JOHN ERICSSON SPENT MUCH OF HIS LIFE in high dudgeon. His temper could be ignited even by a subordinate’s most minor incompetence, but the stubborn Swedish-American engineer reserved a special wrath for officialdom, which repeatedly failed to value his astonishingly prescient inventive designs. So resentful was he of past slights by his particular nemesis the U.S.

It looks ungainly from the outside: a burnt loaf of bread two hundred feet high. But then you enter, by way of doors large enough to drive trucks through. Those doors are tiny afterthoughts cut into the bottom corners of the real doors. The real doors, two on each end of the building, are 214 feet wide at the bottom, 202 feet high, and curved like a quarter-hemisphere of orange peel, each coming to a point at the top where it pivots on a single pin. Each of these big sliding doors is pulled open by standard-gauge railroad cars that run alongside its bottom edge.

THE EARLIEST KNOWN JET AIRPLANE flew—briefly—almost twenty-nine years before the Luftwaffe’s famous Heinkel He 178. One December morning in 1910 a young inventorpilot named Henri-Marie Coanda was testing a crude turbojet attached to a plywood aircraft, both of his own design, at Issy-les-Moulineaux, a suburb of Paris. When he throttled up his engine, a ball of flame ignited the plane as soon as it became airborne. It climbed steeply for a few seconds, barely clearing a stone wall, then turned on its side and slid earthward.

LIKE SO MANY GREAT AMERICANS, ICE CREAM WAS BORN somewhere else. Nevertheless, it has come to be universally thought of as ours. Americans transformed ice cream from a luxury into a staple available—and demanded—every day, all year around, and from a delicacy made in small batches with dishpans and rock salt to the product of computerized, automated production lines turning out hundreds of flavors.

NOT CONTENT TO SOLVE THE world’s housing problems, in 1911 Thomas Edison took on the furniture industry, to the enthusiastic delight (as usual) of the press. Boasting that concrete furniture could be made just as attractive as wood and far more lasting and durable, he began molding some common household pieces.

“ I AM GOING TO LIVE TO SEE THE DAY WHEN A WORKING MAN’S HOUSE can be built of concrete in a week. … If I succeed, it will take from the city slums everybody who is worth taking.” When Thomas Edison announced in 1906 that he planned to recast the world and mold it according to his own vision, people took him at his word.

AKRON, OHIO : (The following report was filed by the editor of this magazine, Frederick Alien.) The National Inventors Hall of Fame, founded in 1973, finally got a permanent home last summer in Akron. I went to see its official unveiling.

THE ICONOGRAPHY OF AMERICAN SHIPPING HISTORY IS dominated by three images: the Western riverboat, all gingerbread and flying sparks, churning down the Mississippi; the classic square-rigger, taut canvas everywhere, on a reach somewhere beyond Cape Horn; and the rakish luxury liner, with the Manhattan skyline as a backdrop, surrounded by fire-boats saluting the capture of the Blue Riband of the Atlantic—the mythic reward for the fastest crossing, usually between the Scilly Isles or Cherbourg and Ambrose Lightship off the coast of New Jersey.

MODERN TEXTBOOKS ON anesthesiology run to the thousands of pages, yet for all the minute understanding that has accumulated, no one really knows why anesthetics work. The first serious theory was postulated in 1847, just months after ether had been introduced for use in surgery. A pair of scientists named von Bibra and Harless noticed that anesthetic gases were strongly drawn to fat-like molecules (lipoids) in the human body but required some water to be present as well.

The letter began: “Having recently completed reading Daniel Sweeney’s excellent article ‘When America Was Last in the Arms Race’ (Spring 1995), I had to chuckle when I turned to the … picture of two workers operating a propellant cutter at a Du Pont factory during World War I. Immediately I wondered if this picture should have been featured in your ‘They’re Still There’ section!”

ON THE WEB: Believe it or not, there’s an awful lot more on the World Wide Web about the history of technology than there is about, say, restaurants in Los Angeles. You might expect the brand-new information technology to excel at providing info of the moment, but judging from a recent journey through its expanses, solid history may get the best treatment of all. The Web is chock-full of history-of-technology museum displays, “virtual exhibits,” illustrated articles, teaching materials, library resources, periodicals, and more.

WE ALL TEND TO JUDGE NEW TECH nologies by what we suppose to be their political ramifications; just look at how people respond to the Internet, the Human Genome Project, or nuclear power. But how does a new technology acquire the political meanings that so define it? And are they really immutable, or can a single technology have at different times different and even contradictory politics? At least one technology has had its politics turn 180 degrees and mean clearly opposite things: the geodesic dome.

ONE ENTERS THE OLD PART OF Auburn, Indiana, abruptly, as though passing through a clearly marked curtain of time. After a vale of strip malls and franchise food, the large street trees close in suddenly, shading a rich selection of Victorian, Craftsman, twenties Tudor, and generic Colonial houses, anchored at the center by the limestone and art-glass fortress of the DeKaIb County Courthouse.

AT THE BEGINNING OF THE AMERICAN Revolution, a man named David Bushnell built the world’s first practical submarine, which became known as the Turtle . He developed it in secrecy in Saybrook, Connecticut, and it came tantalizingly close to sinking the flagship of the British fleet.

Twenty-six of the best articles from Invention & Technology ’s first decade have been collected in the formats in which they originally appeared, with all the illustrations, in a new hardcover book called Inventing America ( CODE: AXH15 ). Copies can be obtained by calling 1-800-876-6556 .

AMONG THE MOST SUCCESSFUL PROFESSIONAL relationships of the first half of the twentieth century was the legendary association between the Standard Railroad of the World and the world’s best-known industrial-design firm, Raymond Loewy Associates. For two decades the mighty Pennsylvania Railroad and the dazzling Loewy organization collaborated on a set of images and objects that came to symbolize the Machine Age. Each organization proudly called public attention to its ties with the other.

AT THE MIDDLE OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY , St. Louis, Missouri, was a city on the move, America’s burgeoning frontier metropolis. By 1860 the city had 160,000 residents, and if the bustling riverfront wharves gave any indication, growth and prosperity were not about to end. Standing at the confluence of the vast Mississippi and Missouri river networks, St.

WHEN BEVERAGE MANU facturers started putting their products in bottles, perhaps the biggest obstacle was finding an airtight seal. Cork, the ancient solution, was cheap, easy to handle, and flavorless; unfortunately, cork plugs tended to come loose, especially with beer and carbonated beverages. Some fifteen hundred bottle stoppers were patented by the 1890s, none very effective: They leaked, rusted, imparted unpleasant flavors and odors, and were so expensive that they had to be reused.

The Blue Riband Lives

I HAVE JUST READ “THE THRALL OF the Blue Riband,” by Robert C. Post (Winter 1996). Your readers might be interested to know that the Blue Riband, which the United States won on her maiden voyage in 1952, is now in foreign hands. The Sea Cat , a tri-hulled car ferry built for the England-to-France channel trade, eclipsed the United States ’s record in 1990 by a mere two hours and forty-six minutes.

The Auburn Cord Duesenberg Museum is located at 1600 South Wayne St., P.O. Box 271, Auburn, IN 46706 (Tel: 219-925-1444). The town of Auburn lies at the intersection of I-69 and Indiana Route 8, about twenty miles north of Fort Wayne and thirty-five miles south of I-80/I-90 and the Michigan border. The museum is open from 9:00 A.M. to 5:00 P.M. every day except Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year’s.