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In 1958 a Popular Mechanics article called “miracles Ahead on Your Telephone” envisioned speakerphones, call forwarding, voice mail, and burglar alarms that would automatically notify the police. Two years later Changing Times predicted worldwide direct dialing, fax machines, and hand-held portable phones. Both these articles, and many others of the era, capped their clairvoyance with the most fantastic prophecy of all: a phone that would let you see the person you were talking to.

New york is a city of contrasts, not least in technology. Grade-school students carry the latest hand-held gadgets, and hedge-fund traders manipulate world markets from a table at Starbucks. Yet on sweltering summer days a very common question, often answered in the negative, is: “Do you have air conditioning?” As recently as the late 1980s, sinks with garbage disposals were banned in most of the city; large swaths of Queens had no cable television; and New York State driver’s licenses had no photographs.

The global positioning System (GPS), whose history was recounted in our last issue, is so cheap, reliable, and easy to use that it is making older, radio-based navigation systems obsolete. loran (LOng Range Aids to Navigation), which dates from 1942, is one of the oldest, so it might seem a prime candidate for dismantling. Yet when the U.S. government announced plans to do just that, the ensuing uproar showed that there are still plenty of loran lovers out there.

It was, and remains, the largest office building in the world. Its odd shape was dictated by the irregular piece of land on which it originally had to fit. To raise and grade the site, six million cubic yards of earth had to be moved. Yet the Pentagon was ready to admit its first workers just eight months after earth-moving began, and it was substantially complete (along with a brand-new network of roads to service the site) in little more than a year. All these feats were accomplished under the material and labor shortages of the biggest war in American history.

In 1900 Joshua Lionel Cowen started the Lionel model-train company, which eventually brought him fortune and fame. But before that, while still in his teens, he walked away from another lucrative business. In the 1890s Cowen invented several devices that could be powered by the newly available dry-cell batteries. One was a fuse for igniting photographic flash powder. The Navy ordered 24,000 of them to use as detonators for underwater mines.

About a decade ago, The Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History started to work more aggressively at documenting recent inventions. To that end, in 1997 the museum instituted its Modern Inventors Documentation (MIND) program. MIND aims to ensure that the story of American innovation will include the contributions of “garage” inventors as well as those of greater renown.