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  • Essays on the History of Mechanics: In Memory of Clifford Ambrose Truesdell and Edoardo Benvenuto
  • Tom F. Peters (bio)
Essays on the History of Mechanics: In Memory of Clifford Ambrose Truesdell and Edoardo Benvenuto. Edited by Antonio Becchi et al.Basel and Boston: Birkhäuser Verlag, 2003. Pp. 256. $59.95.

This is the third volume in the series titled Between Mechanics and Architecture. I have not yet read the second, but this one is more focused than the first and, for the most part, far better rendered in English. The collected essays form a tribute to the two founders of the field concerned with the history of mechanics, Clifford Truesdell and Edoardo Benvenuto, but there is much of general interest as well.

Several of the essays consider how creators think. Louis Bucciarelli discusses scientific error and the historiography of error, raising the issue to a philosophical plane: Can error, under certain conditions, be understood as alternative truth? How does one avoid portraying error as caricature? Distanced as we are, can we even comprehend error, and what is its value historically speaking? Other essays suggest partial answers: Santiago Huerta discusses Rafael Guastavino's erroneous ideas on "cohesive" structure and Sandro Caparrini writes on vector theory, treating what others might consider error as developmental stages in thinking. Caparrini considers the different historic uses of definitions to illustrate changes in conceptual thinking and ways in which this influences the establishment of chronology. Giulio Maltese pursues Leonhard Euler's thought processes and examines the development of Newtonian mechanics into the system we know today, while Piero Villaggio shows how a novel viewpoint in the historical development of impact theory can create a whole field.

Other articles highlight the complex relationship between the abstract analysis that is science and the practical synthesis that is technology. Huerta [End Page 875]raises an interesting point when he traces our understanding of the evolution of the timbrel vault. All historical methods for calculating timbrel vaults provide workable solutions and useful guidelines for design, although all are in part incorrect and do not adequately describe their behavior. In his study of wind on Gothic rose windows, Jacques Heyman demonstrates how builders developed ways to accommodate the influence of deformation on structural behavior. David Speiser's methodological question is less successful: What can the historian of science learn from the historian of the fine arts? He discusses chronology and issue-driven analysis and adds cultural context, although he could have done so without bringing in art history, with its different priorities and modes of thought, or confusing scientific and technological modes of thought.

Heyman sketches a lively and clear historical overview of the science of mechanics, explaining the field in a way that the nonspecialist can understand. Although he draws an illuminating distinction between the goals of the mathematician, the physicist, and the engineer, it must be said that his description of their sociological pecking order applies only to British culture. Gleb Michailov presents a thorough bibliographic discussion, one in which the historian of civil engineering will encounter familiar names such as Isaac Todhunter, Karl Pearson, István Szabó, Stephen Timoshenko, T. M. Charlton, and Darwin Stapleton, and concludes by evaluating the writings of Truesdell and Benvenuto. Finally, Karl-Eugen Kurrer unfolds a history of the European development of the deformation method from its beginnings in 1862 up to the appearance of finite element analysis in the 1970s (excluding, however, the specifically American developments that began with Hardy Cross's so-called moment distribution method), and Patricia Radelet-de Grave traces the use of a particular form of the parallelogram of forces in baroque vault construction.

There is usable material and food for thought in this volume, which goes beyond the internalist-contextualist dilemma in technological history. So one wonders: Can it be used to expand our areas of preoccupation?

Tom F. Peters

Dr. Peters is director of the Building and Architecural Technology Institute and professor of architecture and history at Lehigh University.

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