The history of technology, once the province of buffs and collectors, has become academicized to the point where its practitioners may bear as many labels as a steamer trunk: externalist, social constructivist, feminist, Marxist, and so on. The best historians combine many approaches, and two of the most revered workers in the field have demonstrated their talents in new books: Human-Built World: How to Think About Technology and Culture , by Thomas P. Hughes (University of Chicago Press, 203 pages, $22.50), and Pushing the Limits: New Adventures in Engineering, by Henry Petroski (Knopf, 288 pages, $25.00).
The two men’s varying backgrounds—Hughes is a historian who writes about engineering, while Petroski is an engineer who writes about history—show through even in their tables of contents. Hughes groups his chapters together under headings like “Technology and the Second Creation” and “Creating an Ecotechnological Environment,” and his list of illustrations ranges from masterpieces of Renaissance and Romantic painting to photographs of modernist skyscrapers. Petroski’s table of contents has just two sections, “Bridges” plus “And Other Things,” and his illustrations are mostly photographs, renderings, and diagrams of the works under discussion.
Hughes, the longtime guiding spirit of the history of technology at Penn (and now a professor emeritus), covers such themes as artists’ reactions to technology, the relations between natural and human-built environments, and the benefits and perils of constructing ever more complicated systems. His sources range from the “public intellectual” Lewis Mumford to the former House speaker Newt Gingrich and the saxophonist Lester Young. Along the way he discusses Germany’s Bauhaus and Neue Sachlichkeit movements, the scholastics of me- dieval France, and George Gilder’s celebration of the “outsiders, nerds, science wonks, and upwardly mobile young engineers” who are driving the information revolution.
Petroski, a professor of civil engineering and history at Duke, writes a column for American Scientist , from which the chapters in this book have been collected. Most examine a specific project, usually a major structure, such as the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao or China’s Three Gorges Dam. For each one, Petroski examines how it was designed and (if completed) built, what makes it noteworthy, and how it succeeded—or, in cases like the tragic Texas A&M bonfire of 1999, how it failed. Unlike his previous book, Small Things Considered (2003), which was rambling, personal, and thematic, Pushing the Limits contains little overarching analysis. Instead, the chapters stand on their own, each one teaching a lesson about the complicated juggling act of science, aesthetics, politics, sociology, economics, and many other factors that lies behind every major engineering project.
