Ever since the invention of fire-arms sometime around the thirteenth century, ammunition makers have confronted the problem of making spherical lead shot. One obvious early way was to pour molten lead into molds, but this was a laborious process that too often left an unaerodynamic seam on the shot. Another way was to pour molten lead through a sieve suspended several inches above a barrel of water; this often produced egg-shaped shot with a tail.

I was particularly interested in your article on the Sidewinder missile (“Sidewinder,” by Ron Westrum and Howard A. Wilcox, Fall 1989) as I had the recent pleasure of contributing to its continued success.

On the morning of March 9, 1862, the Confederate ironclad Merrimack steamed out to finish the job of destroying the Federal fleet at Hampton Roads, which she had begun with devastating efficiency the evening before. This time, though, the Rebels found something new added to the equation. During the night, the little Monitor had joined her all-but-helpless sisters.

Looking at the heroic 1857 group portrait "Men of Progress", by the nineteenth-century artist Christian Schussele, a technology enthusiast might wonder who was the man sitting at the center of the picture, surrounded by such well-known giants of invention and science as Samuel F. B. Morse, Cyrus McCormick, Charles Goodyear, and Joseph Henry. Only a loyal alumnus of Union College, in Schenectady, New York, would ask, “Who are all those guys standing around Eliphalet Nott?”

I have yet to meet a genuine vintage-auto enthusiast who does not also wax eloquent over a steam locomotive. In their day they were, in a sense, adversaries; but now that the steam engine has vanished and the great old marques have been replaced by less glamorous descendants, many automotive enthusiasts can’t forget that Walter Owen Bentley, Walter Percy Chrysler, Henry Royce, and other . motoring giants began as apprentices in locomotive shops.

WASHINGTON, D.C.: In May the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History will open its largest, most ambitious exhibit ever, a $9.5 million, fourteen-thousand-square-foot permanent installation called “The Information Age: People, Information and Technology.”

In the mid-1950s, before high fidelity became a household term, a story circulated in the press about a man spending his first night in his new home in Pound Ridge, New York. The man was startled by the sounds of a nearby railroad he hadn’t been told existed.

It is the fourth-largest-selling plastic in America. Last year nearly seven billion pounds of polypropylene were stretched, blown, extruded, or molded into thousands of different products. Chances are the wrapper on your candy bar, the food-storage container in your refrigerator, the lining in your baby’s diaper, and the webbing in your lawn furniture were all made of it.

Where is the oldest Otis elevator? As archivist for the Otis Elevator Company, I am asked that question more often than any other. I thought 1 finally had the answer in the summer of 1986 when this magazine came out with an article titled “The Oldest Otis.” It sounded too good to be true. It was.

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.

At first this picture might look like a photograph of something under construction. But a closer look reveals that quite the opposite is going on. The most prominent implements in evidence are sledgehammers and pry bars, ordinarily used in demolition. The question then: What is being demolished, and why?

On April 7, 1964, the International Business Machines Corporation changed the business world with one of the most momentous gambles ever made by a corporation. It introduced the System/360 family of computers.

Astronomers sift. They sift through galaxies, through stars, through planets, through asteroids, looking for both the expected and the unexpected. They search for the evidence that will bolster one theory or topple another, and they also hunt for the big discovery, the prize jewel that has slipped through other sieves: an exploding star, a phantom galaxy, or—best of all—a new planet.

The worst natural disaster in American history struck Galveston, Texas, on September 8, 1900, when a hurricane covered the whole seaside city with surging water, leveled a third of its area, and took an estimated 6,000 lives. The city had been ravaged by hurricanes before and would certainly be devastated again, but never had Galveston been so helpless and desperate.

Discover a planet and you get to name it. But when Lowell Observatory announced its new planet, it had no name ready. Hundreds of people wrote offering all sorts of possibilities, from Atlas to Zymal .

It was “curious to see,” reported a Yorkshire newspaper in 1851, “two implements of agriculture lying side by side in rivalry, respectively marked, ‘McCormick, inventor, Chicago, Illinois,’ and ‘Hussey, inventor, Baltimore, Maryland’—America competing with America, on English soil.”

Premier Plastic

After reading “A Most Invented Invention,” about the discovery of polypropylene (by David B. Sicilia, Spring/Summer 1990), I will always recall the brilliance of Karl Ziegler as I sit down to enjoy a Dannon yogurt from its plastic container. The article states that polypropylene is America’s fourth-largestselling plastic. What are the top three?

William Harvie
La Jolla, Calif.

“There is probably no other inert substance, the properties of which excite in the human mind, when first called to examine it, an equal amount of curiosity, surprise, and admiration. Who can examine, and reflect upon this property of gum-elastic, without adoring the wisdom of the Creator?”

Joe Horak is not as widely known as, say, Bryant Gumbel, but he leads just as visible a professional life. He is an instrumentation electrician, and one of his duties is to make sure the Colgate-Palmolive Company’s clock keeps proper time. “If it doesn’t,” he says, “the switchboard at the company offices on Park Avenue is swamped with calls.”

LOWELL, MASS. : In the 1820s and 1830s the mills of Lowell were at the vanguard of America’s industrial revolution. Once the nation’s leading manufacturer of cotton cloth, Lowell declined after World War I; the mills closed one by one as the textile industry moved south. By the 1970s Lowell was a blighted, stagnant community, an industrial ghost town with a proud past but an uncertain future.