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TO MOST AMERICANS TODAY THE NAME Charles F. Kettering conjures up little beyond a vague feeling that he had something to do with cancer research. Yet the interest that this remarkable man had in medicine was only a sideline. What enabled him late in life to help found the Sloan-Kettering Institute in New York City was an extraordinarily productive and lucrative career as an automotive inventor. His achievements made him one of the most admired Americans of his day. And in a way he is not really forgotten.

AMONG THOSE HUMBLE inventions that have moved into everyone’s lives and that no one can remember ever being without, probably none occupies such a warm spot in our affections as Scotch tape—or, as its developer called it, Scotch Brand cellophane tape. Millions of miles of it are pressed down every year by people in every walk of life all over the world for all manner of surprising uses—none of which were dreamed of by its originators, who thought of it only as a handy means of sealing packages.

ATTACK! THE ORDER REACHED THE TROOPS OF DESERT Storm at 2:00 A.M. on Sunday, February 24, 1991. Within minutes, as the command crackled over unit radios, the night was filled with the rumble of motors turning over in 1,956 M1A1 Abrams tanks. Pulses pounded as the big metal beasts rolled into southern Iraq, spearheading a massive armored thrust around the right flank of the Iraqi army, which had dug into defensive positions in and near Kuwait. Other M1A1s, many manned by U.S.

BY THE END OF THE NINE teenth century, Thomas Edison’s laboratory had created a machine that could record sounds and one that could record moving pictures. Combining the two was the obvious next step. At first it seemed a simple matter of making them start and stop at the same time—no more complicated than running any two machines at once. Yet more than thirty years would pass before talking pictures fully succeeded with the release of The Jazz Singer in 1927.

TROY, N.Y.: The story is told of a finicky director filming a costume drama who insisted that his extras wear not just historically accurate uniforms, boots, and headgear but even underwear appropriate to the era. When asked who would know the difference if they wore ordinary BVDs instead, the auteur replied, “I would.”

HENRY FORD WAS INDEED A GREAT IN novator (“Henry Ford’s Big Flaw,” by John M. Staudenmaier, S.J.), but I question that those are “6000-horsepower gas-turbine engines in the powerhouse” shown on page 38 of the Fall 1994 issue. The prime movers driving the dynamos appear to be cross-compound Corliss steam engines. Gas turbines didn’t become available for industrial use until well after World War II.

Cowen’s inventions, in fact, often developed in ways he hadn’t intended. He meant to revolutionize photography in 1898 with his fuse for igniting magnesium-powder flashes, but instead the U.S. Navy bought 24,000 to use in detonating underwater mines. Then he designed little metal tubes to illuminate flowers in their pots, which another man used to start the Eveready flashlight company.

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.

FEW TECHNOLOGIES HAVE TOPPED nuclear energy in its capacity to bring forth sweeping predictions of either doom or nirvana. Either we were going to blow ourselves up or, as Lewis Strauss of the Atomic Energy Commission suggested in 1954, we would have electric power too cheap to be worth metering. In the heady days of the 1950s and 1960s, the possibilities of a fuel that packed 400,000 times the wallop of TNT seemed endless.

THE FATE OF MOST ABANDONED RAIL roads is a speedy dismemberment. The rolling stock is sold to other railroads, or if it’s as obsolete and undersized as that of the EBT, it usually goes to the scrapyard. The rails are then pulled up and sold to be relaid or scrapped. The buildings are sold for adaptive reuse, torn down, or simply abandoned. The rightof-way is offered to anyone who can use it.

FIFTY YEARS AGO THIS SUMMER, THE WORLD WAS changed forever when the first nuclear bomb exploded above the New Mexico desert and then bombs were dropped on the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan. The moral, psychological, and geopolitical ramifications of this most powerful and revolutionary of all technologies and its use have been matters of universal concern ever since. They will undoubtedly be the subject of particularly intense discussion this summer.

CHICAGO, ILL. : When Enrico Fermi built his atomic pile on a squash court under the University of Chicago’s Stagg Field (see page 10), it was the most important event to occur at a racketsport facility since the Tennis Court Oath in the French Revolution.

“I‘M HUNGRY. LET’S GO TO LUNCH!”

IN THE EARLY 1930S A TALL, THIN CANADIAN-BORN Chicagoan named Harry J. McCollum invented a car heater that burned raw gasoline. Two things made it amazing. First, it didn’t blow up. Second, it made the interior of his old Chrysler toasty warm in just ninety seconds.

WILMINGTON, DEL. : Any dedicated viewer of television’s “The A-Team” knows that the high point of each episode is the engineering scene. First the team stumbles on a rusty old airplane, tank, or rocket launcher that just happens to be right where they need it; then Mr. T patches it up with paper clips, toothpicks, pipe cleaners, and his Swiss Army knife; and finally the team members use it to subdue the bad guys and save the orphanage from ruin.

IN SINCLAIR LEWIS’S NOVEL MAIN STREET there is a scene where Dr. Will Kennicott and his wife, Carol, are on a hunting expedition near their Minnesota home. Dr. Kennicott, who prides himself on being up-to-date, lectures his less than fascinated bride on the merits of his new rifle, which uses the latest thing in propellants—smokeless powder.

IN THE SUMMER OF 1864 FEDERAL troops were stalled before Petersburg and Atlanta, and the public was souring on what seemed to be an endless war. Democrats were suggesting peace overtures to the Confederacy, and President Lincoln was nervous about his re-election. Secretary of War Edwin Stanton instructed Alexander B. Dyer, the Army’s chief of ordnance, to break the stalemate with increased firepower.

THOMAS FLEMING’S ARTICLE “TANKS” (Winter 1995) was fascinating in recounting the U.S. Army’s more than sixty-year struggle to develop a truly world-class fighting vehicle, but a gap in the story is evident. The marvelousIy detailed cutaway illustration of the M1A1 Abrams tank, with more than thirty callouts for its components, fails to pick out the raison d’être for the two-million-dollar vehicle: its main weapon and ammunition.

“WELCOME TO RIDE NIAGARA’S ULTIMATE ADVENTURE , made possible by the amazing DraxE-1000, high-technology, submersible vehicle—the only vehicle in the world that dares to take you over mighty Niagara Falls in perfect comfort and relative safety.” The speaker continues this soothing spiel as you travel along an “abandoned hydro tunnel” that deposits you in the Niagara River, immediately above the falls. Soon the craft is tossing and turning in the upper rapids; then it plunges down, down, down into the abyss below. Are you in danger? No.

IT WAS PERHAPS THE MOST AUDACIOUS ESPIONAGE CAPER OF THE COLD War. Starting in 1954, British and American intelligence agencies dug a quarter-mile-long tunnel from a suburb of West Berlin under the border and into the Soviet-controlled East. At the tunnel’s end they tapped into telephone and telegraph cables over which the Soviet military command in Germany communicated with Moscow and points east. They listened in for almost a year.