On September 19,1985, the most disastrous earthquake in North American history struck Mexico City. More than twenty thousand people were killed after a layer of wet clay amplified a distant temblor and set downtown buildings rocking. Hundreds of the buildings collapsed, crushing or trapping their inhabitants. But it could have been far worse. Thousands more buildings stood, including the landmark Latinoamericana tower.

The first issue of this magazine was published just seventeen months ago, in April 1985. In a letter from the editors in that issue we wrote, “American Heritage of Invention & Technology will not compete with the many periodicals that bring us news of the cutting edge. On the contrary, we intend to look behind the edge to the nature of the blade itself: its heft, strength, and resiliency—all those qualities that support the cutting edge and cannot be separated from it.

My great-uncle, George S. Morison, one of America’s foremost bridge builders, died July 1, 1903, exactly (as he undoubtedly would have said) six years, five months, fourteen days, and six hours before I was born. What follows begins with some incidental intelligence that has nothing to do with his work; these, listed in no order of relative importance, are just some of the things I know about him:

In October 1925 thousands of New Yorkers viewed an exhibition at the John Wanamaker department store entitled “The Titan City, a Pictorial Prophesy of New York, 1926-2026.” They saw murals of a spectacular skyscraper metropolis, with colossal setback towers spaced at regular intervals and connected by multilevel transit systems, arcaded sidewalks, and pedestrian bridges at the upper floors.

The herring are back again, battling their way up the Wankinko River past the Tremont Nail Company in Wareham, Massachusetts. “We caught a bunch this morning,” says Donald Shaw, the company’s general manager. He opens a stoneware crock to show the fish lying under a thick layer of salt. “We pickle ’em overnight, and then the boys have them for lunch the next day.” He points to a brand-new barbecue grill, very bright among all the old, dark metal in the company’s machine shop. “That’s why that’s there. The last one wore out.

Just before Christmas in 1913 three engineers from the American Marconi company crowded into a cluttered basement room in Philosophy Hall at Columbia University to see a young man demonstrate his new invention, a regenerative, or feedback, circuit, which he confidently declared had made possible the most effective wireless receiver in the world.

In the late 1880s Heinrich Rudolf Hertz (1857-94), a German physicist, proved an earlier theory of the English physicist James Clerk Maxwell that electromagnetic waves could move through space. To do this, Hertz attached copper plates to two separate metal spheres. When he generated an alternating current between them, sparks jumped from one sphere to the other. As crude as it was, this device served as the first transmitter. For a receiver Hertz held a loop of copper wire a few feet away.

As a teen-ager, in the 1920s and 1930s, Charles H. Townes was a tireless reader of Popular Mechanics . “It was one of my favorite magazines, and I built a lot of things I saw in its pages,” he recalls. “It gave me a view of what was going on in science and technology that I might not have had growing up in South Carolina.” By the time he was twenty-four, he was on the staff of Bell Labs; today he is known as the inventor of the laser.

No tale in all the chronicles of American invention would seem to be better known than the story of Thomas Edison’s incandescent electric light. The electric light, after all, quickly became the epitome of the bright idea, and its creator was for more than fifty years the living symbol of America’s inventive genius. But in truth it is only in recent years that we have begun to piece together the complete story of history’s most famous invention.

When Halley’s comet returns to our quarter of the universe this year, the great 200-inch Hale Telescope, perched high on Palomar Mountain in California, will follow it across the sky. In fact, the 200-inch, the world’s largest telescope for a full three decades after its dedication in 1948, was the first telescope to detect the comet during its current return, back in 1982. We can always expect the phenomenal from the 200-inch.

Elting E. Morison, Killian professor of humanities emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is one of the nation’s preeminent interpreters of technology. Though a great fan and chronicler of America’s industrial growth, he takes a clear, unawed view of his favorite subject. “The technological universe,” he says, “should be designed to fit and serve the human dimension.”

On April 12, 1955, Dr. Jonas Salk, a slightly built, forty-year-old research professor from the University of Pittsburgh, became a hero. On that morning, before one hundred and fifty news reporters and five hundred scientists and physicians crammed into an auditorium at the University of Michigan, “amid fanfare and drama far more typical of a Hollywood premiere than a medical meeting,” according to an account in The New York Times , it was announced that Dr.

Years before 1682, when the English astronomer Edmund Halley first saw the comet that now bears his name, Americans were searching the night skies. The first telescope in the New World arrived from England in 1660. With it, John Winthrop, Jr., lifted his eyes from the Connecticut wilds to a blurry image of Saturn.

We have all been taught to be critical of the written word, but we tend to let the omnipresent graphics of our era pass without close scrutiny. This we do at our own loss and peril. Graphics are rich stores of information, but often they lie about quantitative information and are unnerving and confusing when they could be aesthetically pleasing. In his recent book, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information , Edward R.

CAMBRIDGE, MASS . : In a small room on the top floor of building E51, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a white-haired professor addressed the following question to his assembled colleagues: “Which comes first, processed cheese or processed people?”

During the next few minutes, this issue was seriously examined. Has processed food turned us into a nation with a taste for the bland? Or did a dull appetite precede, and perhaps even inspire, the manufacture of processed food?

”If I have seen further,” wrote Sir Isaac Newton to Robert Hooke, “it is by standing upon the shoulders of giants.” Today we all stand on the shoulders of giants who not only have extended our vision of the universe but also, by deftness of mind and technique, have actually invented the modern world.

My father had a concept he called “gadget value”—the intrinsic interest of machinery unrelated to its use. I have found plenty of it over the years in steam locomotives, steamboats, theater organs, and interurban cars, but never so much as in the cable car. In graduate school at the University of Chicago, I became interested in the city’s cable-car system, which had been the biggest in the country.

During the summer of 1900 three fine new steam engines arrived in Brooklyn from the Ames Iron Works of Oswego, New York, and went into service spinning the generators that supply power to Pratt Institute. They’re still there.

On a shelf in a largely ignored basement display case at Rockefeller University sit a variety of medical devices that have been produced by that institution’s laboratories over the past half century. One of them is especially awkward looking —a glass cylinder that rises two feet before sprouting a seemingly haphazard array of tubes. Its glass innards of more tubes and smaller chambers suggest the workings of some unidentifiable life-form.

The First Issue

We received more than two hundred letters commenting on our first issue, which appeared last summer. Here are a few:

The First Issue

What a superb first issue! The articles about Salk and Edison are gems. The interview with Elting E. Morison (I have had those two books of his on technology for some years) is most welcome. And the writing is remarkably lucid.

Burnett Cross
Hartsdale, N.Y