If you look, you’ll see numerous echoes of the Golden Age of Invention’s great world’s fairs in the first several projects in this book. Consider Squire Whipple’s iron truss bridges described in Chapter 3. To a civil engineer, the simple trusses in the original 1840-era Whipple bridges are the close cousins of the artistic steel lattices used in the Eiffel Tower, which was built as the entrance to the 1889 Paris Expo (Exposition Universelle de 1889) grounds.

At the 1939 New York World’s Fair, RCA showed the world its latest and greatest technology by inviting the public into its huge exhibition hall. The hall, from a bird’s-eye view, looked like a giant vacuum tube—the world-changing invention of Lee de Forest, a scientist we’ll meet in Chapter 4.

Our first project is based on perhaps the biggest idea to come out of the 1889 Paris Expo. The diesel engine made quite a splash when it was first shown to the public there, and it has remained important ever since. When you deconstruct the workings of the modern diesel engine, what will you find at its core? A simple device called a fire piston. In fact, our fire piston project is a smaller, simpler version of Rudolf Diesel’s internal combustion engine.

Over the centuries, people have devised many ways to kindle fire when and where they need it. Fire drills, burning lenses, and flint and steel are all dependable, if time-consuming, methods of fire starting. One of the quickest and most elegant methods is the fire piston or fire syringe.