Power, Speed, and Form: Engineers and the Making of the Twentieth Century (review)

The editors of Technology and Culture, in a routine memo to reviewers, ask that, if possible, the book under consideration be placed "in the context of relevant scholarship." This seems a perfectly appropriate guideline. Except what is one to do, as in the present case, when the book at hand appears to be totally unique?

For starters, Power, Speed, and Form is physically an extraordinary volume: a coffee-table book if you will, square (but not oversized), and chock full of the most extraordinary photos. The illustrations are not artistic as ordinarily defined, being mostly black-and-white archival portraits. But they are wondrous in that, rather than viewing the icons of American technology as we are used to seeing them—elderly, somber, and bewhiskered—we find an array of young, dynamic, bright-eyed creator-heroes. There they are: Edison, Tesla, Steinmetz, Bell, Marconi, De Forest, Ammann, Ford, Chrysler, the Wright brothers, and all the others, looking at us proudly as if posing for a college yearbook, or perhaps as young men of promise in People magazine. (Only George Westinghouse is shown in a traditional portentous image, perhaps because there was no lively, youthful picture readily available.)

In addition to the people, there are also stirring photos of objects and places—the Corliss steam engine, a Baldwin locomotive, the Menlo Park laboratory, the Wright glider, an early Pennsylvania oil well, the Tacoma Narrows Bridge as it collapses. And finally, as if to underscore the importance of the visible image, photos from the authors' family album—the senior author and his brother at the 1939 New York World's Fair, his grandmother driving an early automobile, his uncles as boys with a primal radio set. More than eighty illustrations in all, most of them eye-catching and worthy of study. The senior author, a professor at Princeton, is famed for his lectures using slides to help bring technology to life for nontechnical students and to help engineers recognize the connections between their work and the general culture. Now, in partnership with his son, a historian, he has skillfully brought this technique to the printed page.

Yet this is not a picture book. It is a serious history of the development of American technology in the period between the year 1876, "the high point of the reciprocating steam engine and the beginning of its decline" (p. 6), and 1939, when the Futurama ride at the New York Word's Fair was both a vision of the future and a portrayal of "a technology and a society already in existence" (p. 3). "Our goal," write the authors, "is to explain to a non-technical audience, and to engineers themselves, the ideas behind historic innovations that are still essential to modern life" (p. xvi). The scope of the book is best defined by the ten chapter headings: "The World's Fairs of 1876 and 1939," "Edison, Westinghouse, and Electric Power," "Bell and the Telephone," "Burton, Houdry, and the Refining of Oil," "Ford, Sloan, and the Automobile," "The Wright Brothers and the Airplane," "Radio: From Hertz to Armstrong," "Ammann and the George Washington Bridge," "Eastwood, Tedesko, and Reinforced Concrete," and "Streamlining: Chrysler and Douglas." Nothing surprising about this list—except for the refining of oil, which is less often celebrated than the other achievements and so, to me, of particular interest—and little to be said about the narrative other than it is very well done. Also, there are some insightful observations about the nature of engineering and how it differs from science.

But what is unique, and what, along with the illustrations, makes this book something of a treasure, is the inclusion of more than forty sidebars, each a full-page explication in words, numerical formulas, and splendidly clear diagrams, of the historic innovations discussed in the text. These are apparently the topics covered in the senior author's course...