Masterworks of Technology: The story of creative engineering, architecture, and design by E. E. Lewis, Prometheus, 拢28, ISBN 1591022436 Reviewed by Barry Fox
THE Barcelona tour guide showing us a huge new stadium told how the roof had been built on the ground and then jacked into position. Then he explained how the cathedral designed more than a century ago by Gaudi is being finished. Without the architect, who died in 1926, the builders are relying on the aid of computer-aided design (CAD) tools.
Throughout it all, two businessmen were talking to each other about 鈥渕arket price points鈥� and 鈥渃orporate perspective鈥�, seldom even glancing at Barcelona鈥檚 sights. Travel was clearly not broadening their minds.
Advertisement
So it was a real pleasure to read how E. E. Lewis鈥檚 travel experiences aroused his curiosity into just how the ancient Egyptians built the pyramids, 19th-century Wisconsin wheelwrights made the wagons roll and French stonemasons crafted Chartres cathedral. The Egyptians learned the safe angle of slope by iterative design: in other words, trial, error and the big pile of rubble left by a too-steep angle. Masons learned from the collapse of Beauvais cathedral that stone has almost infinite strength in compression, but virtually none when stretched.
Lewis then tackles the practical engineering behind Roman baths, water wheels, windmills, ship sails, steam engines, gunpowder, ballistics and early flight. Brunel proved the superiority of a propeller over a paddle wheel with a practical marine tug of war. The army found out the hard way that scaling up a model can make it break under its own weight. The theory to explain why came later.
By the beginning of the last century science and engineering were entwined. But CAD can help only if the programmer has relevant data to build into the software model. The Hancock skyscraper in Chicago was based on an earlier 19-storey tubular steel and glass building, which had relied on stiffness tests conducted by getting nine volunteers to sit on a 7-metre rotating disc.
Coming up to date, there is a good description of how the Boeing 777 was proved safe, for instance by shooting dead geese into the engine air intakes. As I make tea while my PC crawls through yet another reboot, I am comforted by the assurance that the fly-by-wire plane has nine computers when one would do. The last chapter is an excellent recap of the US space programme and moon landing, by way of defining the modern catch phrase 鈥渞ocket science鈥�.
My only regret is that the book does not touch on Gaudi. One for volume two, perhaps?