AFTER THIS MAGA zine published my article on Jules Verne’s novel From the Earth to the Moon (“A Manned Moon Shot—in 1865”), in Spring 1994, a curious letter appeared in the next issue. A fellow Ohio engineer, Paul Williams, had written to tell about an early-1960s scheme to launch rockets from a huge gun that bore uncanny parallels to the one in the Verne book. After his letter appeared, Paul called me to arrange a lunch.

FOR INFORMATION ABOUT the Society for Industrial Archeology, which leads tours of industrial sites each year and publishes a newsletter and a journal and has local chapters around the country, write to Society for Industrial Archeology Headquarters, Department of Social Sciences, Michigan Technical University, 1400 Townsend Drive, Houghton, MI 49931. Membership is open to anyone interested and costs thirty-five dollars a year.

THE 1949-50 SEASON WAS A VERY GOOD ONE for television owners. Ed Sullivan presented “The Toast of the Town” Sunday nights on CBS, and “Arthur Godfrey and His Friends” appeared on Wednesdays. Milton Berle headlined “Texaco Star Theater” Tuesday nights on NBC. “Cavalcade of Stars” aired on the DuMont network on Saturdays. And “Roller Derby” rumbled two nights a week on ABC.

IT’S SOMETIMES HARD TO TELL when someone has just saved your life. But Elbert Botts has pulled me back from the brink a number of times, and he’s probably uncooked your goose once or twice too. Although there are no statues to honor Botts, he has hundreds of millions of tiny monuments to his memory along the world’s highways. No one can say how many lives they have saved during the last thirty years, but the total is more, I’d venture, than air bags and seat belts combined.

Bell Labs’ Greatness

I AM NOW A VISITING PROFESSOR OF music emeritus at Stanford University. I looked back many years with keen nostalgia when I read the fine piece “What Made Bell Labs Great,” by T. A. Heppenheimer, in your Summer 1996 issue. I encountered again the Labs’ “broad (but not unlimited) domain … ripe for innovation.” I admired again one of my heroes, M. J. Kelly, and recalled various other characters named or discussed, including myself.

A SHIMMERING MIRAGE, PINPOINT small, hovered on the horizon—one big ship floating on two razorthin hulls like ice-skate blades. It grew slowly, so it must be approaching us. We were a crowd of forty people on a sixty-five-foot cabin cruiser waiting by a dock at seven o’clock in the warm breezes of a January morning in Panama.

WHEN AN AMERICAN AIRLINES BOEING 757 SLAMMED into a mountain in Colombia just before Christmas last year, the world was shocked that such a modern plane, with all the latest safety equipment, could come to such an end. Everyone wanted to know how it had occurred. Though the plane had vanished in the jungle without human witnesses, the aircraft’s mechanical witnesses—its cockpit voice and flight-data recorders—were able to tell us in a few days, with intimate detail, the plight of Flight 965.

EVER SINCE ANTIQUITY HUMANS HAVE DREAMED OF flying with artificial wings. The rocket belt realizes that timeless fantasy with twentieth-century technology.

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 CHANCE ENCOUNTER BETWEEN Priscilla Vansteelant and Ronald Woody II is one for the record books. Five years ago Vansteelant was driving her 1989 Chrysler LeBaron sedan near Culpeper, Virginia, when she drifted left of Rural Route 640’s center line. Coincidentally Woody was driving a 1989 LeBaron convertible in the opposite direction. The two LeBarons met corner to corner on a blind hilltop at a closing speed of seventy miles per hour. Vansteelant was wearing a seat belt but Woody was not.

MAMMOTH SMOKE RINGS DOWN ENEMY BOMBERS! MONSTER MACHINE CREATES MAN-MADE TORNADOES! It was a fantastic idea, and it approached reality during World War II. The client? The U.S. government.

The East Broad Top will run three trains daily, at 11:00 A.M. and 1:00 and 3:00 P.M. , on Saturdays and Sundays only, starting June 3, 1995, and ending October 15. Prospective riders should call the EBT at 814-447-3011 for information. Orbisonia, about fifty miles west of Harrisburg, is on Route 522, fifteen miles north of Exit 13 on the Pennsylvania Turnpike.

AT THE END OF A LONG, WINDING DRIVEWAY in the farm country outside Waukesha, Wisconsin, just beyond the advancing sprawl of Milwaukee, I step past several chickens, a turkey, and one of the biggest cats I have ever seen and into a gift store that sells mainly woolen goods—slippers, gloves, socks, rugs, and comforters. As the woman who owns the store comes out to greet me, I hear from behind her a noise from the Industrial Revolution.

THE EAST BROAD TOP RAILROAD was organized in 1871, under a charter issued in 1856, to build a narrow-gauge track between the Pennsylvania Railroad’s main line at Mount Union and a group of coal-mining communities some thirty miles to the south. The first section, from Mount Union to Rockhill Furnace, opened in August 1873, and the remainder of its main stem reached Robertsdale the following year. Several branches were added later.

IN AN ARTICLE TITLED “THE LOST LANGUAGE of Trains” in the Winter 1995 Invention & Technology , Peter Tuttle described how the traditions of steam railroading live on in Chama, New Mexico, where workers continue venerable practices and pass along ancient lore amid a physical setting that is a mixture of old and new.

Smokeless Powder

As an admirer of the Springfield 1873 to 1892 trapdoor rifle, I must rush to its defense from the attack on it that accompanied the smokeless-powder piece (“The Tragedy of the Trapdoor Springfield,” by Roger Pinckney). Before its official adoption by the Army in 1873, this fine old rugged rifle was fieldtested and won out over all the leading firearms of the day.

IN MAY 1943 CMDR. WILLIAM S. (“Deak”) Parsons returned from a secret mission to the South Pacific, where he had successfully introduced a new weapon in the war against Japan. He expected his next assignment to be the command of a ship. Instead he found himself on a train heading toward a most unlikely posting for a Navy officer: Los Alamos, New Mexico. His traveling companion was a nuclear physicist, J. Robert Oppenheimer.

Fermi’s life is covered in Atoms in the Family , by his wife, Laura Fermi, and in Enrico Fermi , Physicist, by his friend and collaborator Emilio Segrè. Nuclear piles and their role in the race for an atomic bomb are described in The New World, 1939/1946 , an official Manhattan Project history by Richard G. Hewlett and Oscar Anderson, Jr.

NINETEENTH-CENTURY AMERICA was famous for its machines. It also became famous for turning those machines into richly decorated works of art. Factory engines were painted bright red and green or made to resemble Roman and Greek temples and Gothic cathedrals, with classical columns, Doric-order entablatures, and pointed arches. Machine tools were covered with swirling arabesques or fanciful floral and animal images. Sewing machines were adorned with Egyptian sphinxes. Why?

PITTSBURGH, PA.: America’s rivers used to come in two varieties: pretty and working. The pretty ones attracted lovers, poets, and artists; the working ones stank, turned orange, caught on fire, and blighted the landscape. At first the two could be combined, as with a little old stone mill and its handsome, inefficient water wheel. But once manufacturers started learning about hydraulics and discovered economies of scale, beauty and industry went separate ways.