Science and Techology: The Engines of Our Ingenuity

Succinct essays on the machines that make our civilization run and the people whose ingenuity created them by Dr. John Lienhard, M.D. Anderson Professor of Mechanical Engineering Emeritus at the University of Houston and a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Acoustics

721 In which Ray Dolby invents more than a hiss suppressor
[electronics, acoustics, Indian music, tape recorders, digital]

Advertising

711 In which Old Joe Camel get his nose under the tent
[drugs, DiFranza, cigarettes, advertising, law, legal, courts, scientific method]

1231 In which automobile advertising mirrored the public
[Dorris, Lexington, Ford, General Motors, Plymouth, Olds, Barnum, bicycles, merchandising]

African Americans

127 Black American inventors before the Civil War
[McCormick, Whitney, cotton gin, reaper, Davis, Blair]

158 Lewis Latimer, a Black pioneer of electric lighting
[Edison, Maxim, Bell]

146 Garrett A. Morgan: a Black American inventor
[traffic, safety]

154 Charles Richard Drew and the development of blood banks
[Black, plasma, medicine]

182 Black and White in pre-revolutionary Virginia
[Jefferson, religion]

231 The real McCoy
[Black inventor, lubrication, railroads]

236 Norbert Rillieux and multistage evaporation
[Black inventor, agriculture, thermodynamics, Civil War]

371 Martin Luther King shows us how the inventive mind works
[Black, race relations, nonviolence]

516 The Tuskegee Airman help desegregate the Army, and win WW-II
[flight, war, Black, airplane]

517 Sojourner Truth: A slave reshapes America
[Black, women, segregation, slavery, Civil War, Lincoln, Douglas, Garrison, Stowe, King, religion, abolitionist]

518 Colonial slaves teach us about smallpox inoculation
[Cotton Mather, Boston, Black, medicine, Franklin]

519 Benjamin Banneker, The Black "Poor Richard"
[almanacs, Black, Franklin, Jefferson, Washington DC, Rush]

520 Great Zimbabwe: A once great African city state
[Black, Rhodesia, iron age, architecture, masonry, archaeology]

521 Black soldiers in the Civil War: Defining freedom
[war, military]

618 Black Americans and salt: a fable about racial superiority
[medicine, heart disease, kidney, metabolism, anatomy, sugar, sickle cell anemia, Darwinian advantage, Diamond]

620 Phillis Wheatley: a Colonial slave prodigy writes poetry
[Black women, Hancock, slavery, literature, Colonial America]

659 Percy Julian, grandson of a slave, invents pharmaceuticals
[chemistry, Black, drugs, hormones, cortesone, DePauw, Glidden]

997 Gene Bullard and his SPAD: The first Black pilot
[WW-I, flight, war, military, airplanes]

987 William J. Powell seeks racial equity in the skies
[Black, transportation, race, flying, airplanes, flight, war, military, Tuskegee Airmen, Coleman]

988 The remarkable tale of Bessie Coleman, first Black woman to fly
[Black women, flight, flying airplanes, race, Texas]

1076 Slave Inventors and question, "Who owns an idea?"
[Davis, Stewart, Ned, Montgomery, patents, Donne, invention, Black, propellors, cotton]

1521 John P. Parker, slave, freedom-fighter, inventor, and businessman
[Uncle Tom's Cabin, Civil War, slavery, abolitionists, Rankin, Harriet Beecher Stowe, iron, agriculture, Black]

1533 The Triple Nickel: the first Black paratroopers become smoke jumpers
[Japanese balloon bombs, parachutes, Black paratroopers, African Americans, Oregon, forest firefighting, military, race prejudice, integration, WW-II]

1624 Garrett A. Morgan: Black American inventor
[African American, gas mask, traffic signals, safety, hair straightener, invention, sewing machines]

1709 Cap Wigington
[Cap Wigington, Percy Zachary, John Marshall High School, Webster School, architecture, St. Paul, Minnesota, Black architect, racism, African American]

Air Conditioning

684 Midgely invents ethyl gas and Freon -- a Pyhrric triumph
[Lowell, Kettering, Ethyl, Freon, chemistry, periodic table]


688 Willis Carrier wields the witchcraft that conditions our air
[Milam Building, air conditioning, psychrometry, refrigeration, Newcomen Society]

Amusement Parks

508 Ferris' Great Wheel: Thrust out into the sky!
[Chicago World's fair, roller coaster, consciousness, Jaynes, bicameral, Eiffel]

908 The Carousel, the Roller Coaster, and Ferris' great Wheel
[amusement parks, Coney Island, Chicago Columbia Exposition, Bartholomew Fair, Jonson, Midway]

Anesthesia

211 Anesthesia, another "Who got there first?" question
[medicine, chemistry, Long, Wells, Victoria, Morton]

Animals

807 Dromedary camels in Texas, a lost ecological experiment
[Marsh, Jefferson Davis, Smithsonian Institution, military, army, dromedary, Civil War, Mexican American War, cavalry]

Architecture

61 The skyscraper and the great Chicago fire
[elevator, steel, Chicago, design, iron]

77 Napoleon Bonaparte and iron construction in France
[Ecole, bridges, Eiffel, monuments]

779 Balloon-frame houses: the first unique American architecture
[Chicago, construction, Taylor, Snow, houses]

813 Thomas Jefferson falls in love, and gives Monticello its dome
[Cosway, painting, art, architecture, invention, America, Williamsburg, France, Colonial, music]

818 The porch glider: America looks outward for a season
[interior design, architecture, comfort, motion sickness, inner ear, Frank Lloyd Wright]

820 The shotgun house: an African technology, more important than you thought
[Black, architecture, sociology, slavery]

836 The brief day of the cast iron building
[Haviland, Bogardus, Derby, Coalbrookdale, Chicago Fire, architecture, art, elevators, skyscrapers, Swinbourne, Ruskin]

903 White Tower/Castle: architecture and five cent hamburgers
[food, nutrition, economics, the Great Depression]

975 Gas stations: a fading American icon
[transportation, gasoline pumps, Ford, mimetic architecture, automobiles, service]

978 Grain elevators: a new wind in American architecture
[Le Corbusier, agriculture, silos, farming]

1218 Galveston's alleys and the democratization of low incomes
[architecture, city planning, urban archaeology, sociology, Beasley, hurricane, slavery]

1234 The biggest domed structure before the Houston Astrodome
[architecture, spas, hotels, Sinclair, Pantheon, St. Peter's]

1278 The Quonset hut: a design with remarkable staying power
[WW-II, war, material, logistics, architecture, Pyle]

1426 The skyscraper: a Phoenix out of the great Chicago Fire
[elevator, steel, Chicago, design, iron]

1589 Pluto: We finally reach the outer fringe of the Solar System
[astronomy, Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Saturn, Jupiter, Uranus, Neptune, telescopes, Galileo, Tombaugh, Transneptunian Objects, Asteroid Belt, Pioneer 10, planets]

1605 The brief race to build very tall buildings: 1885 to 1931
[skyscrapers, Chicago Fire, Louis Sullivan, Lang, Metropolis, elevators, load bearing walls, Chrysler Building, Empire State Building, Home Insurance Building, steel frame construction]

1606 The Skycity: a concept struggling against its own Gothic weight
[Fritz Lang's Metropolis, Wannamaker's department store, skyscraper, skypricker, Gillette, architecture, urban planning, construction, sociology, socialism, Utopias]

1706 The Two Eiffel Towers
[Statue of Liberty, France, construction, Iron, steel, 1889 Paris Exhibition, esthetics, architecture, Gustave Eiffel Tower]

Arts

590 Frederic Remington, naive maker of the Western American icon
[art, sculpture, Spanish-American War, military, Custer, illustration, painting]

831 In which the invention of tubes for oil paints changes art
[painting, Van Gogh, cameras, impressionists, alchemy, medicine, pharmacology, impasto, invention]

838 The Armory Art Show and 20th century revolution
[modern painting, sculpture, unions, armory, impressionist]

842 In which John James Audubon is redeemed by his birds
[art, painting, ornithology, zoology, biology, nature, Cuvier, France, French Revolution]

906 George Stubbs and Leonardo's ghost: of horses and anatomy
[art, anatomy, Burton, forceps, midwifery, Gothic art, dissection, physiology, painting, Darwin]

971 Maya Lin: a cool young girl designs the Vietnam Memorial
[architecture, sculpture, women, Eiffel Tower, Perot]

1314 Amistad, art and revolution: artists join the fight for freedom
[slavery, painting, Cinque, Africa, law, Sengbe Pieh, Jocleyn, abolitionist, color lithography, race relations, Black]

1366 Rain, Steam, and Speed: Turner's vision of modern times
[art, painting, railways, trains, steam locomotives, Trevethick, Bury, Innes, transportation, Brunel, machine as metaphor]


1594 The Mad Scientist -- he keeps coming back
[Frankenstein, Faust, Marlowe, Shelley, literature, Goethe, science, technology, science fiction, Ingolstadt, Jekyll and Hyde, Robert Louis Stephenson]

1595 In which Alfred Stieglitz and 291 anticipate Modern
[art, photography, O'Keefe, painting, modern art, Picasso, Cezanne, Rodin, Talouse-Lautrec, Matisse, sculpture, Photo-Secession, Steichen, Armory Art Show, reality]

1690 The Arts and Crafts Movement reflected in a book for young people
[handicrafts, Frank Lloyd Wright, William Morris, John Ruskin, model airplanes, education, leanring]

Astronomy

98 George Everett Hale and BIG telescopes
[Palomar, optical, optics, astronomy]

168 The Lunar Society and 18th century revolution
[Darwin, Watt, Priestley, Boulton, Wedgwood, Herschel, Smeaton]

1006 Discovering Neptune: whom, if anyone, should we credit?
[astronomy, Airy, Challis, Adams, scientific priority, LeVerrier, Galileo, Herschel, solar system]

1461 George Everett Hale and BIG telescopes
[Palomar, optical, optics, astronomy, lenses, Mt. Polomar, Mt. Wilson, Yerkes]

1726 The Lunar Society and eighteenth century revolution
[Darwin, Watt, Priestley, Boulton, Wedgwood, Herschel, Smeaton, Benjamin Franklin, revolution, Lunar Society]

Automobiles, Carriages, and Motorcycles

125 On finding the first internal combustion-engine driven auto
[Benz, de Rochas, Marcus, invention, transportation]

133 How the 1903 Cadillac brought American cars to England
[automobile, transportation, interchangeable]

921 The motorcycle: a metaphor for motion and menace
[transportation, internal combustion, Otto, Daimler, bicycle, Harley-Davidson, flight, automobiles]

961 In which Henry Ford forgets how he got there
[automobiles, cars, transportation, Rivera, assembly line, unions, production, Greenfield Village]

1285 Carriages: A forgotten technology
[The Carriage Collection, Stony Brook Museums, gig, hack, shay, phaeton, coach, Studebaker, McAdamized roads, Holmes, Kocz]

1286 A steam-powered motorcycle, invented well before its time
[Roper, Stanley Steamer, automobile, transportation, Daimler]

1442 Walter Chrysler and the texture of fame
[The Chrysler Building, Chrysler Airflow, automobile design, Locomobile, mass production, Ziegfeld, transportation]

1444 In which ThrustSSC passes the sound barrier on land
[automobiles, Stanley Steamer, sound speed, transportation, Breedlove]

1520 In which automobile makers gradually learn aerodynamics
[transportation, design, Chrysler, cars, drag coefficient, Zeppelin]

1596 Looking for the "first" automobile
[internal combustion engine, steam car, de Rochas, Samuel Brown, Leonardo, Cugnot, Mercedes-Benz, Markus, Marcus, Shooter's Hill]

1693 Glenn Curtiss' motorcycles: before airplanes
[motorcycles, bicycles, California arrow dirigible, Charles Baldwin, Alexander Graham Bell, Sylvester Roper, Wright Brothers, engines, twin-vee, twist-grip, airplane design, Glenn Curtiss Jenny JN-4]

1713 George Seldon, Henry Ford, and Clyde Champion Barrow
[automobiles, transportation, Duryea, Gibbs, cars, Seldon, Henry Ford, Clyde Barrow, patent law, mass production, assembly line, Olds, Oldsmobile]

