Fifty years old this year, the Polaroid Corporation has eschewed what its corporate communicators call “exercises in nostalgia.” Instead, the organization that gave the world the instant photograph is sponsoring a round of forward-looking events—a decision profoundly characteristic of a company that resists definition, historical or otherwise.

Spanning The Golden Gate

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.

THE END OF THE LINE: It had always been shockingly easy to kill a passenger pigeon. The roosting birds, one witness said, “seemed to court death. Wherever there was a naked branch on a tree, [they] chose to sit upon it in such a manner that an amateur could not fail to bring down at least half a dozen at one shot.” Every year the pigeons traveled to nestings in the hardwood tracts of the Midwest in flocks nearly a billion strong; clubs thrown into the dense mass as it passed overhead would bring down hundreds.

On June 24, 1930, two employees of the Naval Research Laboratory near Washington, D.C., were trying to find out whether airplane pilots could follow the narrow beams of radio short-waves that a transmitter was sending out from a laboratory building. One of the men, Lawrence Hyland, had set up a receiver a short distance from the laboratory, near the Army airport at Boiling Field. His job was to watch a meter and record the strength of the navigation beams at various locations on the ground.

We always used to ask, how could the foremost technological nation in the world not have an agency dealing with its technological past,” says Eric DeLony, principal architect for the Historic American Engineering Record, a federal project based in Washington, D.C. He began asking this question in the late 1960s, when, as a graduate student in architecture, he became involved with the Historic American Buildings Survey, the WPA-born archive of historic architecture.

Across the way from the portentous WPA Romanism of the National Archives in Washington, D.C., a cheerful stand of Federal buildings has managed to survive, and in one of them is a machine that changed the way the world looks.

Fate has put this mechanism in the hands of Fred Litwin, and it couldn’t have found a better curator. Litwin is a used-furniture dealer—his family has been working in the store at 637 Indiana Avenue, N.W., since before World War I—but he speaks with the authority of a historian and the passion of a dedicated preservationist.

Thomas Jefferson had a good eye for real estate on a grand scale. But when the notion of a canal linking the Great Lakes with the Hudson River near Albany, New York, was put before him in 1809 by two New York State legislators, he dismissed it out of hand. “Why, sir,” he said, ”… you talk of making a canal three hundred and fifty miles long through a wilderness! It is a little short of madness to think of it at this day!”

The question “Where did it all start?” is always an irresistible, if slippery, one in matters of technology, and the more important and visible an invention, the greater the fascination in finding its origin or earliest use. In the case of the ever visible automobile, the argument can be made that it was an obscure Kentuckian, Dr. Joseph Buchanan, who, in the mid-1820s, built and drove the first in the United States. The case becomes more debatable the closer one looks, but it also becomes more interesting.

In “Notes from the Field” (Spring 1986), you write, “New York City’s Holland Tunnel, completed in 1927, was the first of many built using compressed air.” I believe there were accounts of sandhogs being blown up to the surface of the East River during the construction of the IRT and BMT tunnels well before the twenties.

Emma Cobb replies: Correct. The Holland Tunnel was the first automobile tunnel so built.

In “Working with Working Models” (Fall 1985), Benjamin Lawless showed a patent model for a Dahlgren-like gun designed by John Ericsson and described the rings around the barrel as providing cooling. But overheating from rapid fire was a small problem in 1864 compared with the tendency of large iron cannon to burst. A host of inventors on either side of the Atlantic labored furiously to develop composite cannon with greater strength and endurance, and Dahlgren, for one, patented circular plates stacked and shrunken into place for added reinforcement.

After traveling in the United States in 1842, Charles Dickens did little to advance the cause of transportation—much less tourism—by canal-boat when he committed his impressions to paper. He recounted canaling experiences that were better read about than lived through.

The cab of a steam locomotive or the balloon-frame construction of a wooden house might seem like mundane objects at first. But by examining the “innumerable, often anonymous acts of arranging, patterning and designing” that went into the creation of such things, John Kouwenhoven has elucidated important and formerly neglected aspects of American culture. His classic study Made in America was published in 1948.

During World War II the United States exported more tons of petroleum products than of all other war matériel combined. The mainstay of the enormous oil-andgasoline transportation network that fed the war was the oceangoing tanker, supplemented on land by pipelines, railroad tank cars, and trucks. But for combat vehicles on the move, another link was crucial—smaller containers that could be carried and poured by hand and moved around a battle zone by trucks.

Builders have striven for height ever since the Tower of Babel, but until the end of the nineteenth century the tall structure was a monument, a symbol of temporal or spiritual power, not the functional building we know today. That changed when from the ashes of the Great Fire of 1871 Chicago rebuilt itself as the most modern city in the world. Tall buildings were going up in other places then, too, but no other city made such a determined and sustained effort to build and define their use and form.

DO YOU STILL THINK OF TECHNOLOGY AS MANKIND’S OBEDIENT SER vant? If so, you may be jolted by Walter A. McDougall’s observations about the space race. McDougall, a professor of history at the University of California, maintains that post- Sputnik , government-underwritten space technology has bred a genuine technocracy that is eroding the very Free World values it is supposed to defend.

American locomotives were worked very hard during the nineteenth century because like the jetliners of today, they were expensive capital goods, and their owners were intent on realizing maximum use from a major investment. Between 1840 and 1870 main-line locomotives normally cost eight to ten thousand dollars each. This was very big money for the period. Engines ran twenty to thirty thousand miles a year, consuming about twelve hundred cords of wood in the process.

ON JANUARY 8, 1815, AMERICAN troops under Andrew Jackson won a great victory against an attacking British force at the Battle of New Orleans. Sharpshooters and cannon behind well-defended positions brought down the staid redcoats by the hundreds, until the famed British discipline broke. The only problem with this success was that representatives of the two belligerents had signed a peace treaty in Belgium two weeks earlier, and only formalities remained before ratification.

IN 1907 ALBERT ABRAHAM MICHELSON BECAME THE FIRST U.S. CITIZEN to win a Nobel Prize for science. He was honored as the laureate in physics “for his precision optical instruments and the spectroscopic and metrological investigations conducted therewith.” It was an honor well deserved. His ether-drift experiment of 1887, done in collaboration with the chemist Edward W.

As Tom Crouch pointed out, the inventors of the airplane got much of their knowledge of stability, control, and lightweight structures from the bicycle industry. He did not, however, mention the bicycle industry’s debt to aviation. The tension wheel, with its wire spokes and thin, flexible rim, was invented by the British aviation pioneer Sir George Cayley in the early 1820s, for use on gliders. This lightweight wheel design was, along with high-strength steel, what made the bicycle actually practical.

The big Allis-Chalmers triple-expansion engine is dead, but not to Walter Wilson and Daniel Hoffman. These men are, respectively, division foreman and manager of pumping and maintenance for New Jersey’s Hackensack Water Company; but back in the 1940s they were just starting there as two young engineers fresh out of the Navy, and the engine was very much alive.