Power Speed and Form: Engineers in the Making of the Twentieth Century

"This is what I would call a typical engineering book. It describes eight breakthrough innovations from the end of the 19th century to the beginning of the 20th century. Those eight innovations are the telephone, electricity, oil refining, the automobile, the airplane, radio, long span bridges and, finally, reinforced concrete. Those were the eight most important inventions in engineering that enabled the world as we know it today. It addresses technical underpinnings of how we live today, explaining each of these innovations, how they came about and why they happened. It also gives good technical, mathematical explanations, and shows how the models were built for these eight engineering innovations. Between designing something and building it, you have a very important intermediate stage: modelling. Before you build a design, you have to make sure it really works. You do that with an experimental model. So, you build a model, and either put some loads on the model or try to use it as it will be used later in reality. Over the past 40 or 50 years, more and more of this kind of modelling has been done through computer simulations. This book describes how 100 years ago they didn’t have computers, but they used mainly theoretical models to show that a particular design really would work. It’s all very nicely explained in easy terms—anybody can understand it. He sees them as a combination of both things. Necessity is a very good motivation for inventing something new, or something better. But this book also puts an emphasis on the profit motive, on the economic incentives that drove these inventions, the idea that we make things not necessarily because it is needed right now, but because it could make our lives more efficient and deliver economic benefits. Thomas Edison famously said “Anything that won’t sell, I don’t want to invent.”"