Bicycle

78 The development of the bicycle
[automobile, Macmillan, hobbyhorse, transportation]

1468 The evolution of the bicycle
[automobiles, macmillan, transportation, penny farthing, ordinary, safety bicycle, hobbyhorse, pedals, sprocket]

Books, Language, Libraries, and Publishing

491 Tom Swift: prophetic assembly line stories
[literature, Bobbsey Twins, Rover Boys, invention]

981 The Library of Congress: how just over 3000 volumes shaped America in 1812
[books, printing, librarianship, cataloging, Jefferson, Madison, government]

1064 Words: not always a helpful reduction of language
[alphabet, linguistics, philology, Twain, speech, writing]

1115 New York Library's selection of the Books of the Century
[literature, censorship, intellectual freedom]

1451 Inventing the free public lending library: socialism in books
[labor movement, unions, Morrill act, Colonial America]

1636 Of books and learning in nineteenth-century America
[education, printing, paper production, textbooks, Morrill Act, libraries, Le Roy Cooley, Vassar College, teaching, science, physics]

Bridges

87 John and Washington Roebling, and the Brooklyn Bridge
[Hegel, suspension bridge, construction]

316 John, Washington, and Emily Roebling; and suspension bridges
[construction, wire rope, Lackawaxen]

1093 The sad tale of Eads' great bridge and caissons disease
[civil engineering, construction, the bends, medicine, scuba diving, piers, foundations, diving bells, Civil War]

1488 John, Washington, & Emily Roebling, and the Brooklyn Bridge
[Hegel, suspension bridges, cable, construction, women]

1517 The very odd bridge that Roebling almost built
[construction, Pittsburgh Steelers, suspension bridges, Brooklyn Bridge, statics, Three Rivers Stadium]

Business and Economics

177 Two wealthy men: Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller
[iron, steel, oil, business, money, industry]

1185 Adam Smith: of economics and natural law
[American Revolution, French Revolution, physiocrats, mercantilism, free trade, laissez faire, Industrialization]

1222 How two coincidences broke the AT&T monopoly
[MCI, Sprint, telephones, communications telephone, radio, business]

1512 The corner store: a retail outlet that is lost but not forgotten
[merchandising selling grocery store Galveston Beasley immigrants urban architecture]

1641 Aaron Montgomery Ward and the catalog that didn't belong in a store
[merchandising, selling, retail sales, wholesale sales, department stores, Sears and Roebuck]

Carbon-14 Dating

776 Carbon-14 rearranges history -- especially along the muddy Danube
[archaeology, chemistry, radiocarbon dating, Lepenski Vir]

1723 Paul Revere, The Shroud of Turin, The Vinland Map, and the problem of debunking
[Paul Revere, The Shroud of Turin, The Vinland Map, debunking, radio carbon 14 dating, chemistry, microscopy]

Cement

253 Gaining a concrete understanding of cement
[Eddystone Lighthouse, plaster, Smeaton, tuff]

Chemistry

86 The discovery of oxygen and scientific revolution
[Priestley, Lavoisier, Scheele, Kuhn, Dalton, chemistry]

933 Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin builds molecular structures from Byzantine patterns of dots
[chemistry, archaeology, X-ray radiology, Thatcher, Bernal, Pauling, penicillin, vitamin B12, insulin, women, Nobel Prize, arthritis]

Children

247 Jean Piaget watches children analyze machines
[education, bicycles, psychology]

572 The Boy Scientist: A 1925 book for boys
[technology, education, engineering, Einstein, X-rays]

626 Maria Montessori, harded-headed apostle of the child's mind
[education, teaching, creativity, invention, religion, women]

1301 The Boy Mechanic: endangering boys seeking danger
[education, criminology, pipe bombs, flight, electricity, manual training]

1762 Camp Cooking and the Savage Boy Inventor
[YMCA camps, Boy Scouts, home economics, savage boy inventor, invention, cooking, food preparations, neurasthenia, Beard]

1763 Child labor, dangerous companion of economic emergence
[economics, Victorian England, Child Labor laws, Great Britain, industrialization, education]

Circus

1399 The passing of the classical circus.
[Barnum, Ringling Brothers, Astley, Hughes, animal acts, horses]

Clocks

1368 Edmund Beckett, Lord Grimthorpe: of clockwork and convervatism
[clock-making, Sam Slick, Eli Terry, Thomas Chandler Haliburton, satire, Canada, balance of trade, Big Ben, bell towers, church politics]

Colonial America

286 The musical instrument shop in Colonial Williamsburg
[violin, harpsichord, tools]

733 The Bay Psalter: Mrs. Glover and our country's first press
[Colonial America, printing, Daye, Day, Dunster, Green, Indians, Pilgrims, religion, women, Bay Psalm Book]

924 Two women: America's first and last Colonial Printers.
[printing, Jefferson, tobacco, American Revolution, Rind, Glover]

1035 Martha Ballard: memoirs of an 18th century midwife
[medicine, Colonial America, gynocology, obstetrics, women, pharmocology, abortion]

1037 Rye ergot and witches, more widespread than we thought
[medicine, witchcraft, pharmacy, agriculture, Salem, plague, Black Death, The Great Awakening, Kipling, psychology]

1146 Early Massachussetts: a cultural beachhead, not yet a new country
[water wheels, fulling mills, Atheneaum, Colonial America, education, land grant colleges, pioneers]

1317 The first iron-smelting in Colonial America: Hammersmith on the Saugus
[metal smelting, Jamestown, John Smith, John Winthrop, pig iron, cast iron, wrought iron, nails, Braintree]

1365 Colonial America, 1776: A new nation of glorious amateurs
[Fitch, Barlow, Jefferson, Monticello, Franklin, Hopkinson]

1463 An old pig iron smelter in the New Hampshire underbrush
[metallurgy, iron smelting, Colonial industry, architecture, stonework, Blake]

1471 Some thoughts about immigrants, depression, suicide & Jamestown
[Colonial America, medicine, psychology, serotonin, law]

1609 Benjamin Franklin's experiments in thermal radiation
[heat transfer, thermodynamics, light, science, radiation, thermal emissivity of skin]

1611 Benjamin Franklin and Cotton Mather: ideologies diverge and converge
[Colonial America, smallpox vaccination, inoculation, Poor Richard's Almanac, Boston Philadelphia, Puritans, Thomas Bond, hospitals]

Computers

2 The Jacquard loom and the invention of the computer
[weaving, Babbage, cards, textile]

27 Vannevar Bush and the great Rockefeller Differential Analyzer
[analog, digital, computer]

152 John Atanasoff's invention of the digital computer
[Sperry, design, Honeywell, Mauchly, ENIAC]

243 What ever became of Babbage's Analytical Engine?
[computer]

401 Herman Hollerith streamlines the 1890 Census and starts IBM
[computer, business, invention]


685 Vannevar Bush tries to predict our world in 1945
[digital computer, analog computer, analogue, NACA, future, information storage, library, books]

1059 The computer invents itself -- despite our best efforts
[Kilby, Noyce, IBM, Fairchild, Texas Instruments, INTEL, Integrated circuits, microprocessors, Babbage, chip, microcomputer, software, Dummar, DEC, innovation]

1145

Jacquard, Babbage, Hollerith, IBM: from weaving to computers
[textiles, census, analytical engine]

1297 Ramon Verea's calculating machine: inventing to make a point
[computers, Hispanic, Spanish, calculator, Jaquard, Mercantile economy, engineering, Hispanic]

1319 Vannevar Bush and the great Rockefeller Differential Analyzer
[analog computers, digital computers, MIT, Compton]

1753 In which Vannevar Bush cannot cross his Jordan River
[Vannevar Bush, Science, government, Modern technology, space program, moon landing, digital, analog, information storage, information access]

Consumerism

315 The 1909 Sears-Roebuck catalog and 20th century America
[Montgomery-ward, manufacturing, typewriter, phonograph]

346 America learns consumerism
[advertising, design, retail sales]

1755 A consumer report: lowbrow means to a better life
[consumers, consumerism, consumer reports, fast foods, cheap housing, supermarkets, design, econonomics, spending]

Constitution

709 The US Constitution: A mirror of the Iroquois Nation
[American Indians, Native Americans, government, Canassatego, constitution, political science, Franklin]

1003 Engrossing -- and dramatizing -- the US Constitution
[printing, government, political science, Washington, Franklin, law, legal documents]

1078 Thoroughbreds designed by a committee: The Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the King James Bible
[Jefferson, cooperation, Chesterton, literature]

Criminology

71 The Guillotine and the democratization of death
[execution, France, Rumford, Lavoisier, death]

179 On the Invention of the electric chair
[death, Tesla, Edison, Faust, electricity]


374 The Cubitt treadmill: a prison "reform" that failed in America
[power, penology, sociology, mills]

1034 Sing Sing prison: an ongoing early American experiment in penology
[penal system, Lawes, jail]

1448 The Guillotine and the democratization of death
[Guillotin, Lavoisier, death, execution, France, Rumford, capital punishment, beheading, capitis amputatio, torture]

1622 Fingerprints, crime detection, and identification
[forensic, evidence, Alphonse Bertillion, retinal scans, photography, DNA, FBI, identification, fingerprinting]

Cultural History of Technology

1600 Henry Adams ponders the Virgin and the Dynamo
[science, medieval architecture, Langley, 1900 Paris exhibition, Chartres cathedral]

Dentistry

1455 A brief history of dentistry and pain
[dentist, dentistry, medicine, anesthesia, teeth, tooth extraction]

Design

96 Streamlining the American public
[design, automobile, airfoil]

255 The Chrysler Airflow: the Car of the Future
[design, automobile, transportation]

592 Shaping the Shaker gift of simplicity
[religion, communal, communism, Civil War, architecture, design, buzz saw, table saw, clothespin, weaving, furniture, invention]

812 Running dogs and Thomas Jefferson help us invent comfort
[interior design, domestic, home, Rybczynski, psychology]

814 Charles and Ray Eames recreate furniture in a child's world
[architecture, art, interior design, sculpture, children's toys, play, furniture, chairs, Saarinen]
1480 Streamlining and the American public
[design, automobiles, airfoil, tailfins, fluid flow, art]

1759 Raymond Loewy, the man who made Modern
[Raymond Loewy, modern design, art nouveau, art deco, streamlining]

Disasters

103 Covering up Soviet technological disasters
[Russia, flight, safety]

282 The Tacoma Narrows Bridge Failure -- the reenactment of an old disaster
[safety, suspension bridge, accidents]

1135 Trying to hold a river that doesn't want to be held
[Mississippi delta, Atchafalaya, flood control, Louisiana, silt, New Orleans, Baton Rouge, civil engineering]

a1138 Texas City, Roseburg, World Trade Center, Oklahoma City: a story of fertilizer and cigarettes
[industrial safety, terrorism, chemistry, logging]

1237 Why did the hindenburg really burn?
[pyrotechnics, accidents, disasters, flight, airships, balloons, blimps, transportation, Zeppelins, fire, chemistry]

1262 An 18-century environmental disaster in Brittany, France
[lead mining, ecology, environmental impact, flooding, Diderot, lawsuit, Duhamel]

1266 In which Mrs. O'Leary is absolved of the Great Chicago Fire
[fire fighting, urban, cities, women]

1325 The day Mulholland's St. Francis Dam broke
[civil engineering, construction, Los Angeles water supply, disaster, San Francisquito Creek, expertise]

1391 The Johnstown Flood. They didn't see it coming
[Carnegie, Barton, hydraulics, earth fill dams, civil engineering, construction, Bessemer steel, disasters]

Education

1708 The school system, and the father, that produced Louisa May Alcott
[education, Houston Teacher's Institute, Paul Cooke, Louisa May Alcott, teaching, school systems, creativity Emerson, Thoreau]

Electricity

171 Electric power comes to Telluride, Colorado
[generator, Edison, Pelton, mining]

174 Nikola Tesla -- another sort of creative mind
[Yugoslavia, Edison, Westinghouse, electricity, Rayleigh]

510 Ben Franklin, electricity, and revolution
[lightning rods, Louis XV]

1323 Fleming, the light bulb, and the vacuum tube
[Edison Effect, electricity, electronics, diode, fundamentalism, evolution]

