Power, Speed, and Form Engineers and the Making of the Twentieth Century reviews

Power, Speed, and Form: Engineers and the Making of the Twentieth Century by David P. Billington (Author), David P. Billington Jr. (Author). Power, Speed, and Form is the primary accessible account of the engineering behind eight breakthrough innovations that remodeled American life from 1876 to 1939--the telephone, electric energy, oil refining, the car, the airplane, radio, the long-span metal bridge, and building with reinforced concrete. Beginning with Thomas Edison's system to generate and distribute electric energy, the authors explain the Bell phone, the oil refining processes of William Burton and Eugene Houdry, Henry Ford's Mannequin T car and the response by Common Motors, the Wright brothers' airplane, radio improvements from Marconi to Armstrong, Othmar Ammann's George Washington Bridge, the bolstered concrete constructions of John Eastwood and Anton Tedesko, and within the Thirties, the Chrysler Airflow automobile and the Douglas DC-three airplane.

These improvements used easy numerical ideas, which the Billingtons integrate with brief narrative accounts of each breakthrough--a novel and effective way to introduce engineering and how engineers think. The e-book exhibits how one of the best engineering exemplifies efficiency, economic system and, the place potential, elegance. With Energy, Velocity, and Type, educators, first-year engineering college students, liberal arts college students, and common readers now have, for the primary time in one volume, an accessible and readable history of engineering achievements that have been important to America's improvement and that are still the foundations of contemporary life.

In this case, you possibly can judge a guide by its cowl, or at least its title. Billington takes a take a look at the applied sciences (created simply earlier than or after 1900) which formed the 20th century. For every he identifies the engineers who made the important thing improvements that made the applied sciences successful.

The guide is partially a historical past lesson, with mini-biographies of the people concerned and a discussion of what the expertise meant within the context of the time. But it surely also partially a simplified discussion of the engineering concepts, with useful sidebars and appendices that give about the identical level of element that you may discover in a first yr engineering lecture.

It's attention-grabbing to see how some of the applied sciences interconnect, such as the telephone being a needed precursor to the radio (for an understanding of how one can carry a human voice over an electromagnetic sign).

As an aeronautical engineer, I used to be principally familiar with the history of the Wright brothers. Billington did an awesome job with that chapter, which gives me confidence that the opposite chapters are simply as correct and complete.

The text is not dry and tutorial, however it does assume at least a practical familiarity with physics and engineering. You don't should be an engineer to grasp the e-book, however it does help.

By the best way, this ebook just isn't about computer systems or different issues that we consider as "high tech" today. It is concerning the applied sciences which can be so fundamental to our lives that we don't consider them, like the electrical energy grid and the automobile. These had the same relationship to the world of 1900 that the internet has to the world of 2000. 

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

 David P. Billington (Author), David P. Billington Jr. (Author)

294 pages

Princeton University Press (October 2, 2006)

 More details about this books.