I enjoyed the recent article in the October issue about the first transcontinental railroad but noted that the final meeting site of the two lines was identified ambiguously. Two places in the article indicated Promontory Summit as the location of the event and three places indicated it was Promontory Point.
Promontory Summit, not Promontory Point, is where the event occurred, despite even some encyclopedias. Promontory Point is actually some 30 miles south, on the edge of the Great Salt Lake.
Congratulations on Stephen E. Ambrose’s excellent article on the construction of the Central and Union Pacific Railroads (“The Big Road,” October 2000). No ax was being ground. He makes the point that all the bonds were repaid, and with interest too. What’s also true is that in making the land grants, the U.S. government reserved the right to have reduced rates applied to all government traffic, both freight and passenger. The vast volume of freight and troop movements handled in both world wars paid many times over the cost of any assistance given to the railroads. While only those railroads receiving land grants were required to offer these reductions, the stiff competition between railroads allowed government auditors to apply the reduced rates whenever the traffic could have been handled over a land-grant railroad. The rates applied from origin to destination even if only a few miles’ journey took place over a land-grant railroad.
I enjoyed the article in the November 2000 issue on the creation of Atanasoff and Berry’s ABC computer (“My Brush With History: Holding the Baby”) but was disappointed in one regard. As a graduate student in the early 1980s, I had an opportunity to hear Atanasoff describe the experience in his own words. The article chides him for not patenting the computer. The truth is that he wanted to do just that. But he was the employee of Iowa State College (now University), and it refused permission, saying the world would need at most two or three of these inventions, not enough to warrant the effort of seeking a patent. Since then—and as a result of this experience—Iowa State has changed its policy and now allows patents on almost anything.
One cannot be too hard on Iowa State, though. After all, had the ABC computer been used only for the purpose it was designed for, the calculation of gunnery tables, the world could probably have gotten by with just two or three of them.
FIRST LIGHT
The books started as soon as the war ended. The U.S. News & World Report staff was perhaps first off the starting block with its insta-book, TRIUMPH WITHOUT VICTORY , a compilation of the magazine’s reporting on the war. James Blackwell, who became something of a fixture on American television during the war, produced THUNDER IN THE DESERT at about the same time, and to the same effect. Bob Woodward’s THE COMMANDERS was not far behind. It could hardly wait until the conflict was over and, in fact, it deals mainly with the decision to go to war. THE COMMANDERS refers not to those who commanded in the field but to the foreign policy elite who directed from afar. Woodward’s worshipful depictions of these officials says less about the conduct of modern American statecraft than about the admiring self-image of the conductors.
Normally the art director at a magazine is involved in appearance more than words. But in this issue, the editors thought it would be fitting for me to add a little something, My father is an art dealer, and he began collecting pop art before I was born, so I basically grew up with it. It was always a part of our house. As long as I can remember, my father would ask me which painting I wanted in my room whenever he rearranged his collection. My two sisters and I typically each had one big painting hanging in our bedrooms.
Back in the mid-1970s, it was my good fortune as a very junior editor on this magazine to be able to help our founder Oliver Jensen prepare a book on a subject that had interested him all his life. The American Heritage History of Railroads in America. Toward the end, like any other book project, it fell behind schedule, and Oliver and I had to put in some late nights. I remember, deep into one of these, standing beside him at the layout table while he tried to decide between two photographs: a big Mikado-class steam locomotive and a first-generation diesel.
Oliver looked up. “There once was a man from Moline … ,” he began, and unfurled a limerick about an inventor who devised a sexual-intercourse machine (it wasn’t called that in the poem), only to find it unsatisfactory.