1327 Electricity in Everyday Life in 1904
[electronic communication, mass media, telephone, radio, books, future prediction telegraph, electric motors, light bulbs, Gutenberg]

1570 GE, light bulbs, and the product-driven innovation cycle
[General Electric, invention, design, manufacturing, Langmuir, electric light bulb, heat transfer, cooling, argon, deposition]

1571 In which the author of Oz contemplates electricity
[L. Frank Baum, electrical, Edison, Tesla, Wonderful Wizard of Oz, future]

1656 Electric power comes to Telluride, Colorado
[electric generator, generating electricity, dynamo, Telluride Colorado, Westinghouse, Pelton wheels, gold mining, Keokuk Dam, technological change, American West, Edison, Pelton, direct current, alternating current]

Elevator and Escalator

250 Escalator: the magical stairways
[steam, exhibition, electricity, Otic, Reno]

279 The Smithsonian acquires a domestic hydraulic elevator
[Otis]

320 On providing and elevator for the Eiffel Tower in 1889
[construction, Otis, exhibition, buildings]

Engineering

189 The two Eiffel towers
[Statue of Liberty, France, construction, Iron]

765 Gustave Eiffel builds a Tower, a vision, and still more
[architecture, construction, structures, bridges, ironwork, Bloy, deMaupassant, radio, aerodynamics, Wright Brothers]

1608 Three scale models of structures, with vastly different weights
[Eiffel Tower, Washington Monument, Boeing 727, density of metals and stone, civil engineering, structural mechanics, steel frame construction, Chicago balloon frame, beam design, architecture]

Engines

64 Rudolf Diesel and his wonderful engine
[engine, power, priority, internal combustion]

1336 In which Diesel engines violate their own metaphor
[thermal efficiency, power plants, internal combustion, gasoline, transportation, ships, marine engines]

1435 Rudolf Diesel, his engine, and a look at invention
[power, priority, internal combustion, coal tar, synthetic fuels]

Environment and Environmentalism

446 The Mt. Graham red squirrel and the U. of Ariz. observatory
[environmentalists, telescope, biology, regulation, forest]

468 The Man-made Infestation of Starlings in America
[ecology, environment, birds, biology, Darwinian selection]

595 George Perkins Marsh, a pioneering environmental scholar
[ecology, camel, linguistics, philology, Vermont, pollution]

1211 Theodore Roosevelt and the mad Marquis create Medora ND
[National Forests, cattle, Nobel Peace Prize, agriculture, meat packing, railroads, American West]

Espionage

1496 Mrs. Greenhow, the first great Confederate spy
[Civil War, espionage, Manassas, Battle of Bull Run, women]

Evolution

494 Lysenko's mad Marxist evolutionary theory
[genetics, Russia, Soviet, McCarthy, communism, Lamark, Mendel]

617 Darwin: a racist champion of human rights
[evolution, Tahiti, missionary, Lincoln, slavery, science, Black, Gould]

750 Louis Agassiz founders on evolution in the Galapagos
[biology, Gould, James, Lowell, geology, creationism]

824 The Scopes trial: a sinister cloud behind a comic opera
[anthropolgy, evolution, Bryan, Darrow, creationism, intolerance, Dayton]

1260 Darwin boards the Beagle and sails into history
[Fitzroy, theory of evolution, Galapagos, biology, geology, Lyell, religion]

1371 The great evolution war at Oxford in 1860
[Darwin, religion, evolution, biology, Samuel Wilberforce, Darrow, Chambers, Owen, Darrow, Bryan, Scopes Trial, Origin of the Species by Means of Natural Selection]

Exploration and Mapping

43 Vespucci and the naming of America
[Columbus, Waldseemuller, exploration, geography, transportation]

932 In which Martin Frobisher looks for the Northwest Passage
[Drake, cartography, geography, sailing ships, navigation, Dee, Baffin Island, gold, Inuit Indians, risk]

1008 Who really were the discoverers of America before Columbus?
[Madoc, Celtic, Celts, Welsh, Wales, Columbus, Vikings, exploration, John Dee, St. Brendan, legends, myths]

1240 A search for the Northwest Passage gives cause to learn geography
[Frobisher, McClure, Hudson's Bay, Franklin, Arctic Ocean, exploration, Canada]

1241 The search for Franklin and the search for the Northwest Passage
[geography, Arctic exploration, Schwatka, Inuits, Canada, Stanley, Livingstone]

1350 Vespucci and the naming of America
[Columbus, Waldseemuller, exploration, geography, transportation, oxygen, Priestly, Scheele, Lavoisier]

1692 Charles Hall's star-crossed attempt to reach the North Pole
[Arctic Ocean exploration, Charles Hall, Baffin Ellesmere Islands, Greenland, North Pole, Polaris, survival, arsenic poisoning, Joe Ebierbing]

1767 Weighing the near and far wake of Lewis and Clark
[Meriwether Lewis, William Clark, slave York, Sacagawea, Sacargewea, Sacajawea, exploration, exploring, west, slavery, black, suicide, appendicitus, Missouri Territory, Louisianna Purchase, Jefferson, Indian Affairs, Jean Baptiste Charbonneau, Sergeant Floyd]

Fax

1433 The invention of the FAX, and the FAX newspaper
[Stewart, facsimile copies, telegraph, Korn, Finch, electronic communication, radio, Internet]

Fire

974 A visit to the fire station
[fire fighting museum, Beaumont, pumps, disasters, Chronkite, New London, explosions, earthquakes]

1524 The other great fire of 1871: Peshtigo, Wisconsin
[disasters, Chicago Fire, Mrs. O'Leary's Cow, Michigan, Peshtigo, Wisconsin, news reporting]

Flight

21 Santos-Dumont, Zeppelin, and the great airships
[Giffard, dirigible, balloons, flight, airplane]

32 The Wright brothers battle for priority over Langley
[Aerodrome, Walcott, Curtiss, Abott, NASA, flight]

34 The Douglas DC-3: an airplane for all seasons
[transportation, flight, Rockne, Fokker triplane, DC-1, DC-2, Shang-Ri-La]

37 The first twenty years of transatlantic flights
[Zeppelin, Lindbergh, Alcock, Brown, Ortieg, transportation, Ryan]


39 Balloonist Jean-Pierre Blanchard, the first barnstormer
[flight, Franklin, transportation, Jeffries, Washington, Philadelphia]

67 The story of a failed airplane design -- the XP-75
[design, Ford, Berlin, General Motors, Loren, flight]

84 Thomas Sopwith's hundredth birthday
[flight, von Richtofen, transportation, war, aircraft]

85 The development of the helicopter
[Forlanini, da Vinci, aircraft, flight, transportation, Sikorsky, Cornu, autogyro]

112 The failure of the Comet jet-liner, and Nevil Shute's anticipation of it.
[literature, airplanes, safety, design]

114 The brief day of the great flying boats
[flight, transportation, Martin, Hughes, seaplanes]

118 The English and 18th century ballooning
[England, Lunardi, flight, transportation, invention]

162 Otto Lilienthal and Orville Wright -- one died and the other lived
[flight, gliders, Chanute]

172 Herbert J.L. Hinkler, Australian almost-hero of aviation
[flight, transportation, Australia]

184 Count von Zeppelin learns about flying in St. Paul, Minnesota
[balloons, dirigible, Hindenburg, flight, transportation]

188 We build a dirigible to get to the gold rush
[America, Giffard, balloon, transportation, flight, Porter]

254 Charlie Taylor builds the Wright Brother's engine
[flight, invention, design, Ford]

283 An 1869 Harper's article on flight
[transportation, ornithopters, Wright Brothers, internal combustion]

302 On the purpose pursued by airplane inventors
[war, Wright]

331 Greth's California Eagle and Baldwin's California Arrow fly over San Francisco
[flight, transportation, airship, dirigibles]

322 Marriot's Avitor airship and the California Gold Rush
[transportation, flight, balloons, dirigibles, Porter]

349 Morrel's California Ariel: a great forgotten dirigible failure
[flight, transportation, balloon, Zeppelin]

373 Flying like a bird: on mimicking life with machines
[biology, flight, airplane, design, invention, transportation]


391 Simplicity gives America its 1st jet fighter, the Lulu-Belle
[Skunk Works, airplane, flight, war, invention, design]

415 The chequered history of observation balloons
[Garnerin, Nero, Walpole, France, Franklin, Napoleon, McClellan]

432 John Montgomery's airplane and its prophet, Victor Loughead
[Lockhead, flight, transportation, Chanute, California, gliders]

507 Igor Sikorsky and Sergei Rachmaninoff make airplanes
[helicopters, airplanes, transportation, Pushkin, design, Russia, WW-I, WW-II, seaplanes, amphibians]

615 Learning to fly: a reflection on learning to fail
[invention, design, Wright Brothers, flight, transportation]

648 Orville Wright and Amelia Earhart try to read flight's future
[transportation, commercial airlines, seaplanes, women]

768 120 years of flight gives birth to the Wright Brothers
[Jeffries, Blanchard{'s balloon}, dirigible, Robertson, Lougheed, Lockheed, airplane, transportation]

827 German Zeppelins achieve failure in their success over London
[war, airships, airplanes, flight, bombing, transportation]

927 The Wright Brothers manage to fly when everyone else fails
[flight, transportation, invention, stability, control, airplane]

1062 In which Charles Lindbergh decides who to be
[transportation, ecology, Anne Morrow Lindbergh, flight, environment, Tasaday]

1070 Wrong Way Corrigan -- a last bit of fun before WW-II
[transatlantic flight, Lindbergh, radio, airplanes]

1120 George Cayley fathers modern aerodynamics in 1809
[flight, transportation, lift, drag, steam power, airfoils, Wright brothers, Newton, dimensional analysis, gliders, similitude, streamlining]

1129 In which Alphonse Penaud invents the model airplane
[psychology, flight, depression, suicide, aerodynamics, dyslexia, Giffard, helicopter, Wright brothers]

1142 The accumulation of empirical data in the legends of flight
[Daedalus, Icarus, Firman, Firnas, William of Malmesbury, Eilmer, Wright Brothers, aerodynamics]

1144 A Fokker D-VII mysteriously lands on an Allied airstrip
[air war, flight, WW-I, heraldry, von Beaulieu-Marconnay]

1209 Early fliers -- all seem to've been good-looking and literate
[Quenby, Coleman, Markham, Earhart, Johnson, Lindbergh, Gann, Shute, St. Exupery, Lincoln, literature, women, writing]

1223 Ghosts from the sky: a visit to the Oshkosh Fly-in
[aircraft, airplanes, aviation, flight, air exhibition, preservation, museums]

1225 Lincoln Beachey, first great daredevil of heavier-than-air flight
[aircraft, airplanes, exhibition flying]

1233 Baden-Powell flies in balloons, airplanes, and even kites
[flight, war, aeronautics, boy scouts, military]

1236 In which an old man finally flies in a B-17
[military, aerial warfare, flight, airplanes, bombers]

1335 Santos-Dumas, Zeppelin, and the great airships
[Aerodrome, Walcott, Curtiss, Abott, NASA, flight]

1342 The Wright Brothers' fight for priority over Langley
[Aerodrome, Smithsonian, Walcott, Curtiss, Abott, NASA, flight]

1351 Balloonists Jean-Pierre and Marie Blanchard, the first barnstormers
[flight, Franklin, transportation, Jeffries, Washington, Philadelphia, women]

1357 An airplane propeller test facility, twelve years before the Wright Brothers
[Maxim, aerodynamics, machine gun, flight, balloons, invention]

1362 The first twenty years of transatlantic flights
[Zeppelin, Markham, Lindbergh, Alcock, Brown, Ortieg, transportation, Ryan]

1409 The Douglas DC-3: an airplane for all seasons
[transportation, flight, Rockne, Fokker triplane, DC-1, DC-2, Shang-Ri-La]

1438 The story of a failed airplane design -- the XP-75
[design, Ford, Berlin, General Motors, Loren, flight, production]

1489 Inventing the helicopter: harder than it looked
[Forlanini, Sikorski, Cornu, Wright Brothers, Penaud, Leonardo da Vinci, aircraft, design, transportation, flight, autogyro]

1510 Thomas Sopwith's hundredth birthday
[flight, von Richtofen, transportation, Falklands, war, military aircraft, triplane, snipe, pup, Hawker Harrier]

