More and more commercial phone numbers are being advertised with a name or word as part of the number. We are urged to dial 335-DIET or 970-LOAN. This is a small historical regression, requiring the use of letters that the phone company made obsolete decades ago.
Where did the old alphanumeric dial plate come from? Most of the world never used letters. And where did it go? The story begins in the telephone’s infancy.
It has become axiomatic that technology is a catalyst for social change. When one technology completely replaces another, it often displaces not only the old technology but a whole elaborate social structure that supported it. When gunpowder replaced the bow and arrow, or when the transistor supplanted the vacuum tube, the consequences extended far beyond the battlefield or the factory. Likewise, when diesel locomotives replaced steam engines in the middle of this century, a lot more was transformed than transportation itself.
The American Precision Museum, in the town of Windsor, Vermont, will never compete in size or grandeur with the great repositories of the world’s treasures, but behind its mellow brick facade dwells a fascinating collection of immense historic significance. The museum houses America’s most important assemblage of nineteenth-and early-twentieth-century machine tools—implements that gave birth to modern manufacturing and helped make the United States the surpassing industrial force in the world.
If most nineteenth-century American inventors are forgotten today—which is undeniable—black inventors are especially obscure. Almost none of them were known even in their own times, and few books about technological history ever mention a black inventor. Jan Earnst Matzeliger is one of those who have been left behind. A solitary black immigrant, he invented a machine for use in manufacturing shoes that helped transform an industry, build a great corporation, produce several millionaires (himself not among them), and create work for thousands of Americans.
Just ahead, through rain and haze on the morning of July 7, 1952, Bishop Rock appeared on the United States ’s radar. The tiny granite island, England’s westernmost tip, marked the end of the transatlantic run for passenger liners clocking their time from Ambrose Light outside New York.
I am very impressed with Invention & Technology . Congratulations on an outstanding piece of technical journalism.
Should new forms of life, the creations of biotechnology, be protected by patents? Many of their inventors argue that they should. The patents would reward those inventors with a chance to profit from their inventions and encourage them to invent more. In exchange for the exclusive right to make, use, or sell their creations, the inventors would be required to disclose their discoveries, furthering the advance of science. Others argue against patenting lifeforms, most often on moral grounds; how can you patent a new kind of life?
James E. Strothman’s article “The Ancient History of System/360” (Winter 1990) incorrectly identifies the computer about which IBM’s chairman, Thomas J. Watson, Jr., wrote his famous memo citing its design and development by “34 people including the janitor.” The computer Watson was referring to was the CDC 6600, produced by Seymour Cray at Control Data Corporation in 1965. And it was not designed to compete directly with the 360 but rather was focused on scientific computing needs.
California’s Santa Clara Valley is an alluvial plain at the southern end of San Francisco Bay. Until the 1960s the valley was home to prune, apricot, and cherry orchards and a worldclass canning and packing industry. Today the world knows it as Silicon Valley.
To see the dream, you could visit General Motors’ Futurama exhibit at the 1939 World’s Fair in New York City. As visitors glided through a scale-model world, a recorded voice murmured compelling promises in their ears. By 1960, it said, fourteen-lane expressways would carry traffic “at designated speeds of fifty, seventy-five, and one hundred miles an hour.” The cars would enter and leave at high speed via sleek interchanges.
At first glance you might think this picture is an image dreamed up for some 1950s science-fiction movie: Attack of the Giant Thermos Bottles . But it’s real enough. One can only imagine what those who saw this top-secret behemoth thought as it rumbled on the rail lines along the Mississippi in the spring of 1945, making its way from the foundries of the Babcock & Wilcox Company, in Barberton, Ohio, to the north end of White Sands Proving Grounds, at Alamogorclo, New Mexico.
Petroleum, a natural mineral oil, was well known in western Pennsylvania long before its “discovery” near the small town of Titusville in 1859. After all, Titusville was located along Oil Creek, which got its name from the petroleum that local residents skimmed from the creek’s surface. In many other parts of the world, geologists, mineralogists, and naturalists had studied and recorded the locations of petroleum deposits.
In certain small villages of western New York, the story is told that the origin of that most Japanese of vehicles, the rickshaw, lies in the Yankee ingenuity of a Baptist missionary.
Today’s interstate highways are built according to a well-established procedure. Typically, a gravel subbase is first covered with concrete. Then an asphalt mixture is applied and compacted; or, for concrete highways, a steel mesh is laid on to help absorb stresses from expansion and contraction, and a layer of concrete is poured on top. These basic materials and methods have been in widespread use for decades.
Congress could not have stated its July 15, 1870, law more clearly: The superintendent of the Naval Observatory was “to contract for the construction of a refracting telescope of the largest size, of American manufacture, at a cost not exceeding fifty thousand dollars.”
I am both a historian of art and a collector of scientific and technological devices. I have had a dual fascination with art and machines for as long as I can remember. My collecting probably began when I was nine or ten, when a neighbor asked me to give her a hand cleaning her basement. Offered a dollar or two for my efforts, I diffidently asked if I might instead have a broken clock I had seen in the laundry room.
BETHLEHEM, PA.: Approximately 150 historians, art scholars, and engineers assembled at Lehigh University in Bethlehem last April. The reason? They were there to see a man about a horse. The horse was the Sforza Monument, a twenty-four-foot bronze equestrian statue that was designed by Leonardo da Vinci but never constructed. The man was Charles C. Dent, a retired airline pilot in Fogelsville, Pennsylvania, who hopes to remedy that omission five centuries later by building a full-size replica.
Your history of the Sidewinder was especially interesting to me because I developed the first IR (infrared)-guided missile for the Air Corps, the GB6 Glide Bomb during World War II. The Sidewinder’s IR seeker was based on one I independently developed during the war for an IR-guided bomb that MIT was trying to develop. The Sidewinder’s IR element is far more sensitive than those available during the war, greatly simplifying the problem, but the basic design of the seeker is the same, and it is covered by the same U.S. patent, number 2,517,702.
Your Fall 1989 issue was the best I have seen. I was particularly pleased with Henry Petroski’s article about Thoreau, since I have been an admirer of both Thoreau and Petroski. I also liked the piece about clipper ships, since I am a native of Baltimore and take an interest in them. The piece about the Sidewinder I liked largely because my job is chief of an Army laboratory, and finally I liked the piece about the Waring blender because I have one that I bought around 1941 and it’s still going good. Congratulations.
The use of nature as a pattern (“An Airplane Is Not a Bird,” by John S. Harris, Fall 1989) has been common in many fields of design. Early plastics were often used to mimic other materials. Researchers now are working on computers structured like the human brain. I often wonder whether the result will be a machine capable of jumping to conclusions at blinding speed.
Gary Welch
St. Joseph, Mich.
