Your Winter 1992 issue is so interesting that it was difficult to know which article to read first—until I found Curt Wohleber’s “The Work of the World.” I cannot express enough appreciation to Mr. Wohleber and your magazine for bringing to the public an appreciation of Nikola Tesla, certainly one of the most underrated geniuses who ever lived.
When Titan II Missile Complex 571-7 was in operation, it was barely noticeable. A couple of antennas and some metal poles poked through the Arizona desert floor above a large concrete slab, a wooden deck, and a few other odds and ends, all of it surrounded by a chain-link fence. But beneath this seeming disarray an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) waited in its silo, and a hidden crew ran an underground control center.
I remember the first time I called the Time Museum in Rockford, Illinois. After a ring or two the phone was answered: “Clock Tower Resort. How may I direct your call?”
Resort? Had I dialed the wrong number? “Is this the Time Museum?” I asked hesitantly.
“One moment, sir,” the operator said, and my call was put through.
It was mid-June of 1952, and President Harry Truman was at the Electric Boat Company shipyard in Groton, Connecticut. Off to his side lay a huge, bright yellow steel plate that was to become part of the keel of a new submarine. Truman gave a speech, and then a crane lifted the plate and laid it before him. He walked down a few steps and chalked his initials on its surface, whereupon a welder stepped forward and burned them into the steel.
Your Summer 1992 issue, with its piece on Charlotte Smith (“The Champion of Women Inventors”), held special significance for me. Autumn Stanley’s fine article, recalling Ms. Smith’s struggle to gain recognition for women’s roles as inventors, noted that Smith implored the Patent Office to set aside a hall for the exhibit of women’s inventions during its centennial celebration in 1891. Charlotte Smith’s dream of such an exhibit was not to become a reality for another hundred years.
Your Summer 1992 issue, with its piece on Charlotte Smith (“The Champion of Women Inventors”), held special significance for me. Autumn Stanley’s fine article, recalling Ms. Smith’s struggle to gain recognition for women’s roles as inventors, noted that Smith implored the Patent Office to set aside a hall for the exhibit of women’s inventions during its centennial celebration in 1891. Charlotte Smith’s dream of such an exhibit was not to become a reality for another hundred years.
By the mid-1920s American racing technology was so advanced that our automobiles were establishing speed records that would stand for decades, with engines that set the pattern for those in today’s fastest sports cars. Yet automobile racing on public roads had been illegal in almost every state since the early 1910s. American auto racing grew up not on roads but on big, oval loop tracks made of wood. The tracks have all been gone for more than sixty years and are hardly remembered today.
This photograph of a taxicab would never have been taken if the Sixteenth Amendment hadn’t been ratified in 1913. The Sixteenth Amendment authorized the federal income tax; the income tax made necessary the invention of a printing taxi meter; this picture showed off the new invention.
In 1809, after years of experimenting, a Parisian confectioner named Nicolas Appert demonstrated a scheme for putting cooked fruit, vegetables, and meat in cork-sealed bottles and then immersing the bottles in boiling water, which, as we now know, destroyed the bacteria that could ruin the contents. For developing his method of food preservation, Appert was granted 12,000 francs by the French government, and in 1810 he published a book, L’Art de Conserver , that was soon translated into several languages.
It’s been raining all day. and New Orleans is sinking. Brown water is backing up the storm drains, filling the intersections, creeping toward people’s front steps. Children run home from school with their pants rolled up to their knees. Parts of Freret Street are underwater. Cleary Avenue is impassable. At the Camellia Grill on the corner of Carrollton and St. Charles, a regular complains to one of the cooks. “We never flooded this bad when I was young. It’s all the damn concrete: there’s no place for the water to go.”
Your Winter 1992 issue is so interesting that it was difficult to know which article to read first—until I found Curt Wohleber’s “The Work of the World.” I cannot express enough appreciation to Mr. Wohleber and your magazine for bringing to the public an appreciation of Nikola Tesla, certainly one of the most underrated geniuses who ever lived.
BROOKLYN, N.Y.: Riding the New York City subways has been known to inspire many different feelings, but a sense of history is not usually one of them. To be sure, there is a lot of antique equipment in operation; however, a straphanger on a crowded C train in July is not likely to consider the old-fashioned rotary fans to be charmingly quaint. Still, a system that began construction in 1903 and now moves a billion people a year over 710 miles of track must have a lot of history behind it.
Having been involved in the dieselization of U.S. railroads, I found Maury Klein’s article “The Diesel Revolution” (Winter 1991) very interesting. His reference to engine men gradually coming to appreciate the vastly improved working conditions of diesel is almost an understatement. On one major road that completely dieselized, a sudden traffic surge required reactivation of a few steam locomotives. No one wanted a steam job, so only those on the bottom of the seniority list operated those locomotives.
When this mammoth wind machine was unveiled in Cleveland in 1888, it surely inspired awe or admiration from passersby along the city’s fashionable Euclid Avenue. At the time there was nothing like it in the world. It did not pump water or grind grain; it generated electricity, in the backyard of the inventor and scientist Charles Brush.
Max Woods throws his weight against the lever, the grip seizes the rope beneath the street, and the first cable car of the day rumbles past Union Square, tilts its face to the lightening sky, and starts up Nob Hill. As the car rises up out of dusk and mist, sunlight flashes white off the tracks ahead; the perpendicular landscape falls away on the right to show a blue slice of bay; and San Francisco looks every bit as ravishing as San Franciscans say it is.
Thousands of onlookers thronged the Battery in lower Manhattan on the morning of April 23, 1838, as the news spread. The black hull of the transatlantic steamer Sirius had been spotted in New York Harbor, sails furled but her stubby smokestack pumping out thick black clouds and her twenty-four-foot paddle wheels churning the water.
Battles are won not just with soldiers and weapons but also with information. An army that responds quickly to changing conditions can defeat an opponent that has it outgunned and outmanned. Gathering information is important, but getting that information to those who can use it is equally so. In every modern army good communications are essential; otherwise, all the fancy hardware is useless. Communications is a recognized military specialty today, and that recognition began with a young U.S. Army surgeon named Albert J. Myer just before the start of the Civil War.
I am pleased to announce that beginning with this issue, American Heritage of Invention & Technology increases its frequency to four times a year. The next four issues will be Fall 1991 and Winter, Spring, and Summer 1992.
We’ve been publishing the magazine for six years now, supported by the continuing generous commitment of General Motors and the sustained interest of our readers. On every level it has been satisfying for us—and something of an adventure as well.
On our 125-acre northwestern Ohio farm, back in the first fifth of the twentieth century, agriculture was a subject we read about. Farming was what we worked at.
Glenn Curtiss was always going someplace. Lean and solemn, with long, powerful legs, a lust for speed, and an intense drive to win, he rode his bicycle all over western New York. Wherever there was a bicycle race, he and his club, the Hammondsport Boys, took most of the prizes. He could easily move faster than most cars of the day, but in 1901 nobody in Hammondsport had a car anyway. Then, one clear summer day, Glenn Curtiss introduced that quiet village at the tip of Keuka Lake to the noisy, speed-crazy twentieth century.