1578 The brief day of the great flying boats
[flight, transportation, Martin M-130, Hughes, seaplanes, Boeing 314, Hercules, Spruce Goose, Yankee Clipper, Sikorsky, Fabre]

1579 Five years before we found out about the Wright Brothers!
[flight, transportation, Curtiss, Lilienthal, Chanute, gliders, Langley, Puck Magazine, Kitty Hawk, Dumont, technological acceptance, expectation, dirigibles, balloons]

1587 In which airplanes gradually learn to wage war
[military airplanes, World War I, design technological evolution, bombers, fighters, observation balloons, Manfred von Richthofen, synchronized machine gun]

1588 The Nieuport 17, early harbinger of the finished WW-I fighter
[SPAD, Sopwith Camel, Fokker Triplane, Fokker D-VII, Nieuport 28, Fokker Eindecker, military airplanes, World War I, synchronized machine gun, monoplane, biplane, triplane]

1648 Building a dirigible to get to the California gold rush
[America, Giffard, balloon, transportation, flight, Rufus Porter, Zeppelins, Thoreau, airships, flight, California Gold Rush, dirigible]

1650 Learning about the stability of aeroplanes in 1916
[WW-I, aerodynamics, airplane design, engineering, Eliot, flying, flight]

1659 Otto Lilienthal and Orville Wright -- one died and the other lived
[flight, gliders, Chanute, typhoid fever, Wilbur Wright, Orville Wright, Lilienthal]

1682 Count von Zeppelin learns about flying in St. Paul, Minnesota
[balloons, dirigible, Hindenburg, flight, transportation, Minnesota, invention, military aviation]

1696 Harriet Quimby, first American woman licensed to fly
[Women, flight, flying, airplanes, transportation, Leslie's Illustrated Weekly, John Moisant, Matilde Moisant, English Channel, Bleriot, Titanic, Earhart]

1715 The first flight around the world -- in 175 days
[flight records, distance flying, Douglas Aircraft Company, Army Air Service, Liberty engines, around the world]

1727 Flying Down to Rio: Making flight safe; keeping flight dangerous
[musical comedies, movies, Flying Down to Rio de Janiero, Fred Astaire, Ginger Rogers, DH-4, Ford Trimotor, DC-3, transportation, Wilbur Wright, barnstorming, daredevils]

1729 The wide angle lens: looking at earth from on high
[Le Corbusier, Lindbergh, airplanes, Balloons, aerial photography, urban design, fascism, WW-II, Nazis, ecology]

1737 A Reflection airplanes, war, and the Krupp Works
[Big Bertha, Dicke Bertha, artillery, howitzers, aerial warfare, Zeppelins, dirigibles, bombing, war, military, Nuremberg trials, Alfred Krupp, Bertha Krupp, Gustav Krupp]


1738 Maxim's airplane
[Ader, flight, transportation, Wright, invention, Maxim's aeroplane, airplanes, Maxim gun, Hiram Maxim, Hudson Maxim, war]

Food

1063 The democratization of ice cream
[food, sociology, women, dessert]

1080 Food in the old Republic of Texas ("The Republic of Porkdom")
[Houston, Santa Anna, nutrition, health, corn, diet]

1324 C rations: Armies trying to travel on their stomachs
[food, nurishment, nutrition, army, military, mess hall, MRE, field rations, C rations]

Genetics

629 Johann Gregor Mendel: the shy creator of modern genetics
[peas, chromosomes, biology, zoology, Darwin, science]

Geology

1049 Hugh Miller: a fundamentalist radicalizes 19th century geology
[Darwin, evolution, suicide, Bible, Genesis, mental illness]

Geography

1462 Jedidiah Morse, geographer and Samuel F. B. Morse's father
[cartography, mapmaking, Calvinism, religion, geography, Native Americans, Indians, telegraph]

Government Policy

823 The PWA shapes 21st century America -- a different view of government spending
[welfare, socialism, Hoover Dam, Holland Tunnel, music education, architecture, sanatoriums, Chaffey, construction]

980The G.I. Bill draws a whole generation back into the mainstream of American life
[education, government spending, military, handicaps]

Hispanics

963 How General Santa Anna went on from the Alamo to create the American chewing gum industry [frankincense, resin, tension, invention, psychology, serotonins, rubber, chicle, sapodilla, Adams]

History of Technology

49 Some technology that we don't see when we first look
[horn, gears, 3-M, invention]

55 How we name our machines
[flight, airplane, refrigerator, engine, machine, computer, steam engine, automobile]

65 Some summary thoughts after the first 64 episodes
[Einstein, Edison, education]

66 Technologies that put an end to record-setting
[speed, aircraft, microwave, transportation]

149 Thoughts on the extent of technological change in one generation
[generation, tecnological, change, information revolution]

193 A picture of New York Harbor painted in 1852
[artist, Lane, ships, steamboats, transportation, Gold Rush]

198 Dionysius Lardner looks at a rapidly changing world
[handbooks, power, steam, coal, conservation, water power]


202 A look at Edwardian patents: 1901-1902
[perpetual motion, Fleming, radio tube, flight]

203 The Encyclopaedia Britannica from 1768 to now
[dictionary, encyclopedia, Industrial Revolution]

356 The folly of naming the first inventor
[light bulb, Edison, Grove, electricity, steamboat, Fitch, Davy, invention, Swan, de la Rue]

447 Synthetic and real things in 1910 America
[production, Santayana, manufacturing, Chaplin, society, advertising, environment]

454 Arcana of Science and Art: Changing the world in 1832
[Industrial Revolution, vanadium, thermostat, flare, England, America, silk, invention, design, Babbage, Somerville, Blake]

471 Have I really seen technological change in my lifetime?
[technology, icebox, refrigerator, radio]

766 The American farm windmill: hi-tech fruit of 40 years work
[agriculture, power generator, Wheeler, Burnham, Halladay, Perry, Chicago World's Fair]

869 The American Centennial issue of Manufacturer and Builder
[magazines, science and technology, machinery, oleo margarine, Twain, 1876 Philadelphia Exhibition, metric system, Edison, Darwin, Bell, telephone, Scientific American]

1055 Reflections on roller skates, roller blades, and stability
[children, Wright Brothers, flight, bicycles, Rollerblades]

1148 1846: Origin of the Smithsonian Institution in a momentous year
[Adams, Agassiz, science, imperialism, Mexican-American War, California, Heinrich Lienhard, the American West, Rilleaux, Howe, museums]

1175 The collapse of the Elizabethan renaissance
[Raleigh, Hariot, Galileo, Dee, Gilbert, Queen Elizabeth, Donne, Jonson, Shakespeare, science, alchemy, magic]

1178 The Encyclopaedia Britannica before/after the Wright Brothers
[aircraft, airplanes, balloons, aeronautics, flight, aerial navigation, transportation, goals and objectives]

1238 The 1893 Chicago Columbia Exposition: America comes of age
[world's fairs, exhibitions, Olmstead, Hayden, Bates, women]

1264 The economics of the 20th-century technological revolution
[industry, production, money, computer memory, energy, steel, beverages, tobacco, commerce, Web, internet]

1293 Some technology that we don't see when we first look
[horn, gears, 3-M, Post-It notes, invention, paper clips]

1346 The World's Work magazine shows what we were thinking a century ago
[color photography, Theodore Roosevelt, conrad, Oliver Cromwell, 19th century, Mark Twain]

1349 Short-lived, but dramatic technologies
[Pony Express, Clipper Ships, scriptorium, scriptoria, cable cars, cattle drives, space program, rocket ships, technological evolution]

1400 Trying to catch the flavor of the past
[nostalgia, 1930s, transportation, alcoholism, medicine, dentistry]

1414 Viewing America through advertisements in Appleton's magazine, 1869
[education, railroads, books, merchandising, Waltham watches, Lowell, Massachusetts, organs household goods, pianos, music making, John Stuart Mills, Golden Spike, Union Pacific, bonds]

1436 Adding it up in 1910: A book grapples with the coming 20th century
[radio, radium, moving pictures, movies, skyscrapers, flying machines, airplanes, Titanic, Olympia, Lusitania, Mauritania, ocean liners, transportation, alien life, space travel, futurism]

1437 Technologies that put an end to record-setting
[speed, aircraft, microwave power transmission, transportation, Voyager, SHARP, Wright Brothers, Breitling Orbiter 3]

1523 On saying goodbye to lighthouses and cabooses
[obselete, obsolescence, Smeaton, Eddystone Light, Pharos, metaphor, symbolism]

1614 Advice on how live our lives from 1836
[diet, food, health, well-being, sociology, Sylvester Graham, Ticknor, bran, brown bread, Beaumont, tobacco, psychology]

1675 Reflection on what it really means to be the 'first' inventor
[Wright Brothers, Whitehead, Montgomery, airplane, aeroplane, gliders, Leonardo, Cayley, Maxim, Bell, Lilienhtal, Langley, Chanute, Santos Dumont, Kitty Hawk, flight, flying, Army Air Service, Military aircraft, control]

1681 The Literary Digest tells us about science in 1904
[science, Dostoyevsky, William Randolph Hearst, Henry James, racism, Black, Negro, religion, Booker T. Washington, Tuskegee Institute, WW-I, wireless telegraphy, Marconi, Boy Scouts, radio, radiation, Antarctica, X-rays, elecromagnetic fields, quantum physics, Einstein, special relativity]

1724 Looking to nature for our technology in 1906
[Samuel P. Langley, The Wright Brothers, flight, cylinder, energy efficiency, internal combustion engines]

Household and Everyday Technologies

48 The lowly, but not-so-simple, dressmaker's pin
[clothing, Cowper, Smith, robot, mass production, machine]

157 Thomas Crapper: The man who didn't invent the flush toilet
[valve]

726 Little yellow Post-its -- a footnote to invention
[3-M, sales, office, merchandising, invention, Silver, Fry]

769 Paper clips: an adventure in elegance and design simplicity
[Vaaler, Middlebrook, Gem, invention]

864 The door lock: ongoing innovation more than invention
[lock, locks, Yale lock, Medieval lock, metal pin lock]

995 How shopping carts changed us
[retailing, food, business, commerce, invention, Goldman]

1032 Microwave oven: only half a promise fulfilled
[watches, clocks, cooking, food, product acceptance]

1295 The lowly, but not-so-simple, dressmaker's pin
[clothing, Cowper, Smith, robot, mass production, machine]

1476 In which Josephine Cochrane invents the dishwasher
[domestic technology, dishwasher, Fitch, steamboat, Columbian Exposition, women]

1088 Housework: In which work doesn't exactly expand to fill the time
[sociology, health, medicine, domestic science, home makers]

Hygiene

1360 A brief history of bathing ourselves
[bathtubs, showers, public baths, cleanliness, personal hygiene, Sears Roebuck, bubonic plague, domestic]

Industrial Revolution

145 General Electric and the product-driven innovation cycle
[design, manufacturing, Langmuir, electric light bulb]

181 The Industrial Revolution comes to America
[Evans, Crystal Palace, millwright, industry]

245 Delaunay Deslandes misses the Industrial Revolution
[plate glass, manufacturing, France]

384 Samuel Slater reinvents spinning technology in early America
[weaving, textile, cloth, industry, manufacturing, Brown, Quaker, women, patent, invention]

445 The second American Revolution
[Romantic, literature, Blake, Barlow, Wollstoncraft, Priestley, Franklin, Godwin, invention, Brown, Industrial Revolution]

Interchangeable Parts

101 Interchangeable parts
[design, manufacture, Franklin, Gutenberg, Whitney, guns, Ford]

383 Eli Terry brings wooden clocks to the Midwestern frontier
[Lincoln, sales, medieval, marketing]

1252 Forgotten invention of manufacturing with interchangeable parts
[Blanc, Whitney, production, France, America, Jefferson]

