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

This is an enjoyable book. Historians of technology will find it especially appealing, but this book deserves—and will no doubt find—a wide audience. The Billingtons, a father-son team of engineer and historian, have written an engaging and comprehensible account of modern engineering. They examine eight technologies fundamental to the modern world: electric power, the telephone, oil refining, the automobile, the airplane, radio, bridges, and streamlining.

In the tradition of Walter Vincenti, Eugene Ferguson, and Brooke Hindle, the authors argue that engineering is best understood as an intellectual endeavor: "We believe that modern engineering is better introduced as a narrative of great works, like the history of art . . . Too often engineers neglect the humanistic impact of their work, just as critics of technology too often dismiss its humanistic potential. Our book is part of an effort to connect the two cultures" (xviii-xix).

In writing this intellectual history, the authors seek to accomplish three related tasks. First, this book lays out a framework to describe modern engineering consisting of "four basic kinds of works: structures, machines, networks, and processes" (p. 8), an analysis that Billington, Sr. began in his book The Innovators. Structures are objects like bridges that work statically. Machines work by moving or by having moving parts. Networks, like the telephone or power grids, are systems that operate by transmission, in which something put in at one end emerges at the other with little loss or distortion. Finally, processes like oil refining operate by transformation, in which an input is changed into something different at the output. Many engineering works incorporate two or more of these basic categories.

The authors also stress that engineering is different from applied science, and they offer a straightforward and perhaps overly simplistic distinction: "Science is discovery, the study of what already exists in nature. Engineering is design, the creation of objects that do not occur naturally" (xvi-xvii). Some technologies, like radio, have directly originated from scientific discoveries. In many other cases, like the relationship between powered flight and fluid dynamics, theoretical understanding has followed only in the wake of technological breakthroughs. As the examples of bridge-building and streamlining show, engineers almost always incorporate economic, aesthetic, and social considerations into their designs. Engineering thus involves tradeoffs: "The consequences of technological choice are never a matter of inherent or technical necessity, and the idea that an optimal solution exists to every technical problem is a fundamental misunderstanding of modern engineering" (p. 101).

Finally, the Billingtons argue that great engineering works are based on "surprisingly simple formulas or concepts," and they conclude that "simplicity, not complexity, is the characteristic of original engineering thought" (xvii-xviii). Thus, they claim that great engineering ideas can—and should—be made comprehensible to readers without knowledge of calculus or physics.

Using these three related ideas, the authors excel at rendering engineering concepts intelligible to a nontechnical audience. They not only show how these systems work, but more importantly, they explain the engineering assumptions and nontechnical considerations built into them. Their discussion of electric power, for example, gives perhaps the clearest explanation of how Edison incorporated both scientific concepts and financial calculations into his lighting and power system. They conclude that "Edison achieved his breakthrough because he thought as an electrical engineer, not as an applied scientist" (p. 34).

Readers will enjoy this book as both an intellectual history of engineering and a clear explanation of key innovations spanning the fields of electrical, civil, mechanical, and chemical engineering. However, historians interested in the business, economic, social, or cultural histories of technology will find the book less useful.