At 5:04:40 on Saturday morning, May 26, 1934, the first diesel-powered, stainless-steel, streamlined train pulled out of Union Station, Denver, on a dawn-to-dusk race for Chicago. Called the Zephyr, it had been delivered to the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy Railroad in Philadelphia just six weeks earlier and had traveled west in a series of short trips. To reach Chicago before sunset, it had to cover 1,015 miles nonstop in less than fourteen hours.

The Wrights’ Stuff

Tom Crouch’s excellent piece on the bicycle’s relationship to flying and airplanes (“How the Bicycle Took Wing,” Summer 1986) is another valuable contribution to a long-neglected segment of our history. When I was a boy in the 1920s, the conventional wisdom viewed the Wrights as unsophisticated repairmen who somehow got lucky in the quest for powered flight, a notion far from the reality of their having anticipated nearly every avenue of inquiry that has since come to characterize the design and development of aircraft.

The collapse of the Quebec Bridge on August 29, 1907 (“A Disaster in the Making,” Spring 1986 issue) entailed considerably more than the ruination of Theodore Cooper’s career, steelworker Hall’s two fingers, and the lives of seventy-five men. Of those seventy-five men, no fewer than thirty-five were Mohawk Indians from the Caughnawaga Reserve in Quebec. Their deaths had a devastating effect on this small Indian community, altering drastically its demographic profile, its economic base, and its social fabric.

After the tragic loss of the nuclear submarine Thresher , in 1963, the U.S. Navy undertook the development of Deep Submergence Rescue Vehicles (DSRVs). On the basis of knowledge gained from earlier submarine-escape research and from the Navy’s bathyscaphe Trieste , which descended to a record depth of 35,800 feet in 1960, plans were made for six vessels, each capable of carrying a crew of three and twenty-four evacuees.

As America entered the First World War, in 1917, an Armenian named Garabed Giragossian petitioned Congress to investigate his miraculous and eponymous Garabed, an invention that would provide unlimited energy, “a natural force that we can utilize and have energy as we like, without toil or expense.” First he secured the endorsements of the director of music in the Boston Public Schools, the president of the board of trustees of the Boston Public Library, and the president of a shipbuilding concern; when he began his lobbying campaign on Capitol Hill, reports about his machi

On the greeting-card racks this past Christmas could be seen a minor technological miracle—a Christmas card that upon opening showed a small yellow light that glowed while the card played a tinny but recognizable version of “Jingle Bells.” The yellow light was the latest addition to a novelty that made its first appearance a couple of years ago—the electronic greeting card.

LACKAWAXEN, PA.: The sight of a canalboat crossing a river was hardly remarkable in 1849 when, on April 26, a local crowd and engineers from all over the country gathered on the banks of the Delaware River in upper Pennsylvania. The boat in view was an ordinary barge. What was curious was how it got from shore to shore—floating inside a wooden flume suspended thirty feet above the water from two iron cables, which dipped across the river over stone piers.

In reading about the exaggerated promotional ploys used by early inventorbarons (“How Did the Heroic Inventors Do It?” by Thomas P. Hughes, Fall 1985), I wonder if today’s jadedness is not in some way a reaction to subsequent barrages of techno-hype.

In his article on the Burndy Library (Fall 1985), I. Bernard Cohen mentions that in the eighteenth century church bells were commonly rung in a vain attempt to ward off lightning strokes, and that they often bore the words fulgura frango . In fact, the full citation reads: Vivos voco,/ Mortuos plango,/ Fulgura frango (The living I call,/ The dead I mourn,/ Lightning I break).

Your magazine is most interesting and provocative for someone who has spent his career as a chemical engineer in the research and development of aerospace technology. And special thanks to Robert Kargon for his article “Inventing Caltech” (Spring 1986). His historical perspective brings into view much of what has influenced me since I joined Caltech’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in 1956.

