Power, Speed, and Form

[bekah]

  Rebecca Solnit's  River Of Shadows  at Amazon:
http://tinyurl.com/ymobvf

bekah


At 9:13 PM -0500 11/26/06, Robert Mahnke wrote:
>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
>
>
>
>____________________________________________________________________________
>________
>We have the perfect Group for you. Check out the handy changes to Yahoo!
>Groups
>(http://groups.yahoo.com)
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://waste.org/pipermail/pynchon-l/attachments/20061126/2be5c31c/attachment.html>