Inventors and Scientists

30 Colonial America, 1776: A new nation of glorious amateurs
[Fitch, Barlow, Jefferson, Monticello, Franklin]

56 An encounter with Einstein
[science]

119 J. Willard Gibbs, America's greatest scientist
[science, thermodynamics, Yale, physics]

136 Herbert Hoover: Humanitarian and Engineer
[Stanford, mining, geology]

139 Herbert and Lou Hoover meet Georgius Agricola
[Stanford, mining, geology, metallurgy, Renaissance, women]

141 Benjamin Franklin's experiments in heat transfer
[thermodynamics, light, science, radiation]


144 Lord Kelvin's miscalculation of the age of the earth
[Bible, science, heat transfer, Fourier, Darwin, Heaviside]

185 Justus Liebig and the first research laboratory
[Gay-Lussac, dye, chemistry, Edison, benzene, aniline]

204 Robert A. Millikan, a man who didn't want to be a physicist
[science, Roentgen, Curie, Planck]

205 Cyrus McCormick and the 1876 Centennial Exhibition
[America, machinery, Lincoln, industry, business, invention]


207 George Seldon, Henry Ford, and Clyde Barrow
[automobiles, transportation, Duryea, Gibbs]

209 Joseph Priestley: Ben Franklin's "honest heretic"
[Industrial Revolution, oxygen, Aristotle, Lunar Society, Boulton, Watt, Darwin, Wedgwood, religion]

264 Oliver Evans -- revised version
[transportation, auto, steamboat, oructor amphibolos, vacuum]

276 Charles Proteus Steinmetz -- brilliant engineer and would-be socialist.
[GE, electricity, technocracy]

285 Oliver Evans: an American original
[millwright, manufacturing, steam engines, handbooks]

419 In which we watch Eliphalet Nott build Union College
[education, university, Hamilton, Burr, Princeton]

423 Frederick Terman, Stanford University, and Silicon Valley
[electronics, electricity, innovation, Klystron, San Jose]

451 Roy Chapman Andrews and his fossils in the Gobi Desert
[exploration, archaeology, dinosaurs, China, Komodo]

522 Jan Matzeliger and the first automatic last machine
[shoes, manufacturing, invention, Massachussetts]

523 Edison fails and succeeds in converting low grade ore
[iron, steel, electricity, Ogdensburg, Mesabi, taconite]

524 Einstein as an inventor and patent holder
[physics, Szilard, refrigerator, gyrocompass, Mach, manufacturing, special relativity, electricity]

569 Edwin Link's trainer: organs to airplanes to oceanography
[player pianos, trainer, flight, transportation, music, Wurlitzer, diving, war]

605 Alfred Nobel makes dynamite and wages peace
[blasting gelatin, Kinsky, explosives, war, nitroglycerin, invention, Nobel Prizes, Sweden]

666 Wallace Carothers dies -- giving birth to nylon and neoprene
[rubber, du Pont, organic chemistry, invention]

694 Hiram Maxim: a brilliant inventor plays at war
[machine guns, armament, flight, invention, electric lighting, gas illumination]

695 John Ericsson: 19th century agent of creative change
[Monitor and Merrimac, ironclad, steam engines, hot air engine, topographical mapping, solar energy, tidal energy, Sweden, screw propeller, Civil War, navy]

712 William James and Nathaniel Shaler: one remembered, one forgotten
[Agassiz, Harvard, paleontology, Darwin, Gould, Kentucky, science, psychology, anthropology]

738 King Camp Gillette turns his Occam safety razor on human affairs
[Lewis, Chase, Ford, Roosevelt, Metropolis, sociology, Utopian socialism, invention, Nickerson]

739 Benjamin Rush, idiosyncratic founder of American Psychiatry
[medicine, psychology, Franklin, America, Declaration of Independence]

792 Thomas Jefferson, the generous Colonial American engineer
[Franklin, Monticello, plow, library, Fulton, patent, navy]

793 Thomas Edison's season in the sun at Menlo Park
[electric light, phonograph, telegraph, inventions, dynamo, Pearl Street Station, power]


795 John Ericsson fails three times, and we all profit
[navy, Civil War, Stirling hot air engine, ship design, screw propeller, heat transfer, invention]

835 Peter Cooper: Inventor, eqalitarian, rich man, educator, political figure, and still more
[Hewitt, Fulton, Lincoln, slavery, railway, Thom Thumb, Civil War, Cooper Union, library, education]

953 John Wise delivers the first air mail in 1859 -- after a fashion
[ballooning, aeronautics, transportation, flight, wine, Indiana]

954 Moses Austin, the American lead industry, and Texas
[Stephen F. Austin, metallurgy, shot towers, Missouri]

1056 Louis Agassiz: What is the measure of a Life?
[naturalists, Harvard, biology, ethnography, ethnology, anthropology, evolution, racism, Darwin, Cuvier, Morgan]

1071 A biology teacher gets fresh Turtle Eggs to Louis Agassiz
[turtle eggs, biology, Thoreau, Sharp, Agassiz]

1377 Benjamin Franklin writes about music and electricity
[Baroque singing, text settings, wigs, American science]

1402 Ben Franklin and Le Ray de Chaumont's house in Paris
[American Revolution, French Revolution, Marc Brunel, Caron de Beaumarchais, Erie Canal, electricity, Victor Hugo]

1423 An encounter with Einstein
[science]

1483

In which J. Willard Gibbs pictures gear teeth
[Amistad, Yale, visualization, geometry, mechanics, science]

633 The Gentleman's Magazine: the first magazine
[Cave, Johnson, Franklin, journalism, printing, telegraph, submarine, electricity, Bach, Fulton]

874 H.L. Mencken tells us why TV couldn't replace newspapers
[literature, books, technological change, Gresham's Law]

912

Thomas Nast: a knight in white (if ink-stained) armor
[cartoonist, journalism, Tweed, Tammany Hall, Civil War, art]

1358 William Minor helping us to understand language from an insane asylum
[Murray, Oxford English Dictionary, etymology, linguistics, insanity, criminology, law, criminal, penology, insane asylum, Churchill, quotations]

Light

11 Electric lights in the 80 years before Edison
[arc light, incandescent, Grove, Swan, Davy, de la Rue]

23 The light bulb and the vacuum tube
[Edison effect, Fleming, telegraphy, radio tube]

262 Light, Experience, and the rise of 17th century science
[art, Hals, Pope, Newton, medicine]

1330 Electric lights in the 80 years before Edison
[arc light, incandescent, Grove, Swan, Davy, de la Rue]

Literature

18 How some contemporary poets saw the Industrial Revolution
[Shelley, Blake, Burns, Scott, literature]

41 Frankenstein -- the monster of our obsessiveness
[Shelley, Byron, Lardner, literature, Romantic, Wollstonecraft]

110 Nevil Shute: engineer and author
[literature, airplanes]

129 The mad scientist -- an unshakable image
[Frankenstein, Faust, Marlowe, Shelley, literature]

131 Henry Adams ponders the Virgin and the Dynamo
[science, medieval, Langley, exhibition]

339 Henry David Thoreau: technologist
[literature, lead pencils, invention, transcendentalists]


342 Walt Whitman's "Leaves of Grass": a photograph of America
[literature, camera, poem, poetry]

410 Coleridge, Newton: Romantic poets and Victorian science
[Blake, Rationalism, English, England, literature]

853 Mary Shelley tells how Frankenstein came to her troubled sleep
[literature, Byron, Shelley, Erasmus Darwin, Romantic, women, invention, creativity, horror]

882 In which Samuel Smiles tutors two young capitalist
[Samuel Smiles, Horatio Alger, Samuel Morehouse, Walter Jennings]

1021 In which the real Robinson Crusoe undercuts the myth
[Selkirk, Defoe, literature, Mercantile economics, Chile]

1025 In which Don Quixote says, "Facts are the enemy of truth."
[Cervantes, literature, Man of La Mancha, statistical, Boltzman H-theorem, entropy, Second Law of Thermodynamics]

1030 Walt Whitman, a fake butterfly, and the problem of matching appearance and reality
[literature, Civil War, nurse, nursing, Sotheby, camera]

1036 Quoth the Raven: a surprising story of cooperation
[zoology, ecology, sociology, sociobiology, Poe, poetry, Kropotkin, Darwinism

1077 Of harpoons and coffins: Moby Dick and Black equity in the whaling business
[Melville, whales, fishing, Douglass, Temple, New Bedford, Nantucket, ships]

1090 In which Edgar Allen Poe writes about conchology
[Cuvier, mollusks, shells, snails, paleontology, Gould, biology, literature, Wyatt, Brown, Mizner, Goldsmith]

1143 Shakespeare's long-standing fascination with medicine
[Shakespeare, Hathaway, medicine, doctor]

1206 Harriet Beecher Stowe: "No talent, only genius"
[literature, slavery, Black, writing, Uncle Tom's Cabin, abolition, Lincoln, women]

1331 The Mississippi and Mark Twain's time warp
[Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain, literature, steamboats, riverboats]

1337 Frankenstein -- the monster of our obsessiveness
[Shelley, Byron, Lardner, literature, Romantic, Wollstonecraft, women]

1339 The Good Soldier Svejk, a fine organizational model
[Shelley, Byron, Lardner, literature, Romantic, Wollstonecraft]

1413 How contemporary Romantic poets saw the Industrial Revolution
[Shelley, Blake, Burns, Scott, literature, poetry, Chariots of Fire]

1719 Edgar Allen Poe's amazing cosmology
[Edgar Allen Poe, cosmology, physics, gothic literature, poems, poetry, philosophy, Romantic poets, Laplace, relativity theory, black holes, theology, eschatology, Einstein]

Mathematics

983 John Forbes Nash Jr. shows us that paranoid schizophrenia is a surmountable illness
[psychiatry, Nobel Prize, psychology, game theory, economics, mathematics, von Neuman]

Measurement and Mapping

52 Man the measure -- man the meter
[folklore, units, Watt, temperature, power, length]

257 Charles Preuss maps the American West
[surveying, Fremont, Kit Carson, cartography]


259 Surveying: a no-longer-recognizable technology
[surveying, surveyors]

260 150 years of the metric system of units
[dimensions, measurement]

284 The aerial map: a dream that was a long time in coming
[photography, Daguerreotype, balloons, flight, surveying]

365 The U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey measures America
[geography, instrumentation]

1363 Man the measure -- man the meter
[folklore, units, Watt, heat, temperature, power, length, Protagoras, Fahrenheit]

1728 In which the standard meter stick is a little short
[metric system, English units, meter, length, mass, time, weight, French Revolution, Mechain, Delambre, satronomy, surveying, standards]

Medicine

74 Germs and the Broad Street Well
[Snow, Koch, Lister, cholera, medicine, disease]

160 The first Red Cross Ambulance
[medicine, war, Red Cross, Solferino, Dunant, Barton]

327 Ambroise Pare turns butchery into humane surgery
[medicine]

318 Charles Lindbergh, Alexis Carrel, and the invention of the heart pump
[flight, medicine, artificial organs]

336 William Harvey, the doctor who unraveled blood flow
[heart, medicine, anatomy, Padua]

512 The fever thermometer enters medical practice
[medicine, physiology, science]

601 Norman Heatley and the production of penicillin
[Biochemistry, medicine, Fleming, Florey, Oxford, Moberg, antibiotics, chemistry, pharmaceuticals]

643 Hall Jackson, Colonial doctor
[medicine, eye surgery, war, digitalis, dropsy, purple foxglove, heart disease]

656 Modern medicine begins to take the shaman's herbs seriously
[pharmaceutical, pharmacological, drugs, healing, folk medicine, Brazil rain forests, curare, Pacific Yew, Taxol]

727 James Black, Joseph Black, upset stomachs, and Tagamet
[medicine, Pharmacology, chemistry, invention, histamine, antihistamine, beta-blockers, cimetidine, antacid]

806 Medicine, the youngest science: recalling what's forgotten
[pharmaceuticals, Osler, Banting, insulin, syphilis, Minot, tuberculosis, heart failure, hospital, psychology]

817 Thomas Hodgkin's fight against disease and social injustice
[medicine, pathology, slavery, Canadian Indians, Quakers]

848 Miasma: bad air, night air, fresh air, mosquitoes and disease
[air quality, medicine, Snow, Koch, Pasteur, Lister, Tyndall, malaria, yellow fever, typhoid, cholera, water quality, architecture, porches, James, literature]

929 What Gage lost when a rod was driven through his brain
[neurology, medicine, psychology, imaging, anatomy, Harlow, morality, Domasio]

970 The stethoscope lets 19th century doctors read symptoms -- and keep their distance at the same time
[medicine, medical instruments, Laennec, Hippocrates]

