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.
MODERN TEA DRINKERS owe a debt of gratitude to Faye Osborne, for he is the father of the tea bag. He spent decades developing a paper with no taste that would be porous without falling apart. Osborne began his work in the 1920s, but tea bags were around long before then. As early as 1904 a salesman named Thomas Sullivan packed samples of loose tea in handsewn silk bags. He meant them simply as a sales gimmick, but some customers started using them for brewing. The advantage was obvious: no more leaves to fuss with.
YOU’LL NEVER BE HAPPIER TO visit your dentist than after you’ve seen the new Dr. Samuel D. Harris National Museum of Dentistry in Baltimore, where the artifacts of what once passed for dental technology will be unflinchingly displayed.
FIFTY THOUSAND PEOPLE WERE at the marina on the edge of San Francisco Bay, staring up in rigid fascination as Lincoln Beachey, his plane horrifyingly shorn of it wings, fell like Icarus from the winter sky. Beachey would have enjoyed their sudden silence. He often said they only came to see him die.
THE ST. LAWRENCE SEAWAY WAS an important part of my life for at least forty years, from the early 1930s to 1975. As a native and long-time resident of Ogdensburg, New York—Seaway country—I watched it develop from a hotly disputed geopolitical concept to a massive construction enterprise to a vital international trade route. And then I watched it decline from a world-renowned engineering masterpiece to a half-forgotten artifact of the 1950s, a victim of global economic and logistics changes and its own design shortcomings.
BOSTON, MASS. : Who invented the bicycle? As with almost any invention, attributing it to a single person is problematic, requiring Talmudic distinctions on matters like when it took its current form, what degree of refinement is required, and how anecdotal the supporting evidence can be. In some cases the trail is hopelessly obscured, and one might as well ask who wrote “Three Blind Mice,” who made up the latest disaster joke, or who first thought of putting crushed M&M’s in ice cream.
Jack Ingram, curator of the National Security Agency’s National Cryptologic Museum, denies that his institution is a mysterious place. Yet visitors have to find it on an access road behind a gas station, surrounded by an eight-foot-high fence of chainlink and barbed wire, housed in the former restaurant of a nondescript gray ranchstyle converted motel at Fort George G. Meade, just outside Baltimore.
Outside Buffalo, New York, lives a man named Ed Winter who collects old machines. He has dozens of steam engines and tractors and railroad cars, but the centerpiece of the assemblage is a twenty-fourfoot flywheel salvaged from a factory that was being demolished. It’s painted bright red and stands upright on a platform near the road, where it makes an arresting sight for passing motorists. As a lawn ornament it certainly beats plastic flamingos and cast-iron jockeys.
“This is something I’ve never told anyone,” says David Kahn, between sips of cola at the Century Club in New York City. On a rainy, humid early evening in May, punctuated by the sound of the occasional car horn from the street below, he has been holding forth on one of his favorite subjects: Edward Hugh Hebern, a seminal figure in twentieth-century cryptography.
“This is a replacement human hip part,” says Michael Coladonato, showing me a curved metal bar about eight inches long shaped so gracefully it looks like sculpture. “We made it of a cobalt-chrome-nickel alloy called MP35N. And these things over here hold the space shuttle together. You spend a lot of money for these. We’re the world leader in precision fasteners.”
AS THE ERIE CANAL NEARED COMPLETION IN THE 1820s, IT BROUGHT HAPPY anticipation to businessmen in New York City. The canal would carry raw materials from the country’s interior across New York State from Lake Erie to Albany; from Albany goods would travel down the Hudson River to the city’s port facilities on their way to manufacturers at home and abroad. Finished goods would travel to the rapidly growing Western states by the reverse path. The canal would be a windfall for both city and state.
Frederic D. Schwarz’s article about slide rules (“Notes From the Field,” Fall 1993), caught my eye. My comment is that newer is not necessarily better. I teach physics, math, and computer courses, and I keep telling my students that one should first consider the task at hand and the desired results before automatically grabbing for a pocket calculator or a computer. For certain types of calculations, slide rules can still run rings around any electronic instrument.
NEW YORK, N.Y. : Everybody knows why the Titanic , sank: It hit an iceberg. Amid all the analysis that has taken place since the accident occurred on the night of April 14, 1912, that much at least is undisputed. What exactly happened after it hit, though, is open to considerable speculation. For years students of the disaster have pored over eyewitness accounts and radio logs, trying to establish what went wrong and why.
“For the historian there are no banal things,” said the Swiss architectural critic Siegfried Giedion. A historian of technology is supposed to know this, but it helps to be reminded from time to time. My most important reminder came during a course that I taught on invention, in which a student proposed to write her term paper on the history of the zipper. I was skeptical. What kind of story could there be in the history of a simple, ubiquitous device that was such a trivial part of everyday life?
Benjamin Franklin is remembered for many reasons today—as inventor, statesman, commentator, and patriot—but he is perhaps best known as an electrical experimenter and theorist. He named the two states of electricity, positive and negative; he showed that lightning was electric with his famous kiteflying experiment; and he explained the action of the Leyden jar, the earliest capacitor.
It was August 1914, and World War I had just started. Germany had a new and worrisome weapon in its Zeppelins—huge rigid airships that could stay aloft for dozens of hours, traveling long distances or hovering nearly motionless. Britain had nothing similar in prospect. The Admiralty feared that those airships could serve as eyes for the German fleet, and Britain needed to improvise a counter-weapon.
After Clarence Birdseye perfected his process to freeze fresh foods, it didn’t take long to come up with the idea of freezing cooked dishes as well. By the early 1930s General Foods had a few prepared items, such as Irish stew, on the market. Far-sighted executives envisioned complete frozen dinners, packaged in one carton, with family-size servings of several items in separate containers.
ON MARCH 29, 1889, WILLIAM KEMM ler killed his lover Matilda (“Tillie”) Ziegler with an ax at their home in Buffalo, New York. Buffalo, it would turn out, was an infelicitous place to have done such a thing. The city was the home of the nation’s first commercially successful alternating-current electrical-transmission system and of a progressive-thinking humane society that had recently introduced the use of electricity to dispose of stray cats and dogs.
TUSTIN, CALIF.: It was inevitable. After an item about slide-rule collectors appeared in this space in Fall 1993, it was only a matter of time before the logical next step would be taken. Sure enough, word has arrived of the International Association of Calculator Collectors (IACC), formed early last year by Guy Ball and Bruce Flamm, a pair of “dedicated (and slightly obsessed)” antiquarians in Southern California who between them own more than fifteen hundred portable calculators.
Is it possible to own a miracle? Horace Goldin, a vaudeville-era stage magician, tried to do just that. He developed a technique for sawing an assistant in half—an illusion as closely associated with magicians as pulling a rabbit out of a hat—and then embarked on an extensive and costly legal campaign to protect his invention from competitors and anyone else who tried to exploit it.
