Masterworks of Technology: The Story of Creative Engineering, Architecture, and Design (review)

One of the most popular literary forms of the Middle Ages was the bestiary, in which an author compiled descriptions of remarkable birds and animals and praised God for the ingenuity so evident in his creatures. In Masterworks of Technology, Elmer Eugene Lewis has undertaken to "capture the essence of engineering" (p. 10). Capturing essences can be a difficult task, and an indirect approach often works better than a logical progression. Appropriately, Lewis has composed a kind of bestiary of engineering and technology, ranging from Egyptian pyramids to the greatest achievements of the space age. The form is well-suited to his task. Masterworks takes the reader on a rambling, informal tour that is part history lesson, part explanation, and part apologia for engineering and technology of all times and places.

Lewis, a professor of mechanical engineering at Northwestern University, has more than a casual acquaintance with the relevant historical literature. There is something in this book for nearly everybody, from engineering's roots in the craftsmanship of a wheelwright's wagon to Chartres Cathedral as an example of empirical stress-analysis and design to the connection between the discovery of perspective in the Renaissance and the importance of visual communication in engineering. The book's eight-page bibliography allows the interested reader to explore various historical themes in greater depth.

In its optimistic view of technology, Masterworks invites comparison to books by the civil engineer Samuel Florman, whose Existential Pleasures of Engineering has achieved near-canonical status as an intellectual defense of modern technology. Lewis lacks Florman's philosophical sophistication. Here and there, Lewis acknowledges that technology, despite its benefits, has also led to evils such as environmental damage and labor exploitation. But instead of engaging the arguments of technology's opponents, as Florman sometimes does, Lewis simply asserts that engineers are aware of these problems and are continually trying to make things better. For example, a discussion of William Blake's "dark Satanic mills" peters out with an anecdote about Lewis's summer job in a Chicago injection-molding factory. The effect is to imply that satanic mills are a thing of the distant past, notwithstanding industrial tragedies such as Bhopal in 1984.

Lewis has visited, observed, handled, or built many of the remarkable technologies and artifacts he writes about, and the first-person passages in which he shares his own experiences form some of the liveliest parts of his narrative. The text is well illustrated with photographs and drawings, many of which will be familiar to readers of Technology and Culture, but which nevertheless make Lewis's points. The book is well designed and well edited, although slightly flawed by a small number of typographical errors (e.g., "Lord Raleigh" for "Rayleigh" on p. 130). I found the figure credits distracting, and wished they had been separated from the figures and collected together in an appendix, rather than appearing in each individual caption.

Although not a work of aesthetics in the conventional sense (Lewis exhausts his fund of adjectives on the visual beauties of Chartres in about a page), Masterworks displays the towers, wings, hulls, and wheels of mankind's making not primarily to convey an understanding of their functions but with the hope of exciting the reader's admiration. While Lewis admits some of the most well-known liabilities and problems related to technology, he refuses to dwell on them. Instead, he has collected many of technology's most admirable creations in one book in order to praise them. And while he appears to hold a rather dim view of the religious and mystical roots out of which the modern age came, he has unwittingly helped his readers to obey the instructions in Paul's letter to the Philippians: "whatsoever things are of good report; if there be any virtue, and if there be any praise, think on these things."