On March 16, 1906, a concert took place in the ballroom of the Hotel Hamilton in Holyoke, Massachusetts, that changed the nature of music in our century. The program, including selections by Schumann, Beethoven, and Bach, was standard concert A fare. But the music that filled the hall was made by an entirely new instrument: a music synthesizer.

I greatly appreciate “How Engineers Lose Touch” (by Eugene S. Ferguson) in the Winter 1993 issue of your magazine. I have never forgotten the frustration I experienced as an engineering student in the sixties when I discovered that many of my fellow students, who were doing much better than me academically, hadn’t the slightest idea which way to turn a nut, little intuition about how to put things together, and no feel for materials.

Few things on the planet look as satisfyingly like what they are as Clyde’s Cider Mill does on a cold blue morning a few days before Thanksgiving. It stands on a hillside in Old Mystic, Connecticut, surrounded by smoky November trees, feeding a steady column of steam into the still air as it ingests the contents of a truckful of McIntosh apples.

If there’s a cliché that hounds our lives unmercifully, it is that we live in the Information Age, a time when ever more information, wanted and unwanted, pours in on us from every side. So relentless and insistent has this flood become that it often seems impossible to escape. Marshall McLuhan’s once fanciful “global village” has emerged with astonishing swiftness in the form of a planet interconnected by elaborate media networks that transfer data and images almost instantly.

In retrospect it’s obvious that the first decade of this century was a time of great innovation in transportation—the beginning of our revolutionary shift to the automobile. But, like so many revolutions, that one was not evident at the outset. The big news in the early 1900s was the nearly complete conversion of urban transportation from horses to electric streetcars. With Henry Ford’s Model T not even on the market yet, the electrification of intercity transport looked like the logical next big change.

After every war in the industrial age there has been a scrap-metal boom, beginning at least with the Civil War. Soon after Appomattox, leftover iron from monitors, cannon, and the like flooded the market. In fact, the overcapacity of iron foundries at the end of the Civil War played a role in the birth of cast-iron architecture in New York City.

ON THE SHORE: Everybody loves a lighthouse. While most artifacts of technology—cars, factories, computers—inspire both positive and negative reactions, lighthouses are nothing but good. They do not pollute, they save many lives while costing none, the labor they require might vex the gregarious but is not particularly exploitative, and only a curmudgeon would complain that they ruin the landscape.

Supermarkets are a perilous business. They must stock thousands of products in scores of brands and sizes to sell at painfully small markups. Keeping close track of them all, and maintaining inventories neither too large nor too small, is critical. Yet for most of this century, as stores got bigger and the profusion on their shelves multiplied, the only way to find out what was on hand was by shutting the place down and counting every can, bag, and parcel. This expensive and cumbersome job was usually done no more than once a month.

Winter was an especial hardship for early American settlers. It was cold, of course, but perhaps an even bigger problem was the inescapable boredom. A lot of this had to do with the monotonous diet pioneers were forced to adopt. With no fresh crops, their fruit and vegetable consumption was limited to what they could manage to preserve at harvest time.

Papa Bar

The article “Bar Codes Sweep the World” (Spring 1993) was interesting and very flattering to Bob Silver and Joe Woodland. However, it was also misleading. An analogy would be an article that implied that Leonardo da Vinci and Samuel Langley had invented the airplane (when in fact they only built models that couldn’t fly) and didn’t even mention the Wright brothers.

Perhaps no twentieth-century engineer has left a more visible mark on a major city than has Othmar Ammann on New York. His five major bridges there bear much of the enormous traffic flow to and from the city while requiring remarkably little maintenance. They are beautiful and efficient structures, for Ammann achieved an uncommon harmony of visual elegance, simplicity, and power with practical design. But that harmony developed slowly.

Reading “Amazing Light” (by Joan Lisa Bromberg) in the Spring 1992 issue, I was reminded of a seminar I attended in about 1964 for MIT graduates. Charles Townes spoke and described the development of the maser. However, instead of using the usual technical definition—Microwave Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation—he advised us of a more practical definition: Method for Arriving at Support for Expensive Research.

Thanks for an elegant article in a thoroughly attractive magazine.

John R. M. Alger
Rumney, N.H.

The first ads for Whizzer motor kits appeared in 1939, and what American boy could possibly resist? For only $54.95 you could convert your bicycle into a full-fledged motorbike. Think of the fun, the admiring glances, the wind in your hair as you purred down Main Street!

“I Albert Doumar,” the proclamation I begins, “come from a royal family in the world of ice cream. We Doumars proudly claim title of creators of the ice cream cone …”

Benjamin Holt was a Yankee immigrant to California whose inventions freed farmers from tedious hand labor and put food on tables around the world. He was a pioneer marketer and exporter of heavy machinery whose tractors boosted America’s reputation for innovation and quality in the early years of this century. His rumbling “caterpillars,” born in agriculture, helped win World War I by hauling artillery and inspiring the invention of the tank. His machines and what they inspired changed the face of the earth, for better and worse.

The patient lies on the operating table. The surgeon is implanting a filter to trap potentially fatal pulmonary embolisms (blood clots). Will this be a risky major surgical procedure involving general anesthesia, major incisions, and high costs? Not if the surgeon is using a filter made of nitinol. The surgeon can take the mushroom-shaped filter, cool it below body temperature, pull it into a straight bundle of wire, and then insert and position the bundle through a cooled catheter in one of the patient’s larger veins.

The tiny biplane was already higher than the peak of Mount Everest, yet its pilot, Maj. Rudolph Schroeder, was heading higher still. Looking out from his open cockpit, he could see ice forming on the wings, for the temperature was sixty degrees below zero. He topped 33,000 feet, still with power to spare; then he suddenly blacked out as his oxygen supply failed. The plane fell off in a power dive, roaring downward with an unconscious man at the throttle. At 4,000 feet the denser air revived him; he regained control and made a safe landing.

OAKLAND, CALIF. : For decades the slide rule was a universal emblem of the engineering profession. A slide rule sticking out of the shirt pocket, along with the inevitable black glasses and bad haircut, was the easiest way for a cartoonist or filmmaker to show that someone was an engineer. Groups of students carried oversized versions at their graduations, and a drawing of a slide rule was invariably used in newspapers to illustrate an engineering-related story.

What’s A Maser?

Reading “Amazing Light” (by Joan Lisa Bromberg) in the Spring 1992 issue, I was reminded of a seminar I attended in about 1964 for MIT graduates. Charles Townes spoke and described the development of the maser. However, instead of using the usual technical definition—Microwave Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation—he advised us of a more practical definition: Method for Arriving at Support for Expensive Research.

Thanks for an elegant article in a thoroughly attractive magazine.

John R. M. Alger
Rumney, N.H.

VIEWED FROM A COCKPIT UP ABOVE, THE LAYER OF FOG over the Arcata airport in Northern California was a churning mass of gray and black in a field of rolling white. As the plane descended, the black portion rose like a mushroom cloud, suckare and more white fog into its vortex. es Grimes and Byron Clark, fresh from World War II service (Clark as a bomber pilot i Europe, Grimes flying transports in Alaska), pointed the nose of their C-47 toward the nearest edge of the turbulence and began their descent.