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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.

THE UNITED STATES IS A SEAFARING NATION, AND HAS BEEN SINCE prerevolutionary war shipwrights first trimmed pine trees into masts. During the nineteenth century America pioneered steam power, the fast clipper, and the ironclad, and after World War 1 the U.S. fleet was one of the biggest in the world. But in the years between 1922 and 1937, the nation’s shipyards built only two oceangoing, dry-cargo freighters.

James Rumsey, a remarkable American inventor of the eighteenth century, is today almost forgotten. Most technological histories accord him little more than a footnote, as one of the less successful claimants to the invention of the steamboat. To some extent this is due to the loss of all his United States patents in the great Patent Office fire of 1836. But his four British patents, describing more than twenty inventions, have survived, and they and other sources make it apparent that Rumsey was one of America’s most creative inventors.

After the war, radar research moved easily into nonmilitary pursuits. In 1946 a variation of the Army’s old SCR-271 set bounced pulses off the Moon, opening an extremely productive era of radar astronomy. Radar made it possible for the first time to scrutinize the terrain of cloud-covered Venus, and it was radar mapping that told flight planners where they could safely land spacecraft on the Moon and Mars. Of late, radar astronomy has merged with laser ranging for even greater precision.

Some say that traditional religion died in the nineteenth century and was supplanted in the twentieth by worship of the machine. A curious reverence for machinery did spring up in the first decade of this century, principally in Europe; in the United States the new “religion” did not make a strong showing until about 1927, despite the fact that expanding technology and the shift to an urban economy had transformed America into the most highly industrialized nation in the world.

Things are never what they seem. Skimmed milk masquerades as cream. And laborsaving household appliances often do not save labor. This is the surprising conclusion reached by a small army of historians, sociologists, and home economists who have undertaken, in recent years, to study the one form of work that has turned out to be most resistant to inquiry and analysis—namely, housework.

I wonder if James Blackaby may not have moved a little too fast from the shaving horse to the workbench in “How the Workbench Changed the Nature of Work” (Fall 1986). Yes, the joiner practices at a workbench, and some of the tools he uses have had adjustable stops and depth gauges for close to a century now. But has Mr. Blackaby ever tried to join a couple of one-by-sixes with only a joiner plane, perhaps using hardwood with an unfinished edge and a handsaw as a start? This certainly requires skill and judgment and a lot of patience.

The lack of any advanced metallurgy among the Aztecs and Mayas has long been a mystery to students of pre-Columbian civilizations. Why, historians ask, were the great Mexican empires stuck in the Stone Age?

The Spanish crushed the Aztec empire with amazing ease, and the Americans’ technological inferiority was undoubtedly partly responsible. The conquistadors had gunpowder and horses; the Aztecs had neither. However, the blades of Aztec swords, made of obsidian, were sharper than steel. They could behead a horse.

The long feud came to an end on the morning of December 17, 1948. Eight hundred and fifty people attended the ceremony in the North Hall of the Smithsonian’s Arts and Industries Building. They sat in chairs facing a temporary speaker’s platform—and the great tattered flag that Francis Scott Key had seen still flying over Fort McHenry in the dawn’s early light of September 14, 1814. The Star-Spangled Banner was but one of the American icons in this building.

Shown below are excerpts from Orville Wright’s comparison of the original Langley plane and the version flown in 1914. The full list of changes was published in the Smithsonian’s 1942 report on the matter.

Marty Cohen rings the doorbell of my apartment at seven in the morning every Wednesday, the day his route takes him to the Upper West Side of Manhattan. He is a husky fellow, built like an iceman, and he has to be: like the iceman’s, his job involves carrying heavy things into people’s homes. And like the iceman’s, his job is nearly extinct.

I wonder if James Blackaby may not have moved a little too fast from the shaving horse to the workbench in “How the Workbench Changed the Nature of Work” (Fall 1986). Yes, the joiner practices at a workbench, and some of the tools he uses have had adjustable stops and depth gauges for close to a century now. But has Mr. Blackaby ever tried to join a couple of one-by-sixes with only a joiner plane, perhaps using hardwood with an unfinished edge and a handsaw as a start? This certainly requires skill and judgment and a lot of patience.

Although no one could ever patent it, one of the most important inventions of the late nineteenth century was the modern corporation, and of those who might lay claim to it, Isaac Leopold Rice was perhaps the most brilliant. At his best, a corporate entrepreneur like Rice was as much an innovator as was the inventor of a practical machine or process, for he institutionalized the useful. Rice was extraordinarily shrewd about patents, building more than fifteen corporations to sell technologies devised by other men.

Since World War II new technological revolutions have been heralded many times. First there was the industrial revolution to be fostered by nuclear power; more recently the computer or information revolution began—if we take the word of the prophets. Space flight and underwater exploration of the “new ocean” are other favorite catalysts of a new era.

For the past sixty years people have struggled to categorize Buckminster Fuller. A college dropout, recipient of twentyeight U.S. patents and forty-seven honorary degrees, author of more than two dozen books, and lecturer at more than five hundred colleges and universities, Fuller was always highly visible. But he defied classification.

IF ONLY WE COULD STEP BACK IN TIME, A historian’s dream might be fulfilled. As a student of transportation I would be particularly thrilled to stand by as the John Bull is off-loaded at the docks in 1831, or to be in the crowd as the New York and Erie officially opens the Great Broad Gauge to Dunkirk in 1851, or to witness the Golden Spike ceremony in 1869. But I think it would be just as rewarding to drop in on a more everyday scene of railroading a century or more ago.

As someone who well remembers the construction of the Golden Gate Bridge, and who walked it on the first day and now is involved in the celebration of its fiftieth birthday, I must tell you that without a doubt your article “A Bridge That Speaks for Itself,” by Margaret Coel (Summer 1987), is the finest I have ever seen on the subject.

Robert F. Christian
Christian Engineering
San Francisco, Calif.

At the Pennsylvania Railroad Ore Docks on the Cleveland waterfront, three Huletts of the M. A. Hanna Company are dipping into the hold of the Capt. Henry Jackman . The Jackman is perhaps eight hundred feet long, but the big vessel is if not exactly dwarfed, at least seriously diminished by the astonishing machines that are unloading it.

Sitting on the deck of the packet boat taking him to England in the fall of 1830, Robert Livingston Stevens whittled at a block of wood he had obtained from the ship’s carpenter. He knew he would have to carve just the right kind of cross section for the rail he had in mind, for much depended on it.

The roundhouse is a most peculiar industrial building. Its obvious purpose was to store locomotives; it also offered a shelter where light repairs and normal servicing could be conveniently performed. In a day when engines were the pride and symbol of a great industry, the roundhouse was a place to clean and groom the iron horse—a machine resplendent in polished brass, steel, Russia iron, varnished wood, and elegant paint.