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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.

In 1893 George Washington Gale Ferris was the champion of U.S. technology, the engineer who had proved that America could top the Eiffel Tower. That summer, excited tourists waited in line for the ride of a lifetime on Ferris’s big mechanical wheel, which could carry 2,160 passengers at a time to a height equaling that of a twenty-six-story building, in an era when most people had never seen a skyscraper.

WASHINGTON, D.C.: Looking through garbage can be rewarding. Inspecting an opponent’s rubbish has been invaluable for political campaigns. In affluent areas you can furnish a house with what people leave out on the street. And there’s always the chance that you’ll stumble on a cache of important historical documents.

It was the last shift before the 1951 Christmas holiday, and the coal miners at the Orient No. 2 mine in West Frankfort, Illinois, were in a festive mood as they boarded the cage (the mine elevator) to go to work underground. My dad, a foreman, rode the cage down too. His job this evening was to assign tasks to a group affectionately nicknamed the peanut gang, men with no specific job descriptions who worked wherever they were needed.

The radio program was the first of its kind: an explorer visiting an unknown realm and broadcasting his experience live to the American people. It was September 1932, and the naturalist William Beebe was descending through the waters off Bermuda to a depth of 2,200 feet. A telephone line linked his tiny craft, cramped as a space capsule, to the ship above. From there his voice—along with that of his topside assistant, Gloria Hollister—would reach the nation via the National Broadcasting Company.

Every crusade has its Jerusalem, every crusader his or her moment when the trumpet call becomes irresistible. For Susan B. Anthony, the suffragist, it was being forbidden to speak at an Albany, New York, temperance rally in 1852. For the birth-control pioneer Margaret Sanger it was the death in her arms of an impoverished mother from a botched abortion in 1912. For Charlotte Smith it was the tragic story of a starving St. Louis inventor she met in the 1870s.

Once upon a time Carl Borgh worked for McDonnell Douglas as an aerospace engineer. “I worked on a telemetry system to bring back data from space vehicles.” Borgh is a tall, powerful, capable-looking man in his early sixties; it’s no surprise to find out he was good at what he did. “Trouble was, the longer I was there, the more management stuff I had to do. I was getting further and further away from what I liked.”

Public transit before the age of the trolley was a decidedly lowtech operation. Horsecars moved through city streets at speeds scarcely faster than a walk. Their tracks, embedded in the pavement, were primitive assemblies of wood and strap rail that hearkened back to the earliest days of railway engineering. The cars were tiny four-wheel affairs with hard seats, minimal lighting, and no heat. Braking power depended on the strength of the driver’s arm.

For the most part we think of portable radios as a post-World War II phenomenon. From the cheap plastic models of the 1950s to today’s elaborate Walkmans, they have been among the most visible examples of the electronics revolution. But portable radios did not start with the invention of the transistor; their history stretches back more than two decades earlier. The 1920s gave birth to the boom box, but the boom box boom quickly went bust.

The long-awaited inauguration of a most improbable conveyance took place on September 13, 1892, when the Mount Holly & Smithville Bicycle Railroad was opened to a skeptical public. It was unique among the railroads of the world. It was nonpolluting, quiet, and very healthful for the patron. It had no cars or engines, and was one of the world’s shortest and most scenic lines, crossing and recrossing the meandering Rancocas Creek ten times in one mile.

Before the Second World War quantum physics had few technological payoffs. The small group of imaginative scientists who had created the field were driven, like many artists or writers, by aesthetic considerations and the pursuit of truth. During and after the war, however, one after another of the phenomena of quantum physics became the basis for technological innovation—transistors, semiconductors, and nuclear energy, to name but a few.

In the early 1830s the Rocky Mountain fur trade was in trouble. Trappers had decimated the once-teeming beaver streams of the West. Veteran mountain men felt the end was at hand. But Capt. Benjamin Louis Eulalie de Bonneville, a newcomer to the trade, disagreed. Born in Paris, Bonneville had come to America as a child and graduated from West Point in 1815 at the age of nineteen. In 1832 he outfitted 110 trappers and headed into the wilderness. His men returned to their rendezvous almost empty-handed, but he wouldn’t give up.

On North Second Street in Philadelphia an old firehouse has been turned into a splendid museum of the city’s fire-fighting past. The tall doors are now windows, and behind them the boiler of a ninetyyear-old American LaFrance fire engine gleams in the afternoon sunlight. Nothing better expresses the heroic age of American industry than a big steam pumper: the great, confident machine, all brass and nickel and paint and capable of throwing nine hundred gallons of water a minute, an output the next century has been able to improve by a mere hundred.

When he was well into his thirties, King Camp Gillette received some advice from a friend. Gillette was a bottle-cap salesman and his friend was the company’s president, William Painter, who had invented the cork-lined bottle cap.

When the first cotton sheeting came off their looms in 1814, Francis Cabot Lowell and the other investors in the Boston Manufacturing Company knew they had launched America’s Industrial Revolution. American factories had produced cotton yarn since 1790, when the British engineer Samuel Slater opened Almy and Brown’s spinning mill in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, but weaving had remained exclusively a domestic handicraft. The British, for their part, had solved the basic problems of the power loom by 1788, but they still made thread in one factory and cloth in another.

The Boott Mill will open to the public in late May or early June 1992. The best source of information about the Boott Mill, the other national park facilities, and even the various non-park attractions in Lowell is the National Park Visitor Center, 246 Market Street, which is open from 8:30 A.M. to 5:00 P.M. every day except Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year’s (508-459-1000).

MADISON, WIS. : The Society for the History of Technology (SHOT) journeyed to America’s Dairyland last fall to hold its annual convention. This year’s event was a particularly special occasion, not just because of the scenic location but because of the additional presence of the History of Science Society (HSS).

Since the earliest days of democracy, as the world has sought the ideal form of government, it has also sought the ideal method of voting. The ancient Greeks decided public questions by clashing spears on shields. Colonial America at first favored the show of hands, or splitting into groups. Later the viva voce method, in which a voter would openly declare his preference (and then be thanked in florid fashion by the candidate), gained favor.

When Kirkpatrick MacMillan of Courthill, Scotland, built the world’s first mechanical bicycle in 1839, he had a practical objective in mind: to visit his sister in Glasgow, forty miles away. Ever since, the history of the bicycle has been tied mostly to Europe, where cycling enjoys a rich tradition. However, America took a strong interest in the fledgling two-wheeler from the beginning and made major contributions to its development.

The world received its abrupt introduction to atomic energy at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The atomic age, ushered in by the bombs dropped on those cities, was the product of a massive effort known as the Manhattan Project. Yet several years before the Manhattan Project got under way, an apparatus was secretly being built in a U.S. government laboratory to attempt to make use of the energy of nuclear reactions—not from fission but, even more difficult, from fusion.