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Sixty miles east of Havana, along Cuba’s north coast, swimmers and skin divers like to gather at a squarish pit filled with lovely aquamarine water, hewn into the rugged basalt just off Matanzas Bay. From a distance it has the look of a Stone Age swimming pool, until one sees electrical wires protruding from aged concrete.

No one could doubt Robert Fry’s aviation experience.

He had already made national headlines in 1928 as a Marine pilot in China, when he wrestled his plane through a violent storm and made an almost impossible forced landing in the middle of a shocked force of hostile Chinese troops. There was therefore no question that he knew how to handle the TWA Fokker trimotor aircraft that departed from Kansas City, only a little delayed on the stormy evening of March 31, 1931.

Well before his inauguration, with a recession gripping the country, President-elect Barack Obama proposed plans for a massive federal stimulus package centered on a public works program. “We will create millions of jobs by making the single largest new investment in our national infrastructure since the creation of the federal highway system in the 1950s,” he said.

Malcom McLean wanted to increase productivity, and ended up revolutionizing the shipping industry. In 1937 McLean, working for his family trucking business, became frustrated after spending all day at Hoboken, New Jersey, waiting for dockworkers to empty his truckload of cotton and load it aboard ship. McLean thought how much easier it would be simply to take his entire trailer, contents and all, and just hoist it aboard.

On October 1, 1908, the Ford Motor Company introduced one of the most famous and influential products in the history of American business. By the time the last Model T rolled off the assembly line in 1927, it had made the company and its founder famous, wealthy, and powerful—and altered American society forever. While long hailed for his innovations in mass production, Ford’s genius also lay in his ability to define clearly what Americans wanted in an automobile and then to build it using a combination of established and cutting-edge technologies.

In the first part of the 18th century, a wave of Lutheran and Reformed German immigrants started arriving in Pennsylvania, a good many of them bringing Old World gunsmithing skills with them. When they adapted their expertise to meet the necessities demanded of the New World, they invented a new kind of firearm, the Kentucky rifle, which would soon exert a major impact on the development of colonial North America.

On an evening cruise in 1979 aboard the 125-foot steamship Virginia V off Seattle in Puget Sound, a 32-year-old engine fireman heard the roar of steam ripping out of the engine, a noise that sends chills down the backs of steamship engineers. Keith Sternberg raced to shut off the boiler before the water level dropped further. A few minutes longer and the boiler’s pipes and tubes could have been irretrievably scorched, causing them to rupture or even explode.

Nineteen-year-old Harvey Henningsen’s heart sank in 1964 when his father announced his intention to scrap the engines of the Sturgeon’s Lumber Mill, a steam-powered operation in Sebastopol, California, 55 miles northwest of San Francisco. Harvey had grown up there, running errands for the millworkers as a boy; as a young man he had been thrilled by the boilermen’s stories as they stroked the massive furnaces powering the pulse of the single-piston, 1850 Atlas 30-horsepower steam engine, which shuddered so violently that it shook the mill floor above.

Bette Nesmith Graham didn’t set out to earn millions: she just needed a way to correct her frequent typing mistakes as a secretary at the Texas Bank & Trust in Dallas in the early 1950s. In the process this single mother invented and patented Liquid Paper, a product that transformed the working lives of millions of typists overnight. Her invention’s effectiveness lies in its simplicity. “Like a safety pin or a rubber band,” she said, “we wonder how we ever got along before without it.”

In early 2006 the 66-year-old retired nuclear engineer George Niederauer pulled his Ford Explorer into David Passard’s driveway in Van Nuys, California, after driving 800 miles from his home in Durango, Colorado. The house, garage, yard, and outbuildings were crammed with antique locomotive generators, lights, bulbs, and books stockpiled over four decades. Niederauer felt his heart race.

Tom Marshall Jr. will never forget the first time he "steamed up," or started, the Stanley Motor Carriage Company's rare 1915 five-seat Mountain Wagon. The year was 1946, Marshall a 22-year-old recently discharged as a lieutenant from the Army Air Forces. His father, a collector of Stanley Steamer vehicles, had roped him into a 300-mile road trip from Yorklyn, Delaware, to Cochituate, Massachusetts, to pick up the wagon that the Litchfield Stage Company had used to haul firewood.

AFTER MINNEAPOLIS’S I-35W steel truss bridge collapsed into the Mississippi River at 6:05 p.m. on Au-gust 1, 2007, the first job was survivor rescue, followed by recovering bodies and clearing of vehicles and wreckage. Well before that was finished, planning for a 1,223-foot-long replacement structure was under way. The state tallied a daily tab of $400,000 in delay and lost business, given that 140,000 vehicles had been using its eight lanes each weekday.

In 1763 Scottish mathematical instrumentation expert James Watt begged his friends at Glasgow College’s Natural Philosophy Department to recall their novel mechanical gadget—a Newcomen steam engine—from a London repair establishment. The awkward, rickety device soon arrived at his shop. It had a rectangular, open wood frame, a boiler the size of a teakettle, and a single piston with a six-inch stroke.

It took Butch Biesecker nine years to restore his 1924 Keck-Gonnerman steam traction engine with new valves, water flues, gearing, and a repaired firebox. Now the newly appointed 62-year-old president of the Rough and Tumble Engineers Historical Association in Kinzers, Pennsylvania, must perform regular, expensive, and time- consuming maintenance on the 12-ton machine. But that’s pan of the charm, he says: “Your best friends are a wrench and a towel. But I enjoy tinkering with engines. They’re hot, dirty, and fun.”

Back in 1951, television was still fairly new and mysterious. Whether they could afford a set at home or just settled for watching one in a radio shop window or other public place, most people were perfectly content to do nothing more than stare passively at the small, flickering, black-and-white screen, later inspiring some wags to dub television the "boob tube." But it wasn't enough for Ralph Baer, a creative young engineer working for the New York electronics company Loral.

THE PLACE DIDN'T LOOK like a cutting-edge research laboratory. The work benches in the little room at Johns Hopkins University's Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Maryland, were cluttered with oscilloscopes and other gear for testing electronics, circuit boards, computer workstations, drills, files, miscellaneous bits of wire, and other gear reminiscent of a hobbyist's well-equipped workshop.

Well before his inauguration, with a recession gripping the country, President-elect Barack Obama proposed plans for a massive federal stimulus package centered on a public works program. “We will create millions of jobs by making the single largest new investment in our national infrastructure since the creation of the federal highway system in the 1950s,” he said.

A typical flight instructor in 1917 would point to the instruments in a cockpit and tell his students to “pay no attention to them.” In aviation’s early days, pilots flew by the “seat of their pants.” They trusted their eyes and gut feelings, even though doing so sometimes killed them, especially when vertigo set in at night or during bad weather. Such loss of equilibrium was considered part of the business, a rite of passage that fliers just had to handle.

Glenn Curtiss made his name as an aviator, but he started out his career as a record-setting motorcyclist, reaching the mind-boggling and joint-rattling speed of 136 miles per hour in 1907. Later that year he joined Alexander Graham Bell and three other members of the Aerial Experiment Association to help create ailerons, hinged wing flaps that enable airplanes to bank and turn. Curtiss went on to make America’s first exhibition flight, win the first international air-speed prize at Reims, France, in 1909, and design the first practical seaplane.

While numerous NASA technologies have found applications outside the aerospace industry, many products long associated with NASA actually came to the space agency fully developed from the consumer and commercial worlds. Test your NASA spinoff literacy below.