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Spring/Summer 1990


Volume 6, Issue 1

FEATURES

Polypropylene was invented by many people in many places almost simultaneously.

Eliphalet Nott saw the future and tried to gamble his way there

A short, distortionfree history of high fidelity
The transatlantic ocean liner reached its ultimate refinement in the United States —when the age of international sea travel was already ending
How a twenty-five-mile stretch of California farmland evolved —in the course of a century—to become the heart of America’s electronics industry

How do you make perfectly round lead balls for shooting? With a truly simple technology that has hardly changed for centuries.

An invention must be all three to get a patent, and even then it may have trouble. The story of two hundred years of U.S. patent law and its impossible but necessary task of defining what is an invention.

DEPARTMENTS

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