Undoubtedly it was birds that first inspired man with the notion of flight. If there had been no birds, perhaps insects could have done the same, but insects can hardly match the inspirational value of soaring eagles, diving hawks, or maneuvering swifts or swallows. Wanting to fly meant wanting to fly like birds. Yet birds are terrible models for human flight, and a too slavish attention to their example—often unconscious —has often impeded the development of aircraft.

THE HISTORY OF TECHNOLOGY WAS OFFICIAL ly born in the United States in 1958, when the Society for the History of Technology was established. But long before the subject donned that academic cloak, three lone pioneers virtually invented it, writing histories that took on the human and moral dimensions of technology in the broadest way. The Harvard economic historian Abbott Payson Usher published A History of Mechanical Inventions in 1929.

In surviving laboratory books from 1889 and 1890, Stanley and his assistants sketched out, often in color, his ideas for AC motors and other projects.

The machine has swept over our civilization in three successive waves. The first wave, which was set in motion around the tenth century, … was an effort tof achieve order and power by purely external means, and its success was partly due to the fact that it evaded many of the real issues of life and turned away from the momentous moral and social difficulties that it had neither confronted nor solved. The second wave heaved upward in the eighteenth century after a long steady roll through the Middle Ages.

The process of innovation has frequently been held to be an unusual and mysterious phenomenon of our mental life. It has been long regarded as the result of special processes of inspiration that are experienced only by persons of the special grade called men of genius. This mystical account of these phenomena is, however, gradually yielding ground before the growing body of psychological analysis.…

Before The Skyscraper

Readers of Tom Peters’s most interesting article (…The Rise of the Skyscraper from the Ashes of Chicago,” Fall 1987) might be interested to know of the contribution in this area of a littleknown American educator named Cyrus Hamlin, who founded Robert College in Istanbul and was later president of Middlebury College. Hamlin, who went to Turkey in 1839 as a missionary, was a man who combined remarkable scientific and engineering skills with a great intellect, in the true Renaissance mold.

Mercifully, the whole thing is starting to fade, to become an episode. When I do still catch the odd glimpse, it’s peripheral; mere fragments of mad-doctor chrome, confining themselves to the corner of the eye. There was that flying-wing liner over San Francisco last week, but it was almost translucent. And the shark-fin roadsters have gotten scarcer, and freeways discreetly avoid unfolding themselves into the gleaming eighty-lane monsters I was forced to drive last month in my rented Toyota.

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.”

History is a magical mirror. Who peers into it sees his own image in the shape of events and developments. It is never stilled. … The meaning of history arises in the uncovering of relationships. … The historian deals with a perishable material, men… . His role is to put in order in its historical setting what we experience piecemeal from day to day, so that in place of sporadic experience, the continuity of events becomes visible. … History, regarded as insight into the moving process of life, draws closer to biological phenomena.

When I was a graduate student in aeronautical engineering, in the late 1930s, my professors told me categorically that a properly designed airplane should be inherently stable aerodynamically. That is, the airplane, if disturbed from equilibrium by a transitory occurrence such as a gust, should return to that condition without any corrective action by the pilot—even if he has let go of the control stick. The need for such built-in stability was simply taken for granted.

The original Remington typewriter, prototype of all modern typewriters, made its public debut in 1874. Hardly anyone noticed. “The advent of the first writing machine was not announced in cable dispatches and newspaper headlines,” The New York Times recalled later.

PHILADELPHIA, PA. : “Who is Lewis Mumford?” That’s the question Professor Thomas P. Hughes asked the scholars gathered at the University of Pennsylvania last November for the International Symposium on Lewis Mumford. A simple question, but simple answers are unlikely when academics meet to size up the work of a man whose career spanned more than half a century and focused on a multitude of subjects.

Thomas A. Watson is remembered mostly as the man who answered the first telephone call. He is known to a few as the actual coinventor of the phone—he worked out the basic idea with Alexander Graham Bell and added major improvements including the bell and the switch hook. But he retired from telephones at twenty-seven and then embarked on a life—or series of lives—so rich and varied that his exploits with Bell might be considered mere preamble.

EVERYTHING IS MADE FROM SOMETHING. THIS SIMPLE FACT AND ITS VAST IMPLICATIONS ARE THE SUBJECT OF “A Material World,” an exhibition opening this spring at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History. For the first time the museum will display a range of objects from the American past with the focus not on the purpose, design, or manufacture of the objects but rather on the materials that constitute them and what they tell us.

Perhaps the most famous image of Thomas Edison is a photograph taken in 1888, showing the inventor after three days of nearly constant toil on his improved wax-cylinder phonograph. The disheveled Edison is slumped before his handiwork, eyes intense, brooding.

Kirkwood Meadows, California, August 15, 1981: Buckminster Fuller, his gentle eyes grotesquely magnified behind his thick glasses, watches intently as I insert the final balsa-wood struts in a twenty-five-inch-diameter geodesic sphere that models his latest structural innovation. His large head, prickly with white hair, angles forward from the compact eighty-six-year-old frame—alert, anticipating. As Fuller’s new engineering assistant I am on my first “business trip.” Guided loosely during his brief office visits, I have gradually learned to decipher the code.

ON THE AFTERNOON OF JANUARY 6, 1949, journalists and scientists from around the nation crowded into the lecture hall at the National Bureau of Standards (NBS), in Washington, D.C., to see the world’s first atomic clock. It looked like a metal cabinet seven feet tall, with a maze of tubes, knobs, and gauges across the front. On top sat a conventional, round face, with hour, minute, and second hands indicating the time. There was no ticking, only a low electronic hum.

The gray mists of predawn shrouded the waters and banks of the Natchez riverfront on the morning of April 3, 1833, as the steamboat Java cautiously moved past the ghostly forms of rafts, keelboats, and two other steamboats. On board the small, unadorned working boat, Capt. Henry M.

In the handsome, high-windowed directors’ room on the second floor of the Watts, Campbell Company in Newark, New Jersey, Chad Watts has set up a little museum. There, on neat display, are working drawings pasted to boards and varnished so they wouldn’t get spoiled in the shop, dim old photographs of steam engines, tools, billheads and ledgers, and all the other memorabilia that a busy machine shop could be expected to generate over the decades.

In the northwestern corner of Connecticut, there is a pretty town called Colebrook. The landscape is serene and pastoral. The main villages, Colebrook Center and North Colebrook, have both become National Historic Districts.