In 1958 John H. White, Jr., a fresh graduate of Miami University, in Oxford, Ohio, landed a summer job at the Smithsonian Institution. Jack, as all his friends call him, had a passionate interest in old things. As a boy he had thought the most wonderful of all occupations would be the proprietorship of a junkyard. Old things were, of course, the stock-in-trade of “The Nation’s Attic,” but Jack did not expect to stay in Washington for more than a few months. His long-range plans were vague.

Among the founding fathers of American technology—Benjamin Franklin, Eli Whitney, John Fitch, Robert Fulton, and their peers —the most surprising disparity between shining merit and its recognition by posterity must be the case of Oliver Evans. The steamboats that conquered the Mississippi owed their engines to Evans. The first powered land vehicle patented in America was built by him. His genuinely automatic flour mill provided America with its first, seminal model of industrial automation—in 1786.

In two hundred years of existence, the U.S. Patent Office has issued nearly five million patents, which together document the greatest industrial development in human experience. (See “New, Useful, and Nonobvious,” by Steven Lubar, Invention & Technology , Spring/Summer 1990.) How did it all start? To whom and for what was the first U.S. patent issued?

Remember Pong? In 1972 it became the first successful videoarcade game. That same year Magnavox released Odyssey, the first home game, giving people new ways to stimulate their minds with a television set. Thus the video game is generally thought of as a creation of the 1970s. In reality, though, it was invented in 1958, in a laboratory in thenrural Upton, New York, by a man named William Higinbotham.

There were ten people in the party, and they were about to descend into the Grand Canyon. The guide wore a cowboy hat and leather chaps; a coil of rope hung from his saddle. Most of the others were dressed for a day outdoors, wearing hats, loose-fitting shirts, and the like. At the rear of the group was John Von Neumann—hatless and in the formal suit and tie of a banker. Moreover, while everyone else sat on a mule facing right, his faced left.

Nuts And Bolts On A Pedestal

Edward Tenner (“Pantheons of Nuts and Bolts,” Winter 1989) gleefully informs us that the great museums of technology all over the Free World have been conquered by his ilk, the social historians, who are busy throwing out the inventions to make room for exhibits of the pseudoissues they think the public should consider more important. Exhibits on social issues are far less interesting to the actual attendees of technology museums than the real machinery.

HOMESTEAD, PA.: Big Steel is dead, and streetlights no longer burn at midday in Pittsburgh, but residents of the area are realizing that the smoke-laden past must not be allowed to vanish completely.

Laura Kenard is something of a surprise. A recent graduate of the Philadelphia College of Textiles and Science, she has spent a year overseeing quality control at Philadelphia’s Pennsylvania Woven Carpet Mills, and the yellow-haired woman in her early twenties looks incongruous at the controls of the immemorial elevator that lifts us to the shop floor.

More cities were destroyed during World War II than in any other conflict in history. Yet the cities didn’t die. The modern technological city, held together by electricity, telephones, water lines, and highway and rail networks, was still a recent phenomenon. No one knew how strong or vulnerable a machine it was. The consensus was that it was too reliant on an easily shattered infrastructure to survive a well-planned military attack. The consensus turned out to be wrong.

Who are the real makers of modern America? Not the politicians or the business magnates, according to Thomas Parke Hughes, Mellon Professor of the History and Sociology of Science at the University of Pennsylvania, but the inventorentrepreneurs, industrial scientists, and engineers who contributed to the golden age of American technology between 1870 and 1970. They created the vast systems shaping modern life—systems such as the Tennessee Valley Authority, the Manhattan Project, and the automobile industry.

Who is this man wearing overalls and a jaunty fedora, and what is he up to?

On the twenty-fifth of April, 1838, the crack steamboat Moselle tied up to a raft a mile and a half above the Cincinnati landing to take on a group of westward-bound immigrants. With the passengers aboard, the packet cast off and was edging away from the raft to continue the downstream voyage when her boilers exploded.

He was a great stout paradox of a man, brilliantly creative yet restless and insecure, lighting up skies with his inventions yet repeatedly facing bankruptcy, founding major corporations yet proving unable to run them, succeeding repeatedly with self-taught technical intuition in a world of technologists with advanced degrees. A high school dropout, he was awarded numerous honorary doctorates. A salesman of the first order, he left at his death a company that would wind up nearly half a billion dollars in debt.

Henry Chapman Mercer, a frustrated archeologist, had what you could call a vision of the history of technology one day early in 1897. At the moment it happened, he was searching for fireplace tongs in a junkyard in his native Bucks County, Pennsylvania.

The Mercer Museum, on Pine Street in Doylestown, Pennsylvania, is open Monday through Saturday throughout the year from 10:00 A.M. to 5:00 P.M. Admission is $4.00 for adults, $3.50 for children and students, and $1.50 for senior citizens. Fonthill, Mercer’s fascinating concrete home, and his Moravian Pottery and Tile Works are also open to the public at similar charges and during similar hours.

CAMBRIDGE, MASS.: Inspired by the success of Ph.D. programs in the history of technology at institutions such as the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Delaware, the historian of technology Merritt Roe Smith has lobbied long and hard for a similar program on his home turf, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Of all high-tech industries in America, the most high tech of all may well be chemicals. Chemicals is the industry that spends the most nongovernment money on research and development—more than eleven billion dollars a year—and that spends more research money on basic (not applied) research than any other. Furthermore, it is one of only two major hightech industries that have consistently maintained a positive balance of payments in international trade. (The other is aerospace.) Why is the American chemical industry so enduringly preeminent?

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.

EIGHTY YEARS AGO, IN A BACKYARD WORKSHOP IN upstate New York, a teen-age tinkerer toyed with a motorcycle he had bought for fifty dollars. The improvements he made marked the beginning of an inventing career that would bring him international fame and fabulous wealth. Over the next three decades he would win patents for more than a dozen high-performance aircraft and some of the world’s deadliest weaponry, develop the first color television, and inaugurate coast-to-coast airline service.

From 1899 to 1901 the largest-selling car in America by far was the steam-powered Locomobile. Sixteen hundred of them were produced in 1900 alone, an impressive feat of mass production by the standards of the time. Other companies produced a small handful of steamers as well, plus 1,575 electric cars and just 936 powered by internal combustion.