No one can know what the ramifications of an invention will be, not with any certainty. In England a minister tried to halt the first experiments with locomotives by insisting that the human skeleton would collapse at speeds over thirty miles per hour. He pointed to the condition of people who fell off cliffs.

There is generally an enormous gulf between aeronautical engineering and flight as a subject for poetry and art. The artist deals with soaring metaphors and human emotions; the designer, even while Grafting wings and fuselages with the exquisite care of a sculptor, works instead from calculations and technical principles. Poets may admire an airplane’s grace but know little of its structural design; engineers, in creating that design, build it strictly along functional lines, paying no heed to the merely ornamental.

The kazoo, like the Chiclets box and the comb covered with wax paper, is a mirliton, a musical instrument in which air vibrates a membrane. It was invented, as far as is known, by Alabama Vest, a slave in Macon, Georgia, who thought it up around 1840. It is said to be the only purely American musical instrument.

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.

The first challenge in the development of the practical sewing machine was the design of an apparatus that could make a mechanical stitch. The second was the refinement of that apparatus into a reliable machine able to make stitches by the thousand, continuously and without a hitch.

Cities, like other living things, need water to grow: water for drinking and bathing, water for industry, water for sanitation and fires. Towns often grow first and get thirsty later, but whenever the thirst becomes evident, it has to be quenched for the town to flourish.

The Fly

“THE HISTORY OF THE ZIPPER?” (BY Robert Friedel, Summer 1994) brought to mind my first experience with a zipper, just before the summer of 1940. I opened a law office in 1938, and in the spring of 1940 I bought a new suit, with a zipper, for $59.50. Connecticut’s blue laws forbade the sale of liquor after 9:00 P.M. on Sunday, and to attract diners, the Seven Gables in Milford, the premier nightclub in the area, had a Sunday dinner from six to nine for one dollar.

The mind of Henry Ford, was, I think, not so much inventive as associative; his genius found full expression in the efficient rearrangement of things. He admired Thomas Edison and the Wright brothers, among others, because what they imagined and then brought to pass was genuinely new; Ford’s own achievements had more to do with what was readily available and could be improved. He did not conceive of the automobile; rather, he mass-produced it. And innovation followed in the wake of repetition.

Late in 1833 Thomas Davenport, a thirty-one-year-old blacksmith from Brandon, Vermont, visited the Penfield Iron Works in nearby Crown Point, New York. There he saw a three-pound electromagnet lift a 150-pound anvil. Davenport was deeply impressed. At great expense he bought the electromagnet instead of the iron he had come for.

The Sewing Story

As usual, I found your latest issue most interesting. The article “Seam Stresses,” by J. M. Fenster (Winter 1994), rightly tells of the resistance to sewing machines in France and of the multiple contributions that gave the sewing machine its final form, acceptable in both home and industry. I would like to suggest, however, that even more emphasis be placed on the effects of what Peter F. Drucker calls the productivity revolution, which of course was a direct consequence of the Industrial Revolution.

IN MARCH 1626 SIR FRANCIS Bacon tried to invent frozen food. The great British philosopher and essayist bought a hen, dressed it, and stuffed it with snow. The only thing he accomplished, though, was his own death. The sixty-five-year-old Bacon caught a chill during the experiment, came down with bronchitis, and died a few weeks later.

THE STEAM TUG ROLLED GENTLY ON THE NORTH Atlantic swells. It was a chilly April morning in 1886. Bill Dwyer sat on deck and donned the modern deep-sea-diving dress of his day: copper helmet connected by a rubber air hose to a handcranked pump; brass-and-rubber suit sealed to the helmet and garnished with lead weights hung over the back and chest; and heavy lead-weighted boots to let him walk, not swim, on the sea floor—more than 150 pounds of gear in all, not counting the many fathoms of hose and rope.

Ron Kaiser was in elementary school in 1948 when he played hooky to watch his first television program. His father had bought an eight-foot-high set with a twelve-inch screen for his small tavern in a western Pennsylvania coal-mining town, and Ron stayed home to watch the sixth game of the World Series from Boston. “There was so much snow in there it looked like a blizzard,” he said. “But you could make out the figures. You could see that there were really people inside that little machine.”

As usual, I found your latest issue most interesting. The article “Seam Stresses,” by J. M. Fenster (Winter 1994), rightly tells of the resistance to sewing machines in France and of the multiple contributions that gave the sewing machine its final form, acceptable in both home and industry. I would like to suggest, however, that even more emphasis be placed on the effects of what Peter F. Drucker calls the productivity revolution, which of course was a direct consequence of the Industrial Revolution.

IN DECEMBER 1860, WITH SECESSION IMMINENT AND ARMED CONFLICT certain to follow, William Tecumseh Sherman, superintendent of the Louisiana Military Academy, warned a colleague: “You people speak so lightly of war. You don’t know what you are talking about. War is a terrible thing. … You mistake, too, the people of the North. They are a peaceable people but an earnest people and will fight too. … The North can make a steam-engine, locomotive or railway car; hardly a yard of cloth or a pair of shoes can you make.

One of the first products of the frozen-food industry, and still one of the most popular, is the ordinary green pea. Its journey from field to consumer illustrates the basic processes involved in the production of frozen food.

“That’s ‘Hark the Herald,’” says Robert Berkman, glancing at blank slotted paper emerging from a perforating machine made around 1915. “Those are the final chords.” The machine has been punching forty layers of paper at once, making player-piano rolls the way it made them during World War I.

Two feet and seventy years away sits a personal computer. A cable from it branches into a sprawl of wires feeding to solenoids that drive about a hundred tiny electro-pneumatic valves. They run the perforator’s ancient pneumatic system.

“I MAKE USE OF PHYSICS. I GO TO THE MOON IN A CANNON ball, discharged from a cannon. He [H. G. Wells] goes to Mars in an airship, which he constructs of a metal which does away with the law of gravitation. That’s all very well, but show me this metal. Let him produce it.”

PEOPLE OFTEN WRITE ABOUT HENRY FORD AS IF HE WAS A VERY ODD DUCK unlike the rest of us—an odd duck who had so much money he could get away with things. I think of him as a very ordinary duck, the difference being that after his early years he had so much money that he could act out impulses that we all may have but can’t possibly obey. I think his very similarities to us make it instructive to follow Henry Ford through some of his history.

Toward the end of the nineteenth century, as bicycles became more reliable and easier to ride, various Western countries experimented with using the new device as a military tool. Italy was the first, putting crack sharpshooters on wheels in 1870. By 1887 the French Army had soldier cyclists; it later developed a folding bicycle weighing only twenty-five pounds that could be carried in a backpack. Cyclist sections were formed among British volunteer forces in 1888; by 1894 they numbered 5,100, with a planned increase to 20,000.