Not long ago, I received a very angry letter from an old friend. It was a response to my suggestion that liberal arts colleges might give students some instruction in technology; that is, give them some feeling for how the world they are living in works. My friend’s argument was that, from the Love Canal to Three Mile Island, and from the grid locks of Manhattan to the boeuf bourguignon on the plastic airline trays, the technological world was not working very well and never would. To explain its necessary malfunctions to the young would do no more than contaminate the view of things put forward in the Platonic Dialogues, Restoration comedies, and whatever other subjects undergraduates were studying these days. The fact was, so the argument ran, that while technological advance increased the Gross National Product and created a glut of creature comforts, it worked inevitably against decency and our saving graces. The thing to do was to stay as far away from it as possible.
Trusted Writing on History, Travel, and American Culture Since 1949
SEARCH 75 YEARS OF ESSAYS!
January 2011
It is quite fitting,” wrote a Philadelphia journalist in 1804, “that the name ‘Rafinesque’ rhymes with ‘picturesque’ and ‘grotesque,’ because so the little man is.” The subject was a struggling 21-year-old scientist named Constantine Samuel Rafinesque, who actually was a rather attractive fellow when he was neatly groomed and at ease and in a good humor, but that was not often.
The history of telephone communications in the United States is also, in large measure, the history of an extraordinary business organization. On January 8, 1982, that organization announced that, within two years, it would tear itself apart, and on January 1, 1984, it made good on its promise.
Before its dismemberment, the American Telephone and Telegraph Company, also known as “Ma Bell,” had been by many standards the largest company on earth. In the range of its influence, in assets, and in its impact on the daily lives of ordinary people, it dwarfed not only other companies but also nations. More than half a billion conversations sped daily over its equipment. On it depended the flow of messages that smoothed the lives of husbands and wives, parents and children, businesses and customers, lovers, friends, strangers—anyone here who wanted to talk with anyone there, or vice versa.
A few months ago, the issue you hold in hand was only paper, blank as much of the surface of the ancient copper globe on the opposite page that shows barely a trace of the still unexplored North American continent. How did the editors of this magazine discover the contents of this issue? Or did the contents discover them? Here’s how the blanks were filled in:
“When we were first planning our new business column,” writes senior editor Barbara Klaw, “Peter Baida submitted a list of subjects that might evolve into columns. One of them was on the dismantling of AT&T. At lunch with Baida to discuss his ideas, we asked him not to use the AT&T item in a column but to write a full-length article on the history of the company instead. AT&T was on everyone’s mind as we all plowed through ten-page telephone bills and tried to figure out to whom we were to give our long-distance business. When Baida’s piece came in, it was so informative we decided to make it our cover.”
The Bell Telephone Laboratories was organized in 1925 as the direct successor of the Western Electric Research Laboratories, formed by Theodore Vail in 1907 when he consolidated the company’s previously fragmented research and development activities. It operates on a grand scale. Shortly before divestiture, it employed twenty-five thousand people who worked at twenty different locations. From the start, scientists employed by the Labs have come up with patentable ideas at a rate of approximately one per working day. Seven of them have won Nobel Prizes. Much of their work has involved technologies that support telecommunications. Without developments such as coaxial-cable transmission, microwave radio relay, and electronic switching, the telephone system as we know it today would not exist. In addition to their work in telecommunications, Bell scientists have played a key role in the development of technologies with significant applications in other fields. Their contributions to radio, sound motion pictures, and television have been touched on in the accompanying article. Here are some other highlights:
War is hell—and so is the coverage of war. General William Westmoreland and former Israeli Defense Minister Ariel Sharon, claiming injury as a result of press reports, retaliated with batteries of lawyers armed with videotapes, classified documents, and loaded depositions. Have the risks of soldiering taken on new dimensions in the last half of the twentieth century? Are the reporters, the editors, the publishers, the producers of recent decades so antagonistic that they provoke unprecedented courtroom battles? How else can a military man combat his detractors? Is a libel lawsuit the best way to counter-attack?
Military leaders have been coming under fire from the press for some time. General Westmoreland is not the first to find his estimates of enemy troop strength challenged by journalists, and General Sharon is not the first to be accused of allowing a slaughter.
Milford Haven is the name of both a town and a natural harbor set in the rolling hills of southern Wales some 250 miles west of London. Once famous for its trawling fleet, it is now a major terminal for supertankers bringing crude oil from the Persian Gulf.
Many Americans visit the area to see the mighty Norman castle at nearby Pembroke, the mellow cathedral at St. David’s, and, most of all, the splendor of the rocky coast. But hardly any of those same Americans are aware that in the streets of Milford Haven they are stepping on a chapter of their own history. For the town was actually built and settled by a group of original Yankees who crossed from the New World nearly two centuries ago in search of a fresh life in the old. Today only a few relics in the town’s museum, the names of quiet roads, and a huddle of weathered tombstones in a tangled burial ground testify to this forgotten epic.
Milford Haven is the name of both a town and a natural harbor set in the rolling hills of southern Wales some 250 miles west of London. Once famous for its trawling fleet, it is now a major terminal for supertankers bringing crude oil from the Persian Gulf. Many Americans visit the area to see the mighty Norman castle at nearby Pembroke, the mellow cathedral at St. David’s, and, most of all, the splendor of the rocky coast. But hardly any of those same Americans are aware that in the streets of Milford Haven they are stepping on a chapter of their own history. For the town was actually built and settled by a group of original Yankees who crossed from the New World nearly two centuries ago in search of a fresh life in the old. Today only a few relics in the town’s museum, the names of quiet roads, and a huddle of weathered tombstones in a tangled burial ground testify to this forgotten epic.
For the “mysterious aura” of his art, a critic has compared him to Thomas Eakins. In the “haunting grandeur” of his sculpture, he is the equal of Auguste Rodin. Both historian and idealist, an artist whose work encompasses realism and allegory, Augustus Saint-Gaudens satisfied popular taste while managing to grow steadily as an artist. An American pioneer in moving sculpture from single to multiple figures and from carved stone to cast bronze, he completed more than two hundred commissions over a 30-year working life. They range from decorations for a Vanderbilt mantelpiece and billiard-room panels to fountains, tombs, and the thirteen-foot nude Diana atop New York’s Madison Square Garden, which the historian John A. Kouwenhoven considers “probably the best-loved statue ever erected in the city.” They could be as small as the $20 gold piece—acknowledged to be the most beautiful American coin—and as large as the sculptured plaques for a 60-foot-high pink granite pyramid on Sherman Summit, Wyoming, honoring Oliver and Oakes Ames.