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In his previous books, Henry Petroski has
initiated us into the hidden mysteries of such everyday
artifacts as the lead pencil, the paper clip, the zipper,
and the Post-it note. Now, with Engineers of Dreams,
he makes a jump in scale to contemplate those "dry
paths" across the rivers and inlets of our cities,
those "hard crossings" over the gulches and ravines
of our countrysides, those eminently practical but inescapably
aesthetic edifices that persist in taking our breath away
(when we're not taking them for granted): bridges.
The great era of American bridge building
-- which from the 1870s through the 1930s gave us such landmarks
as the Eads Bridge across the Mississippi, the Hell Gate
Bridge across the East River, the George Washington Bridge
across the Hudson, and the Golden Gate Bridge at the mouth
of San Francisco Bay -- called for a special breed of engineer:
equal parts dreamer, inventor, and entrepreneur. Since the
building of any bridge is necessarily a collaborative effort,
engineers of dissimilar philosophies and all-too-similar
egos were thrown together on project after project, making
for an ongoing, interwoven human and technological drama.
Every bridge tells a story: of exploding flasks of brandy,
of would-be suicides, of avid ferry and tunnel interests,
of cunning politicians and meddlesome municipal art commissions,
of steel and concrete and cables and paint and blood and
sweat and tears. Some people love bridges, and others are
afraid to cross them -- Petroski understands both camps
(after all, roughly one out of five extant bridges is structurally
deficient), but asks us simply to imagine our landscape
and our lives without them.
Of the engineers themselves, Othmar Ammann,
designer of the George Washington and Verrazano-Narrows
bridges, confessed: "We may lack glamor and sparkle.
We might even be considered dull by many people, but I don't
believe it." Nor will Petroski's readers. On the contrary,
they will promptly recognize these master builders for the
altruistic heroes of technology and culture that they have
so often managed to be.
Henry Petroski's previous books include
To Engineer Is Human, which was developed into a
BBC television documentary; The Pencil; and The
Evolution of Useful Things. He is the Aleksandar S. Vesic
Professor of Civil Engineering and chairman of the Department
of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Duke University.
Among his honors are the Civil Engineering History and Heritage
Award of the American Society of Civil Engineers and distinguished-alumnus
awards from Manhattan College and the University of Illinois.
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