When Fred Waring died in 1984, the obituary writers remembered him not only as the leader of the clean-cut Pennsylvanians choral group but also as the inventor of the blender that carried his name. They were wrong. Fred Waring did not invent the blender, but he did throw his energetic support behind it to help turn a half-formed idea into standard equipment in millions of bars and kitchens across the nation.

The captain of the Red Jacket , an American-built clipper ship sailing out of England, had both a sense of humor and a bit of flair. As the big three-master swept toward the equator, bound for Australia in 1854, he spotted the little bark Sea Bird , plodding from Boston to Cape Town, and decided to give his passengers a show.

There was never supposed to be a Sidewinder missile. The Navy didn’t ask for it; the Air Force didn’t want it. Yet a small, dedicated team of Navy scientists and engineers at a desert laboratory produced it against all odds. Bill McLean and his coworkers succeeded where larger teams with much more money and support failed, in developing a simple, inexpensive, immensely successful air weapon, and in so doing they showed how technical creativity can soar in the right environment.

In 1847 a citizen of Concord, Massachusetts, who had been in Harvard’s class of 1837, responded to a letter from his class secretary, asking about life ten years after college, by writing, with little regard for conventional punctuation: “I dont know whether mine is a profession, or a trade, or what not. … It is not one but legion. I will give you some of the monster’s heads. I am a Schoolmaster—a private Tutor, a Surveyor—a Gardener, a Farmer—a Painter.

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.

The Old Order Amish and Mennonite people of Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, have always believed in isolation from the evils of the world and have thus eschewed modern conveniences, relying instead on simple mechanical tools and face-to-face communication. When the telephone appeared, it created a crisis among them.

America’s Strength

As a footnote to Arthur Molella’s fascinating interview with Thomas Hughes (“America’s Golden Age,” Spring/Summer 1989), one might cite the reaction of a Russian visitor to the America of President James Buchanan: “Young, active, practical, happy in their enterprises, the American people … will have an influence on Europe but they will use neither arms nor sword nor fire, nor death and destruction. They will spread their influence by the strength of their inventions, their trade, and their industry.

At the turn of the century steam engines still pulled passengers into Manhattan, and every train that came and went from Grand Central Terminal had to make its way through the narrow, choking Park Avenue tunnel. Smoke and fumes were worst at rush hour, and they were particularly bad on the morning of January 22, 1902. A New Haven commuter train was stopped at a red signal in the tunnel when a New York Central express came plunging through the murk on the same track.

The discovery in the last few years of a new class of superconductors, which carry electrical currents without any loss of energy at relatively high temperatures, has brought about a storm of interest in the potential usefulness of these materials. It has led to a frantic race to find even better materials and to a level of media attention quite unprecedented in the recent history of science and technology.

If inventors, engineers, and industrial managers are the main characters in the history of American technology, they are far from the sole makers of that history. They must share the job of determining whether and how their innovations are adopted with consumers, corporations, and broad social, cultural, and economic factors—including politics and ideology. Since a great public-works project involves so much technology affecting so many people, serious political and ideological conflicts are likely to play a big role both in its birth and in its later direction.

Silicon is the stuff of the information revolution. It is the basic raw material of which are built the transistor and the integrated circuit and, indirectly, the computer and everything else made from microelectronic elements. Before any of those marvels of the age could be manufactured, there had to be elemental silicon; specifically, there had to be hyperpure silicon. Until the 1940s there was no way of obtaining hyperpure silicon in quantity; it was my good fortune to find the untrodden path that led to an answer.

John Muir spent most of his life, as he put it, in “the study of the inventions of God.” He was a world-renowned naturalist and conservationist, a respected botanist and glaciologist, and a writer who with words brought the wild areas he loved to millions. But before he took up his pursuit of untouched places, he first devoted himself to what might seem an opposite world: he was a tireless inventor and mechanic, a few of whose creations might have made him rich had he bothered to patent them.

On the east bank of the Susquehanna River, about seventeen miles downstream from Columbia, Pennsylvania, stands the burly white block of Pennsylvania Power & Light’s Holtwood Hydroelectric Station. It’s an extremely handsome plant, very much at ease with the superb scenery around it, and a suitable monument to the confident era that built it. Holtwood went into operation in 1910 to serve a new century that was getting increasingly thirsty for electricity. It was a modern plant in every particular; so modern, in fact, that at first it ran into trouble.

William Stanley contributed in a major way to a major invention: the transformer, the key element in the alternating-current system that delivers almost all of the world’s electricity. He also helped build two major corporations, both the Westinghouse Electric and Manufacturing Company and its archrival General Electric. But hardly anyone remembers him.

The greatest American bridge builder of the nineteenth century was John Roebling, and he is celebrated above all for designing the magnificent Brooklyn Bridge. His bridge-building career began in Pittsburgh, the city of rivers, where he constructed his first two suspension bridges and made some of his most critical innovations, including the technique of spinning wire suspension cables and using inclined stays for stiffening. It was for Pittsburgh that he designed one of his most audacious constructions—the Tripartite Bridge.

Despite their dour expressions, the motorists in this 1909 photograph were completing a feat unheard of until that moment. The driver and his dapper passengers were the first to travel by automobile between New York and New Jersey beneath the Hudson River. Their journey, in a Lozier automobile, did not take place in a tunnel designed for motor-vehicle traffic; not for another eighteen years would the Holland Tunnel make such trips routine. How then did these gentlemen do it?

It’s not just a single mood. It constantly keeps changing—segues from one emotion to another.” Milton Berger is talking about a roller coaster; and if his terms might seem better suited to a symphony, that’s all right. The coaster he’s describing is a masterpiece.

WASHINGTON, D.C. : On December 17, 1903, a man named Lorin Wright visited the Dayton office of the Associated Press to report that his two younger brothers, Orville and Wilbur, had wired home with the news that they had flown four times that day, their longest flight lasting just under a minute. The AP newsman was not impressed. “Fifty-seven seconds, hey?” he told Lorin Wright. “If it had been fifty-seven minutes then it might have been a news item.”

Liberty Ships Live On

What a fine Winter 1988 issue! As a maritime historian I wanted to offer you a little additional information relating to James R. Chiles’s “The Ships That Broke Hitler’s Blockade.”

In 1905 Francis and Freelan Stanley, the twins who built the famous steamer automobiles, constructed an aerodynamically advanced steam-powered racing car, the Rocket, shaped like an inverted boat hull. It had a flat full-length underpan and enclosed front and rear suspensions; the driver sat low on the floor, ahead of the engine. In January 1906, with Fred Marriott at the wheel, the Rocket reached a record 121.57 mph, at Ormond-Daytona Beach, Florida.