Engineers of Dreams: Great Bridge Builders and the Spanning of America

by Henry Petroski

Overview

Petroski reveals the science and engineering--not to mention the politics, egotism, and sheer magic--behind America's great bridges, particularly those constructed during the great bridge-building era starting in the 1870s and continuing through the 1930s. It is the story of the men and women who built the St. Louis, the George Washington, and the Golden Gate bridges, drawing not only on their mastery of numbers but on their gifts for persuasion and self-promotion. It is an account of triumphs and ignominious disasters (including the Tacoma Narrows Bridge, which literally twisted itself apart in a high wind). And throughout this grandly engaging book, Petroski lets us see how bridges became the "symbols and souls" of our civilization, as well as testaments to their builders' vision, ingenuity, and perseverance.



"Seamlessly linked...With astonishing scope and generosity of view, Mr. Petroski places the tradition of American bridge-building in perspective."--New York Times Book Review

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780307773135
Publisher:	Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date:	12/15/2010
Sold by:	Random House
Format:	eBook
Pages:	496
File size:	14 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

Henry Petroski is the Aleksandar S. Vesic Professor of Civil Engineering and a professor of history at Duke University, where he also serves as chairman of the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering. The author of more than 15 books, he has received grants from the National Science Foundation and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Humanities Center.

Interviews

Exclusive Author Essay
Writing About Things

For as long as I can remember, I have been fascinated by things large and small. I wanted to know what made my watch tick, my radio play, and my house stand. I wanted to know who invented the bottle cap and who designed the bridge. I guess from early on I wanted to be an engineer.

In Paperboy I have written about my teenage years, during which I delivered newspapers when I wasn't taking apart one of my mother's kitchen appliances. The newspaper itself is a thing of wonder for me, and I recall in some detail how we delivered it in the 1950s, folding it into a tight package and flipping it from a bicycle. My bike, a Schwinn, consumed a lot of my time and attention as a teenager, and it is a kind of character in my memoir. My family, friends, and teachers naturally also appear, but it is the attention to things as well as people that ties Paperboy to my other books.

Like a lot of writers, I write books to try to understand better how the world and the things in it work. My first book, To Engineer Is Human, was prompted by nonengineer friends asking me why so many technological accidents and failures were occurring. If engineers knew what they were doing, why did bridges and buildings fall down? It was a question that I had often asked myself, and I had no easy answer. Since the question was a nontechnical one, I wrote my book in nontechnical language. I am pleased that engineers and nonengineers find the book readable and helpful in making sense of the world of things and the people who make things.

There is a lot more to the world of things than just their breaking and failing, of course, and that prompted me to write another book for the general reader. The Pencil is about how a very familiar and seemingly simple object is really something that combines complex technology with a rather interesting history. The story of the pencil as an object has so many social and cultural connections with the world that it makes a perfect vehicle for conveying the general nature of design, engineering, manufacturing, and technology.

Pencils, like everything else, have changed over time, and I explored that idea further in The Evolution of Useful Things. This book is about invention and inventors and how and why they continue to make new things out of old. In it, I describe inventors and engineers as critics of technology, fault-finders who can't leave things alone. Their quest for perfection leads to very useful new things, such as paper clips, zippers, Post-t® notes, and a host of other inventions whose stories I tell in the book.

As an engineer, I am also interested in large things, and bridges are some of the largest things made. Engineers of Dreams is about the bridging of America, telling the stories of some of our greatest spans, including the George Washington, Golden Gate, Eads, and Mackinac bridges. It also tells the story of the engineers who designed and built these monumental structures, emphasizing that their personalities and the political and technical climate have a great deal to do with what bridges look like and how they work.

Engineers do more than build bridges, and I have told the stories of many of their other achievements in Remaking the World. Among the great projects described in this book are the original ferris wheel, Hoover Dam, the Panama Canal, the Channel Tunnel, and the Petronas Towers, now the tallest buildings in the world. The stories of these world-class things are true adventures in engineering, and it does not take a degree in engineering to appreciate them or understand their making and their working.

As much as I like large and unique structures, I have continued to return to more commonplace ones in my writing. The Book on the Bookshelf had is origins one evening while I was reading in my study. As I looked up from my chair, I saw not the books on my bookshelves but the shelves themselves, and I wondered about the first bookshelves. My search for an answer led me to the discovery that our practice of storing books vertically on horizontal shelves with the spines facing outward was not at all the way it was originally done. In fact, our seemingly natural way of placing books on shelves had to be invented over the course of many centuries. Writing The Book on the Bookshelf reinforced my belief that there is a fascinating story behind even the simplest and most familiar of objects.

As long as there are things to wonder about, there are stories to be written about them. That makes me happy, because writing about things seems to be my thing. (Henry Petroski)

Editorial Reviews

Focusing on five engineers and their creations, Petroski looks at the great bridge-building era that spanned from the 1870s to the 1930s. (Nov.)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Petroski, a civil engineering professor and author of The Pencil (LJ 3/1/90) and The Evolution of Useful Things (LJ 12/92), is one of the better scientist-writers around, and this book is in several ways his best. By focusing on a half-dozen bridge engineers who did epochal work, he manages to capture something of what it is about bridge building that inspires passion and dedication from the engineers who design, build, and study them. Wisely, the Brooklyn Bridge is not a focus here, having been covered well by David McCullough (The Great Bridge, S. & S., 1983); instead, we learn about the Hell Gate, the George Washington, the Eads in St. Louis, and, subtitle notwithstanding, the Firth of Forth and a few Canadian spans as well. We also learn about the men (exclusively) who dreamed them and made them real. One quibble: most of the engineering is elegantly explained, but once per chapter, some term shows up that-maddening-eludes every resource in a well-stocked library. Excellent for general collections and perfect for collections in the applied arts and sciences.-Mark L. Shelton, Worcester, Mass.

Library Journal

The era of record-breaking bridge" building, from the Civil War to the Depression, attracts Petroski to another of his delightful dilations about technology. Just as people seldom pause to ponder the paper clip, one of the artifacts whose story occupied "The Evolution of Useful Things" (1992), crossing a famous bridge arrests our thoughts, if at all, only to the extent of grousing about heavy traffic at the tollbooth. Alas, the soaring structures deserve better attention, so Petroski brings forth the people who realized bridges, from the Golden Gate to the Hell Gate. Each major U.S. bridge, he observes, was pushed forward by a mastermind engineer for whom drafting skill was the minimum requirement: he had to secure financial and political support, in which writing and speaking talent counted as much as calculating. (Gustav Lindenthal, builder of the Hell Gate Bridge, extolled his projects as symbols of advancing civilization.) A fascinating raconteur of ambitions and structural successes and failures, Petroski elevates these vaulting bridges into the epics and icons their builders intended.

Gilbert Taylor