Constructing a Bridge: Exploration of Engineering Culture, Design and Research in Nineteenth-century France and America (Inside Technology Series) (Hardcover)

Review
"Eda Kranakis has written a finely-researched study in the history of 19th-century technology that contrasts engineering ideas, education, and designs developed in France to those pursued in the United States. Her comparative approach has the technological richness of suspension bridges and the cultural depth of general social theories. This lively book is accessible to the general public and will delight the specialist in either history or technology." --David P. Billington, Civil Engineering & Operations Research, Princeton University

Product Description
If it is true, as Tocqueville suggested, that social and class systems shape technology, research and knowledge, then the effects should be visible both at the individual level and at the level of technical institutions and local environments. That is the central issue addressed in "Constructing a Bridge", a tale of two cultures that investigates how national traditions shape technological communities and their institutions and become embedded in everyday engineering practice. Eda Kranakis first examines these issues in the work of two suspension bridge designers of the early 19th century: the American inventor James Finley and the French engineer Claude-Louis-Marie-Henri Navier. Finley - who was oriented toward the needs of rural, frontier communities - designed a bridge that could be easily reproduced and constructed by carpenters and blacksmiths. Navier - whose professional training and career reflected a tradition of monumental architecture and had linked him closely to the Parisian scientific community - designed an elegant, costly, and technically sophisticated structure to be built in an elite district of Paris. Charting the careers of these two technologists and tracing the stories of their bridges, Kranakis reveals how local environments can shape design goals, research practices and design-to-construction processes. Kranakis then offers a broader look at the technological communities and institutions of 19th-century France and America and at their ties to technological practice. She shows how conditions that led to Finley's and Navier's distinct designs also fostered different systems of technical education as well as distinct ideologies and traditions of engineering research. The result of this two-tiered, comparative approach is a reorientation of a historiographic tradition initiated by Tocqueville (and explored more recently by Eugene Ferguson, John Kasson and others) toward a finer-grained analysis of institutional and local environments as mediators between national traditions and individual styles of technological research and design.

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews   4.0 out of 5 stars A thought-provoking history, 24 Jan 2008 By  kvetner - See all my reviews This is a book that could appeal equally to students of bridge design, civil engineering history, or the history of technology. Kranakis comes from the last of those perspectives, and uses the work of two early suspension bridge pioneers to illustrate wider ideas about how engineering design choices are affected by social context. The first half of the book contrasts James Finley, inventor of the modern suspension bridge, with Claude-Louis-Marie-Henri Navier, whose monumental design for the Pont des Invalides drove forward engineering science but was a never-completed failure. Finley was a practical, experimental, partly self-tought engineer operating in a rural community, and his design was driven by commercial competition against truss alternatives. Navier was a bureaucrat and scientist with a love of mathematical idealism, designing a state-funded bridge which had little real reason for existence. I was at first most impressed simply by Kranakis' attention to historical detail - these bridges and engineers are discussed elsewhere, but not with this level of careful explanation. But ultimately, I found the book's main reward to lie in how the nineteenth century divide between empiricism and abstraction remains highly relevant to modern bridge engineering. These issues are brought into sharper focus by the book's second half, which explores the social context for American and French engineers of the period, and offers a wealth of detail on their educational systems and the institutions that they established. The French were elitist and technocratic; the Americans egalitarian and meritocratic. In many respects, this is still true today, and the difficult balance between the two can be found in many engineering arenas. Certainly the choices for modern engineering education (which perhaps focusses too heavily on the science side rather than on practical design) are still unresolved. The book shows the weight of months of painstaking research, and I found it to be well-informed, well-argued, and very thought-provoking. Comment Comment | Permalink | Was this review helpful to you? Yes No (Report this) Share your thoughts with other customers: Create your own review › See all customer reviews...		Ad feedback   Search Customer Reviews Only search this product's reviews

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