Power, Speed, and Form

[rich]

i read that book

my short muse back in a few yrs ago here:

Hi all--

reading a strange mess of a book--River of Shadows by
Rebecca *Solnit*.

musings on human perception and the annihilation of
time and space by technology, particularly railroads
and photography are memorable (think of those
cannonball studies). think much of what *Solnit* says
reverberates with some of Pynchons' musings about
technology, California, and the like. It's a nice
cultural review of the America that enmerged in the
late 19th century.

Rich



On 11/26/06, bekah <bekah0176 at sbcglobal.net> wrote:
>
>   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=U
> TF8&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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