooklyn, New York, stands on a sloping mountain of anthracite in the coal bunker in the school’s basement and shovels 650 pounds of coal into a bucket suspended from an overhead rail. “I do this at least ten times a day,” he says. He pulls a link chain to raise the filled bucket and pushes it out through the bunker doorway and across to an area in front of one of four big boilers, where he tips the bucket to dump the coal onto the floor.

LT. ROBERT HARDAWAY III PEERED INTO HIS BOXES OF NEWLY procured medical equipment and sighed with disappointment. It was April 1941, and he had just reported for duty as a surgeon in the 8th Field Artillery Regiment of the Hawaiian Division. Standing in the Schofield Barracks, the Texan doctor uncrated his supplies, neatly wrapped in yellowed newspapers that bore dates from 1918. The rolls and squares of cotton bandages had crumbled in their packages due to terminal dry rot.

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.

ON MONDAY, OC tober 29, 1945, at nine-thirty in the morning, 5,000 shoppers stormed into Manhattan’s Gimbel Bros, department store in pursuit of technology’s latest marvel. An advertisement in the previous day’s paper had called it “the miracle pen that will revolutionize writing.” The ball-point pen was a wonder that would write in the Aleutian Islands, underwater, or at 20,000 feet, without smudging or leaking, for two whole years. By the end of the day, Gimbels had sold 8,000 pens at $12.50 apiece (with desk stand). They were no good.