January 2011

Overrated

Rudolph Valentino, Julie Andrews, Ulysses S. Grant, and Franklin D. Roosevelt enjoy the ascent in Edward Sorel’s drawing, while Susan B. Anthony, Eugene O’Neill, Johnny Carson, Ralph Nader, and Robert E. Lee plunge downward. But this particular ride never ends, and, for the seventh year in a row, our critics follow the eternal flux of reputation.

A century ago the New York Times put up a new building in midtown Manhattan (its cheerful terra cotta has long been debauched by a rebarbative gray cladding), and when the subway station there opened on October 27, 1904, the publisher, Adolph S. Ochs, exercised enough clout to get the stop named after his paper. So Longacre Square became Times Square, and within a generation it was known around the globe, its intersection with Forty-second Street the most famous of all crossroads. A wonderfully beguiling and spirited birthday salute, Times Square Style: Graphics From the Great White Way , by Vicki Gold Levi and Steven Heller (Princeton Architectural Press, $20.00), teems with the sorts of images Times Square and its enterprises have used to sell themselves: matchbooks, postcards, menus, chinaware, posters, song sheets, all of them together conjuring a place- at once familiar and exotic—of lobster palaces and showgirls, skyscrapers rising from warrens of bars and trinket shops and penny arcades, and, of course, lights, lights, lights.

Spend some time online, and you’ll find Web pages with plenty of data, both technical and historical, posted by Accutron enthusiasts. Some sites also offer service and merchandise. Start at Dashto Horological ( www.dashto.com ), where clicking on the word Links on the home page will take you to a list of other Accutron-related sites.

On October 25, 1960, Bulova unveiled a battery-powered watch called the Accutron. It wasn’t the industry’s first electronic model, but it was a breakthrough product.

A Bulova technical whiz named Max Hetzel had begun developing the Accutron in Switzerland in 1952 and later relocated the project !V to the company’s U.S. headquarters. Hetzel’s watch employed a new device known as the transistor and had at its heart an electromagnetic tuning fork that vibrated 360 times per second. It hummed rather than ticked.

Accutrons were exact to within a minute a month; Bulova guaranteed that precision, astounding for its time, in writing. The company’s chairman, Gen. Omar Bradley, a man who knew the importance of timing, may have had something to do with NASA’s decision to use Accutron mechanisms for several purposes. (Nevertheless, the space agency chose the Omega Speedmaster, a mechanical chronograph, for its astronauts to wear.)

In our water-cooler discussions here at American Heritage, when we get tired of dissecting Longstreet’s tactical errors at Seven Pines and debating whether George Templeton Strong or Philip Hone was the superior diarist, the conversation often turns to picking the least-known President. Some, like Garfield and Fillmore, are disqualified by being famous for their obscurity (both have cartoon characters named after them). Others, like Hayes and Andrew Johnson, achieved modest notoriety as bit players in grand historical dramas. Strong cases can be made for Tyler and Arthur, both understudies who failed to capitalize on their chances at stardom. But if the choice is restricted to elected Presidents, the winner has to be Franklin Pierce.

“If the truth were known about the origin of ‘jazz,’ it would never be mentioned in polite society,” wrote Clay Smith in Etude magazine in September 1924. A trombonist who had toured Western mining towns in the 1890s, playing in honky-tonks where “the vulgar word Jazz was in general currency,” Mr. Smith knew what he was writing about.