ANNIE EDSON TAYLOR MAY HAVE BEEN THE FIRST person to shoot Niagara Falls in a barrel, but she wasn’t the first stunter on the river. That honor goes to Sam Patch of Passaic Falls, New Jersey. On October 7 and 17, 1829, Patch made leaps of 85 and 130 feet into the Niagara River at the base of Horseshoe Falls from a platform of tree limbs lashed together. He died later that year—on Friday, November 13—doing a high dive into the Genesee River at Rochester, New York.

TO A CASUAL TRAVELER, THE NUMEROUS SMALL towns of the Great Plains, regularly spaced between tracts of cropland or rangeland, can seem mundane and unremarkable, each sleepy hamlet having its constellation of church steeples, grain elevators, and perpendicular streets. The names of the towns—Volga, New UIm, Ghent, Pulaski—hint at the residents’ varied backgrounds; yet despite this ethnic diversity, any trip across the Middle West, from the Mississippi River to the Rockies or from Saskatchewan to Texas, reveals much the same residential pattern.

APPROACHED FROM THE EAST, CHAMA, New Mexico, has changed very little from a century ago. The highway over Cumbres Pass parallels the Cumbres and Toltec narrow-gauge railroad’s swirling descent through the high mountain parks of the Rio Chama, with the river valley widening and flattening for only the last few miles.

INSIDE AN UTTERLY NONDESCRIPT HANGAR-SIZE SHED across from the small rural airport in Cambridge, Maryland, Ken Knox runs a flourishing industrial business from another century. “We have equipment from 1900 and before working here,” he allows matter-of-factly. “This piece right here is from 1905. All this stuff”—he sweeps his hand across a roomful of dark iron forms, grimy with whole lifetimes of constant use—“you can’t buy now. I hate to think what it would cost to start a barrel business today.”

IN AN AGE WHEN SATELLITE COMMUNI cations can take us anywhere in the world within moments, we sometimes forget how short a time it has been since the interior of our own continent seemed as remote and mysterious as darkest Africa. To the generation that swelled with pride over the driving of the Golden Spike, spanning the continent meant something more than faster, easier travel. It offered access to a harsh but spectacular landscape that had long fascinated Americans.

The Atomic Bomb

Your articles on the atomic bomb brought back memories. How Oak Ridge, Tennessee, missed being mentioned I don’t understand. I was in the Army Corps of Engineers there when General Groves would come into Nashville by train and we would furnish vehicles for his use. We transferred twenty of the largest dump trucks I have ever seen to the Oak Ridge project.

IN 1877 A SAN FRANCISCO reporter, evidently weary of the endless hoopla over the city’s new Palace Hotel, described the hotel’s remote signaling device. Twenty-five thousand numbered bellboys, he wrote, one for each guest room, waited in a basement for lodgers to ring. “Down goes the clerk’s foot on a corresponding pedal and up shoots the bellboy.… He is put in a box, shut up in a pneumatic tube and whisked right into the room designated by the bell-dial.

TEN YEARS AND THIRTY-FIVE ISSUES AGO we introduced American Heritage of Invention & Technology , hoping that people might enjoy a magazine devoted only to the history of technology. To our surprise and delight they responded far more warmly than we ever expected, and we soon knew we had struck a real nerve. Our readers were thrilled to see a magazine about engineering history and cared deeply about what it said.

APPROXIMATELY A THOUSAND YEARS AGO, ON Chiapa de Corzo, a windswept plain on the west coast of Mexico, a Mayan sits on a rock with his head thrown back. In front of him stands the tribal shaman, who is about to begin the ritual of drilling holes in the man’s front teeth before inlaying them with jeweled ornaments.

To ORDER any of the above books, call 1-800-876-6556 and give your credit-card number and the code number listed at the beginning of the review. Books may be packaged and shipped separately; please allow six to eight weeks for delivery. Shipping and handling charges will be added. Orders will be accepted through December 15,1995.

Your articles on the atomic bomb brought back memories. How Oak Ridge, Tennessee, missed being mentioned I don’t understand. I was in the Army Corps of Engineers there when General Groves would come into Nashville by train and we would furnish vehicles for his use. We transferred twenty of the largest dump trucks I have ever seen to the Oak Ridge project.

“ALL WE KNOW ABOUT ALL THIS EQUIPMENT IS that it came over new from Germany in the 1920s,” says Lorette Russenberger, standing in the light, airy loft space of her Milwaukee factory. “You see, the company went through a lot of owners before the last one basically drove it into the ground.” She shakes her head. “He was very stubborn. I offered him five times as much for the company as I ended up paying at the 1RS auction.”

WE ALL KNOW THAT CHICAGO was once the “City of the big shoulders,” as immortalized by Carl Sandburg. It was also the city whose citizens the architect Daniel Burnham supposedly challenged to “Make no little plans. They have no magic to stir men’s blood.” Though times have changed, Chicago and its satellite burgs across the Indiana border still conjure up apocalyptic images of raw industrial power.

DURING AVIATION’S HARLY DAYS PILOTS NAVIGATED BY following the railroad tracks. When the weather closed in, they would come down to low altitudes and continue onward. This practice led to such techniques as keeping to the right, to avoid collisions with low-flying oncoming planes. Hazards of the business included running into a locomotive and hitting a hill pierced by a tunnel.

Big Gun

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.

In reading “Made In America,” Nicholas Delbanco’s article about Henry Ford Museum (Winter 1994), I was surprised to find what appeared to be a technical error on page 11. A device shown there was described as “a fan from the Wright brothers’ wind tunnel.” It seems obvious to me that you erred in assuming that the power output of the device was at the fan end. The machine appears to be a wind-driven grinding wheel. Note the abrasive stone and tool rests.

Harold Warp Pioneer Village (Minden, NE 68959; Tel: 1-800-445-4447 (in Nebraska, 308-832-1181); Fax: 308-832-2750) is open every day of the year from 8:00 A.M. to sundown. It’s located twelve miles south of Interstate 80 at exit 279, on Nebraska Highway 10. Admission is $5.00 for adults, $2.50 for children aged six through fifteen, and free for younger children. A single admission is good for as many days as you wish to stay, and group rates are available.

“THIS USED TO BE THE CANDY CAPITAL OF THE world,” says Walter J. Marshall, looking out from his top-floor office at the New England Confectionery Company, two blocks and a whole world away from MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts. “We started it all in 1847; Schrafft came in in 1861, and then Fanny Farmer and all the others. Now there’s just us and Tootsie Roll Industries. It all migrated to the Midwest.

A NUMBER OF IN teresting new books have arrived in our offices lately, and this column is devoted to recommending the best of them. To make them easier to get hold of, we have made it possible to order them through us: See the box at the end of the facing page.

• The Machine in America: A Social History of Technology

”Sendzimir was a genius, a real character. The only problem was he had so many ideas. Ninetyfive percent of them weren’t any good. But the remaining five percent were so good that you forgot all the rest.” That’s how Tad Sendzimir is remembered by one steel-plant chief—and perhaps all of them, around the world, who own Sendzimir rolling mills.