Power, Speed, and Form

[Robert Mahnke]

Anyone interested in the book discussed below might take a look at Rebecca
Solnit's River Of Shadows, something of a biography of Edweard Muybridge,
someone who could claim to be the inventor of motion photography.  I say
"something of" because Solnit uses Muybridge's life to tie together various
threads.  Some of her other books can ramble to excess, but not this one,
and she's a very interesting writer -- she's on the short list of people
whose next book I'll buy, whatever it is.  Among other things, Solnit talks
about the transformation that resulted from the railroad, which changed the
way people perceived speed, distance and time.

Perhaps the Amazon page gets at all this better than I can:

http://www.amazon.com/River-Shadows-Eadweard-Muybridge-Technological/dp/0142
004103/sr=8-3/qid=1164593435/ref=pd_bbs_sr_3/102-5134796-3577745?ie=UTF8&s=b
ooks

I haven't started reading AtD yet, but I wouldn't be surprised if there's
some cross-fertilization there as well.

Solnit is seen as an intellectual rock star by the San Francisco Chronicle,
but I'm not sure anyone else knows she exists.

-----Original Message-----
From: owner-pynchon-l at waste.org [mailto:owner-pynchon-l at waste.org] On Behalf
Of Dave Monroe
Sent: Saturday, November 04, 2006 1:09 PM
To: pynchon-l at waste.org
Subject: Power, Speed, and Form

Billington, David P. and David P. Billington Jr.
   Power, Speed, and Form: Engineers and the Making
   of the Twentieth Century.  Princeton, NJ:
   Princeton UP, 2006.

Power, Speed, and Form is the first accessible account
of the engineering behind eight breakthrough
innovations that transformed American life from 1876
to 1939--the telephone, electric power, oil refining,
the automobile, the airplane, radio, the long-span
steel bridge, and building with reinforced concrete.
Beginning with Thomas Edison's system to generate and
distribute electric power, the authors explain the
Bell telephone, the oil refining processes of William
Burton and Eugene Houdry, Henry Ford's Model T car and
the response by General Motors, the Wright brothers'
airplane, radio innovations from Marconi to Armstrong,
Othmar Ammann's George Washington Bridge, the
reinforced concrete structures of John Eastwood and
Anton Tedesko, and in the 1930s, the Chrysler Airflow
car and the Douglas DC-3 airplane.

These innovations used simple numerical ideas, which
the Billingtons integrate with short narrative
accounts of each breakthrough--a unique and effective
way to introduce engineering and how engineers think.
The book shows how the best engineering exemplifies
efficiency, economy and, where possible, elegance.
With Power, Speed, and Form, educators, first-year
engineering students, liberal arts students, and
general readers now have, for the first time in one
volume, an accessible and readable history of
engineering achievements that were vital to America's
development and that are still the foundations of
modern life.

http://press.princeton.edu/titles/8261.html


 
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