As new technologies hit us by the hundreds every week, we are so overwhelmed by progress that we forget pioneers of the Industrial Age allowed us to reach our present destination so swiftly.

A hundred years ago, final touches were applied to the world's first underground electrical generating station at Snoqualmie Falls. That is a small community in the foothills of the Cascade Mountains, an hour's drive east of Seattle, Washington. The establishment of this underground station in the 1890s was really pushing the electrical envelope at the time, so much so that it took almost a century before we started to use this terminology. At the time, this was a "world first" for the State of Washington. By any standard, it was an engineering and technological marvel.

Built by Cornell-educated engineer Charles H. Baker, a portion of the water from the river right above Snoqualmie Falls, which is 100 feet (30 metres) higher than Niagara Falls, was diverted into a pipe, eight feet (two metres) in diameter, drilled through solid rock that channeled the steam to turbines located in a stone chamber excavated 280 feet (90 metres) below the brink, adjacent to the falls own plunge pool. The plant was opened in 1898 by Charles Baker's eleven-month-old daughter Dorothy, who was helped to flick the switch to activated the four water-driven turbine motors.

The resulting power in alternating current (AC) generated by the plant provided "much of the electrical power for trolleys, street lamps and business in Seattle and Tacoma" in the early 1900s, according to Greg Watson of the Snoqualmie Valley Historical Museum. Those were the days when electrical transmission was "long distance" if it traveled the 32 miles (50 km) to Seattle. Before that, direct current (DC) was in use and because of its nature had restricted delivery distance. The original turbine water shute still runs today and goes right beneath the popular Salish Lodge & Spa, originally built in 1919 and modernized extensively during recent years.

A second generating plant and additional turbines have been installed. What is astounding is that the whole system still works, with few distractions and failures, over a century late. A fire in 1903 in the wooden elevator housing caused major damage, and there was an earthquake in 1948 that caused a section of the canyon wall to break off and crash harmlessly into the falls plunge pool, Yet the generators continue to function and generate electricity without fanfare and at low cost.

Visitors have been flocking to the falls ever since the Yellowstone Road opened in 1915, and the Salish Lodge opened for business four years later. They should pause at the world's first underground electrical generating station at Snoqualmie Falls and marvel at its efficiency and also at the engineering genius of Charles H. Baker.

Picocell could end such chaos. This British device, the size of a boxed print dictionary, could tidy up your office. With the capability to reroute all transmissions within a range of 600 feet (200 metres), the easy-to-install and nil maintenance Picocell would be a boon to the Communications Age.

Designed by a team led by David Wake at British Telecom's research facility at Martlesham, Suffolk, the prototype has been tested in a local network. Picocell is linked via fibre-optic cables that use radio waves to communicate with phones and radio waves within a prescribed boundary.

The unit requires no additional power. It is symmetrical and capable of simultaneous, two-way traffic. A pulse of light-carrying radio waves is converted through the device into radio waves alone -- which then broadcast the data to computers and phones in the office. The system also works in reverse.

Although sophisticated in its simplicity, Picocell can expand bandwidth instead of requiring costly replacement cables when something new is added or when a system is changed or upgraded. The need to re-cable is one of the downsides of the new communications technology. Picocell bypasses that roadblock on the communications superhighway. No longer will cybernauts need to face gridlock at "spaghetti junction.

British Telecom hopes to license the technology and expects volume production to limit retail cost to about US $70.

For nearly two decades, I have been maintaining that anything anyone can imagine, someone someday will accomplish. This principle applies to national defense. Today the real war does not take place on the traditional battlefield. It is being fought in cyberspace. Just as European generals found that what worked in World War I did not necessarily work in World War II, cybernauts must adapt to circumstances and environments dramatically different from anything in the past.

Money is not the prime attraction for computer hackers. They have a contempt for antiquated thinking of the Industrial Age. They seek the respect of their peers. They have a personal confidence that their probes can eventually penetrate any defense created by those using traditional procedures. They also resent unaware governments that continue to buy such vulnerable protection.

All this gives the code crackers immense satisfaction, and it indirectly brings economic benefit from industrial corporations happy to settle for "a six-month security zone" that really works for any new product or service. Growing numbers of these developers, who are usually young entrepreneurs, are advising clients to look to the short term. "This protection is only good until Dec.31," they say. What they say is modeled on the expiry date on a milk carton: "Best before...."

One instance of defense or security protection is a beauty. In January 1997, RSA Data Security, feeling secure behind an encrypted message made with a 56-bit key Data Encryption Standard (DES) code, like the one used by many U.S. government departments, credit card companies and banks, made an offer of a $10,000 prize. They would turn over this amount to the person or company that first cracked their defense system and thereby provided the text hidden in a sentence defended by their 72 quadrillion (10 to the 15th power) code. They reasoned that it would take years of work to penetrate this code, the numbers were so astronomically high. Their claim, posted on the Internet, attracted the interest of one Rocke Verser, who with glee and gusto accepted the challenge.

A decade and a half ago, I reasoned that the scrambled satellite code used with communications broadcast satellites, a hand-over from the U.S. military at the time, would be unscrambled within three months. I was wrong. I overestimated the time. Dedicated amateurs provided it free to the world within one month.

In Ottawa in 1994, I made the suggestion, before a meeting of the Canadian Computer Security Establishment, that there was little long-term security in anything. I mentioned that I had once written about the billions spent by the U.S. Air Force America on their Stealth bomber, said to be "invisible" to sophisticated detection apparati, which quickly became observable through the use of an old war-surplus weather satellite dish. The antiquated dish did not detect the plane itself, but it did observe the plane's direction, speed, and altitude from the turbulence (contrails) coming off the plane's engines and wingtips (a horizontal tornado). That was all that was required to aim a missile a few kilometres ahead of the turbulence and then wait a few seconds until the plane flew into the missile. Somewhere in the Pentagon, experts quickly agreed that the Stealth could be detected, but nevertheless they recommended that the Pentagon continue to build and fly them, sending taxpayer dollars down the drain.

Rocke Verser, a dedicated amateur, gathered together a crew of Net surfers with attitude. They brought zeal, time, and skill that were necessary to assist their new webmeister. Soon the operators of 14,000 independent computers (these are numbers one could only put together quickly via the World Wide Web) around the world started testing the code at the rate of seven billion keystrokes per second. It took but 17 quadrillion strokes to find the "hit." The decryption read, "Strong encryption makes the world a safer place."

Ha! Game over. "Where's the money?"

Verser admits he did it all to show the inherent weakness of government encryption policies. He said at the time, "DES can no longer be considered secure against a determined adversary." He also pointed out that since this defense could be dismantled so quickly by spare computer power, it would not be safe again anyone dedicated to decryption.

In World War I, the vaunted French Maginot Line had all its heavy artillery pointed towards Germany, which every French general "knew" was the direction from which the German soldiers would emerge. As every German general also knew, walking into such a rain of firepower was not healthy for their troops. They bypassed the front of the line, penetrated around the sides, and strolled -- well, maybe not strolled -- through the only lightly defended rear doors. Encryption hides behind Maginot Lines.

My admiration goes to journalist Mark Ward, who broke the exciting story of Verser vs. Data Encyryption Standard in Britain's New Scientist June 28,1997. There will always be code-makers and there will always be code-breakers. Remember that the latter are on the heels of the former.