On June 4, 1896, the editor of the Binghamton, New York, Republican offered what most of his readers must have regarded as a rather startling prediction. The airplane, he remarked, would likely be the work of bicycle makers. “The flying machine will not be the same shape, or at all in the style of the numerous kinds of cycles,” he admitted, “but the study to produce a light, swift machine is likely to lead to the evolution in which wings will play a conspicuous part.” The editor’s judgment was confirmed seven and a half years later.

On an August afternoon in 1943, a long column of American B-17s arrived over the Bavarian city of Schweinfurt. The bombardiers watched the city crawl by under the lenses of their top-secret Norden bombsights, made delicate adjustments, and, from four miles up, dropped eighty bombs into a mile-square target. The remarkable accuracy of their bombsights was due partly to the dozens of tiny and precise ball bearings in each one. Hundreds more ball bearings went into the bombers’ big radial engines.

Some inventors are better left unsung, for example Fred H. Brown. He was the creator of the “vibrochord,” an impressive agglomeration of electrical wires, coils, and magnets that linked a musical instrument—a piano or perhaps a guitar or trombone—to a listener’s body. It flooded his system with “waves of harmony” and thereby cured “insomnia, hysteria, nervous prostration, rheumatism and numerous other ailments.” Or consider Ernesto Finelli, of New York City.

Tom Crouch’s excellent piece on the bicycle’s relationship to flying and airplanes (“How the Bicycle Took Wing,” Summer 1986) is another valuable contribution to a long-neglected segment of our history. When I was a boy in the 1920s, the conventional wisdom viewed the Wrights as unsophisticated repairmen who somehow got lucky in the quest for powered flight, a notion far from the reality of their having anticipated nearly every avenue of inquiry that has since come to characterize the design and development of aircraft.

In “The Perpetual Search for Perpetual Motion” (Summer 1986) Ken Alder provides an amusing look at inventors who thought their machines could defy the laws of nature. I was troubled, however, by the curt treatment of Joseph Newman’s recent invention. Alder seems to have applied the same a priori reasoning in dismissing Newman’s invention as has the United States Patent and Trademark Office.

In the spring of 1887, the emperor himself came out to the Steinfeld firing range a few kilometers from Vienna to watch the Austrian Army trials for rapid-firing weapons. Franz Joseph seemed particularly impressed by the performance of the Nordenfeldt model, a gleaming five-barreled rifle demonstrated by a team of two—one man feeding the cartridges, the second carefully cranking out 180 shots per minute.

When I went to college, my father gave me his slide rule—the one he had used in college. Marked on its leather case, which I had often envied as a child, were his name, the Greek letters of his fraternity, and the names of the schools he had attended. Knowing that countless problems had painstakingly been calculated through skillful manipulation of its slide gave the tool an aura not unlike that of the swords passed from generation to generation in medieval times.

In his article Tom Crouch presents a fine synopsis of the evolution of the ordinary through the safety bicycle. However, the bicycle shown in an accompanying photograph (on page 12) has been wrongly identified. It is certainly an antique, but it is not an ordinary. The bicycle is a Star, an unusual early safety bicycle, with the large wheel in the rear and pedals that are actually spring-loaded levers driving a ratchet-wheel mechanism. It was probably built between 1883 and 1886, by the H. B. Smith Machine Company, of New Jersey.

THE DISAPPEARING RECORD: A few years after the last American troops left Vietnam in 1973, the Pentagon turned over a big batch of microfilm, more than one hundred rolls, to the National Archives. The film carried every enemy document captured by U.S. forces during the war—a spectacular trove of information for some future historian, and most of it not existing in any other form.

Squat and powerful, its boiler sheathed in stout wood planking and its nearly six-foot-long iron leading truck thrusting forward wickedly, the ten-ton John Bull is the oldest self-propelled vehicle in the world that can still run. Gazing at the 155-year-old steam locomotive, you begin to sense just how it was that it and other innovative machines became engines of change that knit nineteenth-century America together, industrialized the nation, and helped form the American character.