991 The invention of the hospital
[medicine, hospice, Nightingale, Franklin, health care, Cortes]

1013 Oliver Wendell Holmes, puerperal fever, and a wonderful shay
[poetry, literature, medicine, childbirth, Semmelweis, abolition, law, death]

1015 Florey, Fleming, and penicillin: Who really gets the prize?
[medicine, bacteriology, microbiology, pharmaceuticals, Nobel Prize, awards and honors, Pasteur, Chain, Porter]

1131 John Hunter: idiosyncratic medical pioneer
[medicine, syphilis, surgery, anatomy, inflammation, Reynolds, angina, fibroblast, Ehrlich]

1210 In which Louis Pasteur puts medicine on a war footing
[germs, language, metaphor, blood circulation, Harvey]

1341 A view of physiology in 1872 -- not that long ago
[medicine, anatomy, pharmacology]

1490 Germs, John Snow, and the Broad Street Well
[microbes, bacteria, microbiology, immunology, disease, cholera, medicine, Snow, Koch, Lister]

1527 How Clean Water triggered the Great Polio Epidemics
[medicine, massage therapy, epidemiology, Infantile Paralysis, Sister Kenney, Tuskegee Institute, George Washington Carver, polio, poliomyelitis]

1627 A shocking look at medications in 1892 shows us how far we've come
[medicine, medications, herbal cures, first aid, pharmacology, healing, hemp, marijuana, anesthesia, pain, coffee, alcohol, wounds, death, progress]

1628 The first red cross ambulance
[medicine, Solferino, Dunant, Barton, War of 1859, Smithsonian Institution, Spanish-American War]

1635 At the Sign of the Barber Pole: of barbers and barber-surgeons
[barbers, haircuts, haircutting, beards, shaving, Hair, surgery, blood-letting]

1712 Florence Nightingale's graph: Learning what really happened
[Florence Nightingale, nursing, Crimean War, hospitals, health care, medicine, statistics, graphs, graphical displays of information, mortality, disease]

Mesmerism

710 In which Franklin, Lavoisier, and Guillotin debunk Mesmerism
[guillotine, magnetism, electricity, medicine, Mozart, Gould, healing, MRI]

Metallurgy

22 The first American iron production in Saugus, Mass.
[nails, smelting, mill, forge, wrought iron, Colonial]

128 The Liberty Bell
[American Revolution, metallurgy, casting]

635 Furnace Town: An old smelter rises out of the rain
[forced draft, steel, smelting, America, Widener, Nassawango, forced draft, iron, Maryland]

762 William Kelly doesn't quite get the drop on Henry Bessemer
[iron, steel, metallurgy, Kentucky, Drew]

1087 Aluminum: from a precious metal to a cheap structural material
[Hall, metallurgy, electrolysis, Alcoa]

Meteorology

1022 Greely gets the data: a survival story
[Signal Corps, U.S. Weather Bureau, meteorology, Civil War, Albert Myers, U.S. Army, U.S. Navy, arctic]

Music

291 The French horn and the industrial revolution
[music, invention, music, pipe]

692 In which the player piano plays counterpoint to our dreams
[music, pianola, phonograph, Clark]

1188 William Billings, Colonial composer and American original
[musical composition, choral music]

1189 The other Pachelbel brings music to Colonial America
[Bach, keyboards, first American concert on record, slavery]

1291 In which sheet music offers a record of our country
[American Colonies, Bay Psalm Book, Daye Press]

1386 Benjamin Franklin invents the glass armonica -- no mouth organ, this
[musical instruments, invention]

1584 Hugo Distler: Beleaguered pioneer of twentieth century music
[composers, Hindemith, Weimar Republic, Germany, Holocaust, Auschwitz, choral music, organ, conscientious objection, Lubeck conservatory, Hitler, Nazis]

Myths

558 The lost myths and folkways: Bettelheim, Bly, and Revels
[music, psychology, myth, theater]

Native Americans and Amerindians

161 The Indian canoe -- a perfected technology
[design, boat, transportation]

571 The origins of Native North American Agriculture
[farming, anthropology, archaeology, grain, corn, wheat, Indian, Mississipi-Ohio, maize, urbanization]

843 George Catlin: A Gift, a wound, a historical recored
[Native American Indians, Audubon, art, painting, anthropology]

893 A copper plate engraver creates the American Indian
[printing, anthropology, Mercator, Inquisition, De Bry, DeBry, travelogue, engraving]

1086 Aztec obsidian, too good to give up
[Native Americans, Indians, materials science, glass, tools, blades, warfare, hydration dating, anthropology, stone age]

1094 Mesa Verde: Another civilization abandonded at its peak
[Native Americans, Anasazi, Indians, pueblos, anthropology, architecture, cliff houses]

1620 The Indian canoe -- another perfected technology
[design, boat, transportation, Native American, Longfellow, Hiawatha]

Numismatics

163 Numismatics -- coins as a historical record
[anthropology, money]

1689 Numismatics -- coins as a historical record
[anthropology, money, minting, coins, coinage, numismatics, Roman denarius, Henry Dobson, quadriga, penny-pinching]

Obsolescence

89 On saying goodbye to lighthouses and cabooses
[obsolete, obsolescence]

Obstetrics

622 Ignaz Semmelwies: the unhappy hero of birthing mothers
[Hungary, Hungarian, medicine, germs, antiseptic, obstetrics, childbirth, Lister]

Paper-making

1052 In which wasps teach us to make paper from wood
[rag paper, American Revolution, fibers, Schaffer, Reaumur]

1099 Henry Robert: a civil engineer creates order at meetings.
[Robert's Rules of Order, Galveston, parliamentary procedure, sea wall, hurricane of 1900]

Patents and Copyright

418 200 Anniversary of the U.S. Patent and Copyright Office
[famous, law, invention, lawyer, creativity]

565 The first American patent: a process for making potash
[potassium, chemical process, Hopkins, alkalai, Bly]

Phonograph

990 A book on Emile Berliner speaks a language he helped to kill
[gramophone, phonograph, microphone, electric communication, Edison, Bell, telephone, electricity, Hemingway, Fahlberg, saccharine, Victorola, sound transmission]

Photography and Film

124 The camera obscura, waiting for someone to provide the film
[photography, France, lithography, Kepler, Niepce]

212 Niepce, Daguerre, and the first 30 years of photography
[camera obscura, chemistry]

348 The riddle of the camera and reality
[Holmes, Orvell, stereoptican, photography, manufacturing]

529 Panoramas: The IMAXs of 1800
[theater, movies, art, Barker, Fulton, motion pictures, Reynolds, Constable, painting]


536 Edwin Land, polarization, Polaroid, and the Land Camera
[stress analysis, photoelasticity, invention]

676 Alice Liddel and Charles Dodgson in Wonderland
[Alice in Wonderland, photography, mathematics, psychology, literature, fantasy, children, Lewis Carroll]

786 The Stereoscope: virtual reality in 1851
[Baudelaire, Arago, Wheatstone, Brewster, stereopticans, Daguerreotype, Crystal Palace]

826 Muybridge, Marey, and the problem of picturing motion
[motion pictures, medicine, measurement, biomechanics, Stanford, cameras, biomedical, horses]

904 Women take up cameras to photograph within and without
[Niepce, Daguerre, Brigman, Johnston, art, sociology]

1220 In which Levi Hill invents color photography 80 years too soon
[Daguerreotypes, chemistry]

1481 A revealing view of photography's early days
[art, chemistry, Daguerre, camera obscura Stieglitz, Crystal Palace]

Physics

1127 Why Germany didn't make an atomic bomb during WW-II
[Heisenberg, Meitner, Frisch, collision cross section, critical mass, uranium, U-235, nuclear fission, chain reactions, neutron]

1671 Quantum mechanics takes to a place we didn't know was there
[alternate realities, David Deutsch, parallel universes, Hugh Everett, quantum mechanics, light, free will, Christmas, determinism]

1683 The Wrong Formula: About Fermi and memory
[physics, fine structure constant, Schrodinger equation, memory, Nobel Proze, Italy, postage stamp, eyewitness testamony, Enrico Fermi]

Polls

1199 Gallup Poll: spawn of intellect with some saving imperfection
[politics, Truman, Dewey, Roosevelt, Landon, demographics]

Printing

50 Mark Twain and the Paige Compositor
[Linotype, design, machine, Merganthaler, production, printing, function]

787 Stereotype and fine type: William Ged and William Caslon
[Linotype, fonts, Boyer, printing, France, England]

924 Two women: America's first and last Colonial Printers.
[printing, Jefferson, tobacco, American Revolution, Rind, Glover]

1372 Mark Twain and the Paige Compositor
[Twain, Clemens, Merganthaler, Linotype, typesetting, engineering design, printing]

Race and Slavery

429 The mismeasure of man: bigotry hides behind numbers
[race, Black, women, Gould, anthropology, Agassiz, Morton]

560 Humankind: one race -- not a thousand subspecies
[biology, evolution, anthropology, Smith, Layton, cichlids, Black, natural selection, zoology, taxonomy]

1279 Two Newtons, an old mechanics text, and the fight against slavery
[religion, Amazing Grace, Kater, Lardner, religious education, marginalia, clergy]

Radar

42 Our radar warning of the Pearl Harbor attack
[communications, war, Hulsmeyer]

269 Mechanical ears in WW-II
[war, acoustics, sound, radar]

1364 Our radar warning of the Pearl Harbor attack
[communications, war, radio, Hulsmeyer]

Radio and Television

195 Radio Days -- a tribute to early radio
[Wells, radio tubes, Hindenburg, communication, media]

317 Edwin Armstrong, FM radio, and the superheterodyne
[communication, electricity, radio tubes, Sarnoff]

1649 Reginald Fessenden endows radio with sound
[radio, wireless telegraphy, wireless telephony, Tesla Marconi, Edison, AM, FM, Handel, Armstrong, de Forest, Borman]

1695 On wanting to build my own crystal set
[radio, communication, Marconi, electricity, wireless telegraphy]

Railroads

409 The inclined railway on Lookout Mountain at Chattanooga
[Civil War, cable, Lookout Mountain, Tennessee, Indians]

556 Melancholy railroad: icon of American growth and change
[steam locomotives, commerce, transportation, Chicago, meat packing, livestock, Whitman, Sandburg]

655 Matthias Baldwin gives us locomotives, and a better world
[transportation, America, steam power, steamboat, locomotive, Black sufferage, railway, woodblock printing, calico, textiles]

998 Treacherous Mt. Washington and its safe old cog railway
[meteorology, sport, mountain climbing, weather, risk]

1009 The Golden Spike and the end of the American West
[railroads, railways, Donner Party, Heinrich Lienhard]

1208 The first transcontinental railroad -- and no golden spike!
[Panama Canal, civil engineering, mail, malaria, cholera, Grant, California]

1277 Railroads in winter: finding our way through the snow
[Whitman, locomotives, transportation, Jull]

Science Books

1623 The textbooks of J. Dorman and Esther Steele
[education, teaching, discipline, physics, physiology, zoology, Civil War, Joel Dorman Steele, Esther Steele, science, history, textbooks, women]

1718 The Rev. Dionysius Lardner: keeping up with a world in flux
[handbooks, steam power, hydrostatics, pneumatics, railroads, trevithick, technological change, Mary Shelley, locomotives, coal, conservation, water power]

1701 The sewing machine in American life
[theater, theater, memory, memorization, memory palace, psychology, acting, actors, actresses]

Ships

31 The century-long retention of masts and sails on steamships
[Savannah, Great Western, Monitor, Merrimac, transportation]

81 Two unsinkable ships: the Titanic and the Great Eastern
[Brunel, accidents, safety, invention]

156 Robert Fulton's last ship, the Steam Battery catamaran
[navy, war, invention, design, propeller]

199 Ford's star-crossed Eagle boat
[ship, war, design, navy, production, design, construction]

201 The rush to build the Western riverboats
[safety, steamboats, Pittsburgh, transportation]

280 The wreck of the Cairo
[Civil War, ship, steamboat, gunboat, war, anthropology, archaeology]

333 Shipwrecks in the Great Lakes. The Northwest Passage
[Arabia, Sweepstakes, Huron, Superior, Michigan, Erie, Ontario, St. Lawrence]

