Amazon.com: The Engines of Our Ingenuity: An Engineer Looks at Technology and Culture: John H. Lienhard IV: Books

Amazon.com
Technology is not just a byword to refer to the sum of designs and applications that enable us to do things like open cans--or make cans in the first place. It is, writes engineer John Lienhard in this imaginative survey, an instrument by which we become more human, a means of interacting with and learning from the world. Technology mirrors humans, and humans mirror technology, and the question that remains is "whether we are to be lifted up or dragged down in the process."

Although he is quick to acknowledge the harmful applications of technology over the years, especially in producing ever more novel and efficient ways of killing each other, Lienhard is inclined to point toward the beneficial uses of machines and tools and the innate beauty of a thing well made. (Not for nothing, he notes, did Henry David Thoreau proudly carry a calling card that identified him as a civil engineer.) As he ranges throughout history, Lienhard offers wonderful case studies of well-intentioned attempts to make the best uses of technology--Christopher Wren's construction of St. Paul's Cathedral in London, the colonial American oddball John Fitch's invention of the first paddlewheel steamer, Mark Twain's financing of a revolutionary and doomed typesetting machine--and to change the world in the bargain. Lienhard's pages are populated with characters who have been largely forgotten in the standard history books, but whose work added greatly to the quality of life of succeeding generations. His book deserves a place on the shelf alongside Kenneth Clark's Civilization and Jacob Bronowski's Ascent of Man as a spirited celebration of the practical imagination. --Gregory McNamee

From Publishers Weekly
Based on episodes from Lienhard's widely broadcast public radio series, this intriguing set of essays begins with a simple premise: more than we often care to admit, our lives are shaped by our machines. Fleshing out this proposition, Lienhard ransacks 2,000 years of scientific and technological history, cobbling together a quirky biography of the strange being he calls homo technologicus. From Galileo's inspired tinkerings to a thumbnail history of the DC-3, this book plunges into the annals of mechanical culture and turns up a technophile's delight of canny observations. For example, an obscure German clergyman suggested that the Americas be named for the Italian navigator Amerigo Vespucci, and one of Napoleon's resident archeologists turned up the Rosetta Stone during a military stalemate in Egypt. A fascinating history of St. Paul's Cathedral in London reveals that architect Christopher Wren sneaked the magnificent dome into his plans after a stodgy commission insisted on an ungainly spire instead. Then there's J. Willard Gibbs, the man Lienhard calls "the greatest American scientist who has ever lived," who made forays into vector analysis and statistical mechanics that paved the way for Einstein and Fermi. Though Lienhard groups his material conceptually (one chapter reviews major landmarks in the history of inventions, another examines war and technology), his freewheeling associations can make one's head spin. Still, approached as an almanac of serendipitous discoveries, this work remains a fitting introduction to the human obsession with invention. (June)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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The Engines of Our Ingenuity: An Engineer Looks at Technology and Culture (Hardcover)

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