Constructing a Bridge: An Exploration of Engineering Culture, Design, and Research in Nineteenth-Century France and America by Eda Kranakis (review)

232 LETTERS IN CANADA 1996 Montreal Public Library (19°1-17), when Quebec remained 'outside the continental trend known as the IJpublic Library Movement." , Claire England's engrossing history of fires in Canadian libraries, though appalling in its chronicle of waste, is not totally disheartening, as when Bishop Strachan extracted regrets and the return of two boxes of books from an American naval commander whose men had pillaged the legislative library of Upper Canada in 1813, or when more than one library rose from its ashes as a superior being - the polygon Gothic parliamentary library in Ottawa, the University of Toronto's 'first building designed as a separatelibrary.' Other 'Diverse Perspectives1 are BertrurnH. MacDonald's case study of the Library of the Natural History Society of Montreal (1827-1925), Maxine K. Rochester's analysis of the Carnegie Corporation's successful (though tainted, some thought, by cultural imperialism) effort to bring libraries to rural Canada in the 19305, and an account by Charles R. Acland and William J. Buxton of the neglected 1941 survey of research collections in Canadian libraries made by New York Public Librarian Charles F. McComb for the Rockefeller Foundation. The politics of library philanthropy are nowhere more powerfully manifest than in the history of JOM Ross Robertson's gift of 'the foremost collection of visual Canadiana' to the Toronto Public Library (1885-1929)1 recotmted here by Darrel R. Reid, and Faith Wallis's description of the impact of W.W. Francis's intense personal attachment to his cousin, Sir William Osler, on his stewardship of the Osler Library of the History of Medicine at McGill. Helmut Kallmann's pioneering, multi-faceted contribution to music librarianship in Canada is contextualized in a moving personal biography by Dawn L. Keer. If any article in this volume needs no defence on the grounds of relevance , surely it is Basil Stuart-Stubbs's tale of the librarian's ambivalent love affair with the computer. Elucidating the early 1945-65 period, StuartStubbs leaves no doubt that history will show librarians to have been determined, even visionary in harnessing the new teclmologies that would change the face of their profession. (LINDA CORMAN) Eda Kranakis. Constructing a Bridge: An Exploration ofEngineering Culture, Design, and Research in Nineteenth-CentunJ France and America MIT Press. xii, 454. us $45.00 . The great merit of tills book is to provide a comparative history of engineering to illustrate general themes in the history and sociology of technology. The sodal construction oftechnology is currently a popular banner for many historians and sociologists of technology, although it is sometimes not quite clear what this means. Kranakis has given a carefully documented, concreteexampleof the socialshaping oftechnology that puts HUMANITIES 233 life into the often exiguous historical accounts of theorists attempting to support some abstract model. It should also satisfy those who see history as primarily narrative. The book has a nicely binomial division. Kranakis's first section, further divided into two, deals with case stuclies of the construction of suspension bridges in the United States and France, specifically with the efforts of James Finley (1762-1828) and Claude-Louis-Marie-Henri Navier (178518 )6). Here we get detailed case studies of the intellectual and socioeconomic background of two pioneering bridge builders, their education, and the institutional context of their work, as well as an examination of the bridges they designed. Although almost contemporaries, the two designed very different kinds of bridges, and .although they borrowed ideas from other countries, they were selective in different ways in what and how they borrowed. Kranakis's treatment gives breadth, detail, and development to Tocqueville's luminous but general idea that therewas a democratic and an aristocratic style of science and technology for America and France respectively . Although she goes into as much detail ofbridge design as necessary to give the reader a comfortable grasp of the technical issues involved, no more than high school mathematics is required to understand the book. In the second part of her book, the focus broadens from individuals to considerfirst the French and then the American tedmological communities as a whole. Rather than focusing on bridge builders and civil engineers alonel she examines the mechanical engineering community, again...