338 The brief bright day of the Clipper Ship
[transportation, steam, sailing]

421 William Gibbs and the steamship United States -- 30 years too late
[shipping, design, transportation, marine, Queen Mary, flight]

467 The First Steamboat in San Francisco Bay
[Donner, Lienhard, Sacramento, Sitka, California Gold Rush, pioneers]

550 Crossing the Atlantic under steam -- 1819 and 1838
[transportation, steamboat, Brunel, Smith, Lardner, marine, engine, Savannah, Sirius, Great Western]

747 Watching the Titanic sink: a lesson in objective science
[ships, books, scientific method, psychology]

1258 Inventing the steamboat, inventing the riverboat
[Fulton, Shreveport, Evans, transportation, log jams, logjams, Mississippi, steam engines, invention]

1338 The century-long retention of masts and sails on steamships
[Savannah, Great Western, Monitor, Merrimac, transportation]

1344 The Monitor's flush toilet: lessons from emerging technologies
[Civil War, Merrimac, Hampton Rhodes, Ericsson, naval warfare, turrets, Thomas Crapper, engineering design]

1387 The ghost fleet of wooden ships in Mallows Bay
[war, military supply, merchant shipping, merchant marine, WW-I, mass production, assembly line, steamships, ecology, wild life preserves]

1397 John Fitch and America's first successful steamboat
[Fulton, Watt, Rumsey, Newcomen, transportation, steam engines, Philadelphia, Kentucky, Colonial America]

1405 Marc Isambard Brunel and his son, Isambard Kingdom Brunel
[Great Eastern, ships, civil engineering, Thames tunnel, Great Western, materialism]

1473 Two unsinkable ships: the Titanic and the Great Eastern
[Brunel, accidents, safety, shipbuilding, passenger liners, success, failure]

1439 A capital ship on an ocean trip: a reflection on battleships
[war, military, navy, battleships, submarines, aircraft carriers, guns, cannons, fire power, Spanish American War, World War I, World War II]

1525 Liberty ships: an amateur takes over the trade
[transportation, war, WW-II, construction, shipbuilding, merchant marine, cargo vessels, design, Kaiser]

1632 Rediscovering the sunken Union Monitor
[Civil War, Merrimack, navy, gun turret, shipwrecks, Edmund Fitzgerald, Ericsson, Titanic, Bismark, Vasa, SS Central America]

Space

25 NASA's "crawler transporter," the world's largest land transportation vehicle
[space, NASA, tracked vehicle]

47 Moment of inertia and satellite stability
[Landon, Sputnik, Explorer, space, NASA, Bracewell, failure, RCA]

413 Edwin Hubble and the 15 billion light year universe
[telescope, NASA, space shuttle, astronomy, nebulae, relativity, Adams]

515 Science fiction and German rocketry
[von Braun, Goddard, Oberth, Valier, V2 rocket, Lang, Opel]

764 Werner von Braun transcends the heritage of the V-2
[rocketry, Congreve, war, Nazi, Tsiolkovsky, Oberth, Goddard, jet propulsion, moon, spacecraft, military]

948 A 25th anniversary reflection upon the moon landing
[astronomy, space flight, Apollo missions, NASA, Clark, Shelley, Khayyam, Gilbert, Thoreau]

1332 Moment of inertia, secrecy, and satellite stability
[Landon, Sputnik, Explorer, space, NASA, Bracewell, failure, RCA]

1361 NASA's Crawler Transporter: Largest land transport vehicle
[space program, NASA, tracked vehicle, earth movers, space shuttle]

1421 The Rocket Boys, a moving story of adolescence and engineering
[von Braun, rocketry, Sputnik, space program, West Virginia, coal mining]

Sports

1137 America goes to the first modern Olympic Games
[athletics, track and field, Greece]

Statues

1478 A sneak preview of the Statue of Liberty
[sculpture, Eiffel, Bartholdi, structure, monuments, art, Colossus at Rhodes]

Steam Power

1 Oliver Evans and an early American steam powered amphibian
[steamboat, transportation, steam engine, auto, Oructor]

6 Jouffroy: one of the first successful steamboat makers.
[Newcomen, France, d'Auxiron, transportation]

13 Dionysius Lardner and early steam power technology
[handbook, conservation, coal, ecology, pyramids, environment]

14 John Fitch and the first commercially successful steamboat
[Fulton, Watt, Rumsey, Philadelphia, Kentucky]

28 The first American steam engine
[Hornblower, Schuyler, Adams, Colonial America, Franklin]

69 Steam engines in England during the 18th century
[Watt, Savery, Newcomen, power, England]

109 High-pressure steam engines and transportation
[railroad, Watt, Cugnot, Trevithick, power]

678 James Watt, Joseph Black, and the separate condenser
[steam engine, power, energy, design, thermodynamics, latent heat, specific heat, invention, Glasgow]

1084 Jouffroy's steamboat -- 24 years before Fulton
[d'Auxiron, transportation, ships, France, Newcomen engine]

1085 The first American steam engine
[Newcomen, Schuyler, power, Jefferson, Franklin, Adams, Hornblower, copper mining, American Revolution]

1180 Dionysius Lardner looks at early steam power technology
[energy, ecology, environment, pyramids, conservation, coal]

1296 In which Andrew Carnegie contemplates James Watt
[steam engines, iron, steel, social revolution, economics, capitalism, literary style, Arago, McCormick, Hill, Astor]

1440 Steam engines in England during the 18th century
[Watt, Savery, Newcomen, power, England, Trevithick, railroads, railways, canals, transportation, Industrial Revolution]

1572 High-pressure steam engines and transportation
[railroads, Watt, Cugnot, Trevithick, steam engines, power, external condenser, condensation, vacuum]

1674 Fulton's last boat: the steam-powered Battery-Catamaran
[steamboat, demologos, Fulton the First, Fulton1, Fulton's Battery-Catamaran, naval warfare, steamships, Monitor, The Virginia, Merrimack, Merrimac, propellers, paddlewheels, paddle wheels, ASR 21 Pigeon, ASR 22 Ortolan]

1378 The wreck of the S.S. Edmund Fitzgerald; "Only a lake!"
[iron ore, Great Lakes shipping, shipwrecks, Lightfoot, Hiawatha, Gitche Gumee]

Submarine

60 A critique of Bushnell's invention of the submarine
[Turtle, Hopkinson, transportation, war, Colonial America]

237 Early submarines
[Verne, Turtle, transportation, war, ships, Fulton, Bauer]

238 The Momsen Lung, a technology that needn't have been
[safety, navy, submarines, design, Bauer, war]

304 In which Robert Fulton tries to build a submarine
[Turtle, Napoleon, steam, Bushnell]


381 Using submarines in the Civil War
[Bushnell, Fulton, David, Hunley, Housatonic]

638 David Bushnell/Dr. Bush invents the submarine
[naval warfare, Turtle, American Revolution, navy, mines]

1385 How David Bushnell built his submarine for the Colonial Army
[Turtle, The Gentleman's Magazine, Yale University, American Revolution, naval warfare, Hopkinson, innovation]

Subway

83 Alfred Ely Beach's secret subway
[Tammany, Scientific American, New York, Tweed, transportation]

1474 Alfred Ely Beach builds a secret subway in New York City
[transportation, urban rail, BMT line, Tweed, Nast, Brunel, Thames Tunnel, tunneling, graft]

Telegraph

15 Early inventions of the electric telegraph
[Morse, electrostatic, Watson, LeSage]

59 The transatlantic telegraph cable
[Field, Gisborne, Great Eastern, Queen Victoria, Buchanan, communication]

757 Semaphore telegraphy: a grand technology, long forgotten
[Western Union, pony express, war, Hooke, France, England, communications, Morse]

772 Perry Collins and Cyrus Field race to forge a telegraph link
[Atlantic cable, Alaska, Siberia, Russia, communications]

1393 Early inventions of the electric telegraph
[Morse, electrostatic, Watson, LeSage, invention, Cooke, Wheatstone]

1425 Laying the transatlantic telegraph cable
[Field, Gisborne, Great Eastern, Queen Victoria, Buchanan, communication]

Telephone

93 Teaching the American public to use the telephone
[Bell, telegraph, communication]

281 van Rysselberghe's invention of long-distance telephone service
[electricity, communication, Bell, telegraph]

587 Alexander Graham Bell invents after the telephone.
[invention, hydrofoil, kites, Keller, electricity, flight, Buckminster Fuller, geodesic dome, tetrahedron]

748 Inventing the telephone: Putting the user in the equation
[telegraphy, Reis, Bell, Webb, monopoly, regulation, economics, communications, Sandburg]

1098 In which we try to decide who really invented the telephone
[Bell, Bourseul, Reis, Gray, communication, telecommunication]

1177 Thomas Watson, the man on the other end of Bell's telephone
[electricity, communication, geology, theater, Shakespeare, machine shops, manufacturing, goals and objectives]

1487 Teaching the American public to use the telephone
[Bell, telegraph, communication, Hayes, Nauvoo]

1625

Telephone inventor Elisha Gray talks about miracles
[telephone, telegraph, invention, religion, Bell, Reis, Bourseul, Meucci, patent wars, Oberlin College, Western Electric, evolution]

1300 Daniel Fahrenheit invents the thermometer and its scale
[heat, thermometry, Poland]

Textiles and Sewing

159 Lowell, Massachusetts: a "Utopian" industrial city
[textile mills]

167 The sewing machine in American life
[Singer, Willcox-Gibbs, Saint, design]

Thermodyanmics

4 Benjamin Thompson/Count Rumford and the conservation of energy
[heat, American Revolution, Lavoisier, thermodynamics]

1165 Benjamin Thompson/Count Rumford and the conservation of energy
[heat, American Revolution, Lavoisier, thermodynamics, remake of Engines Episode 4.]

Timekeeping

235 Harrison's wonderful watch
[timekeeping, invention, clocks, navigation, Royal Society]

272 The railroads and standard time
[clocks, timekeeping]

Tobacco

1075 Tobacco: Montezuma's real revenge
[agriculture, smoking, nicotine, addiction, Beaumont, Lamb, Wordsworth, disease, Native Americans, sugar, slavery, Indians, Native Americans]

Tools

1497 The rise of Paul Bunyan's radical double-bitted axe
[lumberjacks, forests, forestry, woods, felling trees, Colonial America, Thoreau]

Toys

1563 Looking back at the impact of toys
[children, education, Erector, Tinker Toys, Meccano, streamlining]

Transportation and Canals

36 The Erie Canal
[transportation, Great Lakes, Buffalo, Hudson, Niagara, Jefferson, Gallatin, Clinton]

82 Late 18th century competition among roads, canals and railways
[transportation, power, mines, mining]

244 Cable cars: the right technology in the right place
[transportation, electric trolley, steam engine]

616 19th century engravings tell us about invention and travel
[automobile, car, transportation, flight, railroad, bicycle, engravings, woodcuts, lithography, art, magazines, submarines, ships, airplanes, gunboats, steamers]

1116 Revisiting a 1970 attack on the Interstate Highway System
[civil engineering, Bureau of Public roads, railways, Federal Government, Eisenhower, ecology, environment]

1257 Digging the first Suez Canal, 4000 years ago
[de Lesseps, Darius, Egypt, Africa, Napoleon, Panama Canal]

1420 The Erie Canal
[transportation, Great Lakes, Buffalo, Hudson, Niagara, Jefferson, Gallatin, Clinton]

1509 Late 18th century competition among roads, canals and railways
[transportation, power, mines, mining, locomotive, Trevithick]

Tunnels

51 A short discourse on tunneling
[Whittier, aqueduct, canals, railroads, transportation, Hoosac, Brunel]

197 The Holland Tunnel -- a story you've heard before
[construction, ventilation]

1388 A short history of tunneling
[Whittier, Delaware aqueduct, canals, railroads, transportation, Hoosac tunnel, Marc Brunel, Isambard Kingdom Brunel, Posilipo, Thames Tunnel, transportation]

1698 The Holland Tunnel -- a story you've heard before
[Clifford Holland, ventilation, construction, tunneling, Holland Tunnel, Land link, automobile traffic, heroes]

