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Technology and Culture 45.2 (2004) 426-428



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Wilhelm von Traitteur: Ein badischer Baumeister als Neuerer in der russischen Architektur, 1814-1832. By Sergej G. Federov. Berlin: Wilhelm Ernst and Sohn, 2000. Pp. 342. €85/48.80.

Those who read no Russian, and I among them, have hitherto caught only tantalizing glimpses of a foreign world of invention. We know that the Swiss Leonhard Euler and his successor Nikolaus Fuchs developed seminal mathematical and mechanical theories at the Academy of Sciences in Russia, and, beginning with the work of Stephen Timoshenko in 1953, we know that innovative work was being pursued in engineering as well. Now Sergej Fedorov has examined the period when French, German, English, and Spanish engineers and Swiss and Italian architects immigrated to Russia under Alexander I and created an academic engineering culture in Moscow and, especially, St. Petersburg at the new Institute of Engineers of Ways of Communication.

This wholesale importation and transformation of a foreign technological culture parallels what was occurring in North America at the time, but [End Page 426] it took a very different form. Unplanned and individual immigration by young engineers and technologists to America, coupled with an unbridled indigenous drive to innovate, aided the creation of industrial technology there. Fedorov's study of the work of Wilhelm von Traitteur and his circle describes a carefully planned development based on family ties between the ruling Romanovs and several German principalities. Some of the principal actors came to work in Russia—Pierre-Dominique Bazaine, Augustin de Betancourt, Benoît-Paul-Emile Clapeyron, Gabriel Lamé, William Hastie, Harald Adam, Traitteur—and some remained in their own countries, including Marc Brunel, Carl Friedrich von Wiebeking, and Guillaume-Henri Dufour. Fedorov discusses the role that these mostly French-trained theoreticians and practitioners played in the creation of Russian engineering and their support by Duke Alexander of Württemberg, a close relative of the Czar and head of the Department of Roads. He also touches on the contribution of British industrialists, in particular Charles Baird, to the rise of the iron and fabricating industries.

Far from being peripheral to European development, Russian work was very much part of the mainstream in the early nineteenth century. Betancourt and Traitteur's wooden bridges and the record-span timber roof of 1817 over the Moscow riding hall were notable, as were Traitteur's five elegant iron-chain suspension bridges in St. Petersburg (1824-26). Betancourt published an influential description of the roof in France in 1819, which was translated into German in 1842. Wiebeking's discussion of the bridges appeared in French in 1832 and was translated into Italian two years later. Baird's work was reported to the Institution of Civil Engineers in London by his nephew in 1824. Claperon and Lamé later contributed substantially to the development of engineering theory in France, and Betancourt and Bazaine to construction practice.

Fedorov's study lifts the curtain on this bustling activity. His book is pioneering in several ways. It discusses the genesis of civil engineering in Russia as an international and border-crossing endeavor, examines the architectural, design-oriented side of civil engineering, links its development to the family and nascent national politics of rulers in post-Napoleonic Europe, and demonstrates it to be mainstream and innovative. Much more work remains to be done here, but this is an impressive start. There are weaknesses, however: Federov's art-historical thoughts about buildings and structures are less convincing than his discussion of the technical material, for which he is better qualified. His lasting contribution in this excellently illustrated book is the intimate knowledge he imparts of the political organization and day-to-day workings of early civil engineering in Russia.

The career of the book's protagonist was an unusual one. Rejected by the Department of Public Works in Karlsruhe as incompetent after several years of study and practice in France and Switzerland, Traitteur was recommended by the Dowager Margravine of Baden and hired by her son-in-law, [End Page 427...

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