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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A good start,
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This review is from: A History of Mechanical Engineering (Paperback)
This book was written in Great Britain in 1961 so the last 50 years of mechanical engineering are not covered. It is divided into nine chapters:
I. Prehistory before 3000BC II. Egyptian empires 3000-600BC III. Greco-Roman 600BC-400AD IV. The Dark Ages and Renaissance 400-1500 V. Towards the Industrial Revolution 1500-1750 VI. The Industrial Revolution 1750-1850 VII. The Age of Steam 1850-1900 VIII. Mechanical Road and Air Transport 1900-1940 IX. Dawn of the Nuclear Age and Space Travel 1940-1960 Each of these chapters, which are by no means equal in length or coverage, is subdivided into topical areas like Materials, Tools, Machines, Fluid Machines, Heat Engines, and a Review. There are 291 black and white line illustrations which are well integrated in the text with simple and clear explanations of functionality. There are ususally twenty to thirty cited notes per chapter and each chapter has a list of up to a few dozen works as a bibliography. At less than 400 pages of text, this book is not encyclopedic but more a set of structured essays on each time frame. I have a number of the texts cited such as Timoshenko's History of the Strength of Materials but I can think of nothing like the Burstall book in terms of scope. That being said there is a lot not in this work. There only passing mention of Chinese mechanical technology up to 1500AD which was not likely much inferior to technology anywhere else. The chapters on the Industrial Revolution and The Age of Steam focus very heavily on Great Britain and the United States due apparently to Burstalls unfamiliarity of works outside the English language. There is little discussion of Arab/Islamic influence on the growth of knowledge in Europe and what effect that did or did not have on technology. But this is more a descriptive than an analytical work anyway. In the later chapters there is some discussion of how engineers designed things but very little consideration of that in the earlier chapters. Clearly that information was easier to find from more recent times. There are some areas where Burstalls views seem dated or quaint as when he views the Soviet model as potentially leading to a stronger development of technology than the capitalist path. On the other hand, although the chapter covering 400 to 1500 (in Europe) is titled The Dark Ages and the Renaissance, the actual text makes clear the more incremental nature of the the changes in mechanical technology that recent scholarship would tend to support. It is interesting to see the perspective of 1950s in the approach that sees the generation of power shifing from wind and water to the wholesale consumption of hydrocarbons as the inevitable path of technological progress. On final note is to say that I started college on my path to an engineering degree in 1964 and the sense of what constituted mechanical engineering in this book is very much what I encountered in my education. If I had known about this book then and read it, I would have found it intensely interesting. All in all, a good book to read and own and apparently still available at a quite low price.
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