For generations it was a familiar memory from just about everyone’s childhood: a slow-moving freight train crawling across the prairie, huffing up a steep grade, or gliding down a valley like a huge metallic snake. Young rail enthusiasts would count how many cars there were between the steam-belching engine and the stubby caboose or search the colorful railroad insignias for ones they hadn’t seen before.

NEW YORK, N.Y. : The Greenwich Village air was sweet with the smell of burning tar, which mingled with souvlaki and honey-roasted peanuts in an olfactory mosaic. Staccato bursts of jackhammer noise, accompanied by equally rapid-fire cursing from road workers, served as percussion for the usual symphony of ambulance sirens and car horns. Weak sunlight filtered gamely through the smog; most blocks had at least one sidewalk passable; in short, it was the perfect day for a stroll down to Cooper Union to talk about the infrastructure.

There are just three places in America that lie below sea level. Two are in the California desert. The other is considerably more hospitable: it’s the city of New Orleans, which has been called “a bowl of water surrounded by water.” The Mississippi lies on one side, Lake Pontchartrain on the other, and more rain falls here than on any other major city in America.

If you make your way to the top of a rugged, forested hill in the northwestern corner of New Jersey that the local people call Edison’s mountain, you can still find the remains of what was for a few years a century ago a mammoth industrial complex. Empty cellars, quarry pits, and stone walls under the trees mark the site of what may have been Thomas Alva Edison’s most ambitious but least-known project—and his most spectacular failure.

The revolutionary “American system” of manufacturing interchangeable parts began in armories like Robbins & Lawrence’s. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, as now, advances in technology were often stimulated by military need. Army muskets at the time were assembled from pieces that resembled one another but were not machined precisely enough to fit together without extensive hand filing.

The American Precision Museum, on South Main A Street in Windsor, Vermont, is open daily May 20 to November 1, weekdays from 9:00 A.M. to 5:00 P.M. and weekends and holidays from 10:00 A.M. to 4:00 P.M. To get there, from I-91 take Exit 8 north to Winsdor or Exit 9 south to Windsor.

I enjoyed T. A. Heppenheimer’s computer-history article “How Von Neumann Showed the Way” (Fall 1990), but I believe he erred by omitting discussion of the 1973 Sperry Rand-Honeywell patent case over priority for the invention of the digital computer. Judge Earl Larson found that John W. Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert, Jr., “did not themselves first invent the automatic electronic digital computer, but instead derived that subject matter from one Dr. John Vincent Atanasoff.”

Frederick Winslow Taylor was only twenty-two when he got promoted to gang boss in a machine shop at the Midvale Steel Company, in Philadelphia, in 1878. A slender, intense upper-class young man, he found himself at once the target of undisguised threats from his new underlings. He recalled later, in his book The Principles of Scientific Management , one man’s threatening words:

CLEVELAND, OHIO: The Society for the History of Technology (SHOT) was born here in 1957, when Melvin Kranzberg convened a group of scholars dissatisfied with the low importance historians of the day assigned to technological matters. Through the years SHOT has grown in numbers and in respect, and upon returning to Cleveland for its annual meeting last October, it found itself facing the challenges of middle age. (The same cannot be said for Kranzberg himself, who retains the energy of an excited teen-ager.)

A tiny white airplane soared upward under rocket power, its vapor trail bright against the blue-black sky. It was September 1956, and Capt. Iven Kincheloe was taking the experimental X-2 to a record altitude of 126,000 feet—some seven miles higher than the previous record.

In addition to the standard styles of cars, the railroads devised some curious and interesting special-purpose cars, mostly built in very small numbers. For example:

Wooden tank cars used by big food processors such as H. J. Heinz to move their products around the country in bulk quantities.

Often the most useful inventions are the simplest. Uncomplicated, functional solutions to common needs are the essence of good design. The safety pin and the paper clip, for instance, are as ubiquitous as they are elegant. A less visible but equally important example of classic simplicity is the ordinary O-ring.

What of Atanasoff?

I enjoyed T. A. Heppenheimer’s computer-history article “How Von Neumann Showed the Way” (Fall 1990), but I believe he erred by omitting discussion of the 1973 Sperry Rand-Honeywell patent case over priority for the invention of the digital computer. Judge Earl Larson found that John W. Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert, Jr., “did not themselves first invent the automatic electronic digital computer, but instead derived that subject matter from one Dr. John Vincent Atanasoff.”

Rope and ropemaking might seem like unpromising subjects for a historical study. While rope certainly figures in the story of ships and sail, it remains a minor character in that drama. Anv nonsoecialist asked to name a use for rope might rummage through remembered images of TV cowboys lassoing a calf or recall clotheslines and rope swings. Rope is ordinary and common stuff; even most sailors take its variety and easy availability for granted.

As usual, I greatly enjoyed the latest issue of your magazine, and I am delighted that it will now be published four times a year. I particularly enjoyed the articles on Glenn Curtiss and Niels Christensen.

In April of 1796, when George Washington sat for his portrait before Gilbert Stuart, the President was trying without much success to adjust to a new set of false teeth. He had recently lost his only remaining natural tooth, a lower left premolar, which he had insisted on keeping long after all his others had been lost or extracted. Washington’s attachment to this last tooth was not sentimental.

Throughout much of his life, Albert Einstein, the theoretical physicist, was actively involved with inventors and inventing. Not only did he serve as a patent examiner in the Swiss Federal Patent Office—at a time when inventions in electric light, communications, and power were proliferating—but afterward he repeatedly served as an expert witness in patent cases and even patented and tried to market inventions of his own.

New York City’s General Post Office unfurls its grand white facade along two full blocks between Thirty-first and Thirty-third Streets on Eighth Avenue. It’s open around the clock all year long (as midnight draws nigh on April 15, representatives of the Maalox and Excedrin concerns pass out free samples to harried taxpayers in the tall marble hall), so at any hour a passer-by may drop in and poke into the alcoves where displays of mail pouches and old photographs and engravings tell the history of the New York postal service.

The Story Of O-rings

As usual, I greatly enjoyed the latest issue of your magazine, and I am delighted that it will now be published four times a year. I particularly enjoyed the articles on Glenn Curtiss and Niels Christensen.