Typewriter

100 The invention and selling of the typewriter
[communication, Monaco, Remington, business]

719 QWERTY: the mindless invention of your computer keyboard
[typewriter, evolution, Gould, invention]

1532 The invention and selling of the typewriter
[communication, Monaco, Remington, business, typewriter, QWERTY, writing]

Urban History, Design, and Urban Technologies

8 Pittsburgh in 1816
[steamboat, iron, coal, industry, glass]

553 Mulholland waters LA -- and damn the Owens Valley
[Eaton, California, civil engineering, agriculture, ecology, aqueducts, irrigation, construction]

585 The new vision of cities: 1925
[urban sociology, architecture, buildings, construction, modern art]

865 Raising Galveston above the sea
[Texas, urban, flooding, civil engineering, dams, construction, hurricanes, gales, floods]

994 Manhole covers: the secret cousins of coins
[iron, sewers, cities, urban architecture]

1373 Pittsburgh in 1816
[iron smelting, coal, steamboats, America, transportation, manufacturing, air pollution, glass]

War and Weaponry

7 Fokker and the machine gun interrupter mechanism
[flight, war, WW-1, airplane]

35 Does war influence technological evolution? Some surprising facts
[airplane, speed, production, invention]

91 Liberty ships: an amateur takes over the trade
[transportation, war, construction, design, Kaiser]

108 Trench warfare and the technology of war
[Tuchman, guns, automatic weapons, Maginot]

148 Continuous-aim firing: a diagnosis of an ill-received idea
[navy, war, design, invention, guns]

151 Rediscovering the sunken Union Monitor
[Civil War, Merrimack, navy, gun turret, shipwrecks]

210 Maxim's airplane
[Ader, flight, transportation, Wright, invention]

292 The Scapa Flow ship cemetery
[war, navy, shipwrecks, Royal Oak]

298 A prediction about aerial warfare made in 1909
[flight, transportation, Zeppelin, dirigible, guns]

369 Civil War ironclads -- a lot more of them than you thought
[military, ships, steamboats, guns]

436 Why bombs can't kill a city
[war, airplanes, sociology, production, WW-II, Viet Nam]

455 In which Rhode Island rum-runners create the U.S. Navy
[military, ships, frigate, Colonial, America, smuggling, Bligh]

573 The search for the first naval artillery
[cannons, firearms, gunpowder, war, Renaissance]

651 No Furgeson's Rifles to save Furgeson, at King's Mountain
[war, military tactics, American Revolution, South Carolina, guns, invention, Brown Bess muskets]

870 In which Union artillery redefines Confederate fortifications
[war, forts, Sumter, Civil War, armament, cannons, castles]

930 Our national anthem celebrating India's rocketry
[Congreve, armaments, music, Akbar, naval warfare, ordnance]

1004 The not-so-secret Norden bombsight
[WW-II, secrecy, war, bombing, bombers, flight, Sperry, military tactics]

1033 In which Army research on a killer ray creates a prize-winning child's toy
[Meitner, aerodynamics, Shelton, Germany, WW-II, jet aircraft, a-bomb, chemical warfare, poison gas, vortex gun]

1091 Balloon Bombs -- the Japanese secret weapon
[aerial war, atomic bomb, forensic geology, diatoms]

1092 The unrelenting search for Buck Rogers' rocket belt
[science fiction, war, military, jet propulsion, travel, flight, Dickens, airplanes]

1160 The technology of death: We are hard to kill.
[medicine, war, medical ethics, armaments]

1190 The only mustard gas attack in WWII yields new medicine
[armaments, arms, chemical warfare, Hodgkins' disease, cancer, oncology, yperite, WWI]

1219 A chance encounter with a hero: Ploesti remembered
[war, air power, bombing, bombers, B-24, oil production, military tactics and strategy, WW-II, Hitler]

1267 The secret American Navy of the War of 1812
[ship design, military, Constitution, Admiral Nelson, Humphreys, structural design]

1369 Fokker and the machine gun interrupter mechanism
[flight, war, WW-1, airplane, synchronizer mechanism, Eindecker]

1583 Glide Bombs and the unrevealed Rohna disaster
[rocket weaponry, war, military, merchant marine, secrecy, Dochterman, Zuther, Kamikaze, Germany, WW-II, flight]

1607 Continuous-aim firing: a diagnosis of an ill-received idea
[navy, war, design, invention, guns, fire control, Sims, Scott, innovation]

1612 Trying to tell the story of the worst battle
[WW-II, Battle of Stalingrad, warfare, Russia, Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, tank battles, death, killing, Matthew Arnold]

1672 Learning about war by counting our dead
[military, murder, Lewis Fry Richardson, conflicts, war deaths, WW-I, WW-II, design, dynamics, demographics, Quakers, megadeaths]

1731 Why bombs can't kill a city
[war, airplanes, sociology, production, WW-II, Viet Nam, bombing, 9/11]

Water

191 Hoover Dam: "Replenish the earth and subdue it."
[water management, mead, power, hydroelectric]

310 The Fairmount Waterworks in old Philadelphia
[Twain, turbines, hydraulics, pumps, steam, water wheels, Latrobe, Dickens]

361 Water witching, dowsing, and the psychology of finding water
[Carolyn Kraus, water witching, drowsing, dowsers]

473 On making water fit to drink
[civil, environmental, carcinogens, flouride, chlorine, chemistry, Rook, Bellar]

Weather

45 Fahrenheit and thermometry
[heat, science, Newton]

Western Frontier

10 The Medieval character of the Wild West
[America, saddle, whiskey, log cabin, cowboy, White]

170 Technologies of the Texas Republic
[medicine]

248 Ninety years before the Golden Gate Bridge
[Gold Rush, Fremont, Strauss, safety]

251 The timber square set: a mining revolution in Virginia City
[invention, construction, Deidesheimer]

353 James Porteous and the invention of the Fresno Scraper
[California, American West, earth moving, heavy equipment, agriculture, civil engineering]

737 Crossing the Bonneville Salt Flats -- in 1846 and 1970
[Walker, pioneers, Lienhard, Salt Lake, racing cars, Gabelich, Campbell, Breedlove, Thompson, stock car, ecology, environment]

871 The axe, the riverboat, and the American locomotive go West
[steamboat, railroad trains, deforestation, ecology, safety, transportation, wood working]

915 In which power and gold shape California
[Sutter, Lienhard, Marshall, water wheel, Pelton wheel, metallurgy, Watt, Boulton, Boswell]

931 Pioneer Village: a paean to progress in Nebraska
[history museum, Warp, post-modern]

1328 The medieval character of the wild West
[America, saddle, whiskey, log cabin, cowboy, White, distillation, architecture, capital punishment]

1401 Theodore Roosevelt and Frederic Remington defining the West.
[America, cattle ranching, Spanish American War, Henry Adams, cowboys, Rough Riders]

1557

Heinrich Lienhard creates a new world - even as he discovers it
[American west, settlements, pioneers, Mississippi River, axe]

Women

80 On the absence of women in the history of technology
[Cowan, Pursell, Masters, engineering]

102 Lord Byron's daughter, first computer programmer
[Babbage, Ada, analytical engine, literature, women]

221 Caroline Herschel: more than meets the eye
[women, astronomy, mathematics, Uranus, comets, nebulae]

234 Dolly Shepherd -- on parachutes, risk, and technology
[women, balloons, flight, Buffalo Bill, Garnerin, space]

249 Amy Johnson -- an improbable heroine
[Earhart, women, flight, transportation, aircraft]

289 In which we watch women join the new technology of flight
[war, transportation, Wright, Curtiss, Scott, Clark, Quimby, Stinson]

305 Lisa Meitner, the reluctant mother of the atomic bomb
[science, chemistry, physics, radiation, women, war]

306 Mothers of invention: women inventing for women
[liquid paper, Nesmith, Newmar, Lamar, Baker, invention]

326 Sybilla Masters, the first and last Colonial woman inventor
[America, agriculture, fabric, weaving, patents, women]

382 Mary Wollstonecraft: feminism and 18th century revolution
[Frankenstein, women, Paine, Blake, Priestley, Godwin]

428 Marie Mitchell: a pioneer of American astronomy
[Annie Jump Cannon, science, Vassar, Nantucket, women]

435 Hedy Lamarr: The inventor behind the mask of beauty
[women, electronics, control, movies, invention, Antheil]

547 Bertha E. Jaques and an American school of etching
[Chicago, prints, art, invention, women]

599 Florence Merriam Bailey: A pioneering American naturalist
[birds, women, conservationist, ecology, ornithology]

636 Gertrude Stein and the invention of the gear shift
[women, Toklas, transmission, Stevens, syncromesh, Bendix, ambulance]


649 Gertrude Elion, Nobel Prize winning inventor of medicines
[biochemistry, drugs, pharmaceuticals, Hitchings, cancer, chemotherapy, virus, women]

794 In which Ellen Swallow Richards brings women into MIT
[education, home economics, sanitary engineering, chemistry]

803 Helen Keller: love, language, and self-awareness
[socialism, Carnegie, Sullivan, blind, handicap, deaf, Holmes, Whittier, psychology, women, linguistics]

863 Mary Anning's dragon in the cliff changes natural history
[paleontology, geology, fossils, biology, women, Darwin]

867 Hannah Ropes and Louisa May Alcott help invent nursing
[Stanton, Civil War, medicine, hospital, literature, women, anesthesia, Nightingale]

868 In which women Romantic poets alter the game
[Shelley, Lamb, Nairne, Wordsworth, Byron, Coleridge, Blake, Burns, literature, poetry]

872 Julia Morgan: an architect gives California its personality
[women, design, San Francisco earthquake, Hearst, San Simeon]

891 Maria Martin, early American naturalist and Audubon artist
[biology, science, women, Bachman, painting, zoology]

918 Fanny Burney: the conservative voice of 18th C feminism
[Wollstonecraft, literature, revolution, Paine, Wedgwood, Priestley, feminism, medicine, mastectomy, women]

1007 In which Annie Edson, no longer young, rides the the first barrel over Niagara
[daredevils, Houdini, women]

1057 Too bad that Amelia Earhart didn't get to write poetry
[women, flight, transportation, Snook, Lindbergh, Putnam]

968 Belva Lockwood: 1st woman presidential candidate -- and more
[women, law, government, equal rights, Cleveland, Grant, education, suffrage, minority, Black, Indian, Cherokee]

1105 Mary Roberts: The frustration of a 19th century woman scientist
[biology, conchology, mollusks, creationism, religion, Buckley, Gould, women]

1181 In which Edith Humphry doesn't quite receive the Nobel Prize
[Werner, Pasteur, Bernal, chirality, inorganic chemistry, women, polarized light, molecular structure]

1193 Beryl Markham flies out of Africa, and across the Atlantic
[airplanes, aviation, flight, women, Dinesen, literature, Hemingway, writing]

1245 In which Sarah Bagely opens the field of telegraphy to women
[union movement, labor, communications, Morse, Smith, Hamilton watch, Lowell weaving mills, industrialization]

1247 America's first women architects: three very different people
[Irwin, Bethune, Hayden, 1893 Chicago Columbia Exposition]

1251 Katherine Stinson and her siblings help America learn to fly
[flight, Wright Brothers, airplane building, barnstorming, Lillie, air mail, architecture, transportation, WW-I, women]

1253 Hanna Reitsch: a true believer in a cursed cause
[flight, airplanes, war WW-II, Germany, Nazis, Himmler, helicopters, gliders, V-I rockets, ME-163, test pilots, women]

1503 The second generation of women fliers comes to maturity
[Stinson, Batten, Nancy Bird, Earhart, Quimby, Ruth Law, transportation, aviation]

Wood

789 In which an abundance of wood shapes America
[axe, iron, coke, smelting, ship building, interchangeable parts, clocks, railroads, ecology]

X-Rays

654 X-rays promise infinite possibility in 1896
[Roentgen, cathode ray tubes, futurism, invention, science, medicine, radiation therapy, breast cancer]

Xerox

239 Chester Carlson and the XeroX machine
[printing, communication, invention]

923 Elizabeth Fleischmann takes up radiology in the old West
[X-rays, Roentgen, California, military medicine, radiography, war, women]

1494 The strange persistence of X-ray hair removal
[medicine, health, dermatology, Roentgen, sociology, atom bomb, WW-II, Tricho]

This site was updated on 11-Feb-12.