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

John H. Lienhard IV

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0195135830 ISBN 13: 9780195135831

Publisher: Oxford University Press, 2000

Synopsis

A million people tune in twice each week to hear John H. Lienhard's radio program "The Engines of Our Ingenuity." Now Lienhard has gathered together his reflections on the nature of technology, culture, human inventiveness, and the history of engineering in this fascinating new book.
The Engines of Our Ingenuity offers a series of intriguing glimpses into technology--as a mirror, as a danger, as a product of heroic hubris. The book brims with insightful observations. Lienhard writes, for instance, that the history of technology is a history of us--we are the machines we create. Indeed, our very first technology, farming, which demanded year-long care, dramatically changed the rhythms of human life and the course of our history. We also learn that war does not necessarily fuel invention (radar, jets, and the digital computer all emerged before World War II began), and that the medieval Church was actually a driving force behind the growth of Western technology (Cistercian monasteries were virtual factories, putting water wheels to work in wood-cutting, forging, and olive crushing). Lienhard also illuminates the unpredictable nature of the inventive mind, leading us through one fascinating example after another. Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla, for instance, were highly passionate, even combative figures, while the almost invisible Josiah Willard Gibbs, living a quiet, outwardly uneventful life, was probably America's greatest scientist.
Lienhard ranges far and wide with stories of inventors, mathematicians, and engineers, telling the story of the canoe, the DC-3, the Hoover Dam, the diode, and the sewing machine. The result is less history than autobiography--for the autobiography of all of us is written in our machines.

About this title

About the Author

John Lienhard is M.D. Anderson Professor of Mechanical Engineering and History at the University of Houston. He has worked as an engineer and educator since 1951, and is known for his work in the thermal sciences. He has also worked actively in history since 1970s. He is the author and host of "The Engines of Our Ingenuity," a daily essay on creativity produced by KUHF-FM Houston and heard nationally on Public Radio. He lives in Houston, Texas.

Reviews

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.

An elaboration on the NPR broadcasts made by Lienhard (Mechanical Engineering/Univ. of Houston), who contends, basically, that machines are us.Lienhard begins with history, examining the growth of technology from the chance mutations that created plump-grained wheat (which required threshing) to the emergence of the computer. Lienhard observes that the interactions between society and technology result in machines that reflect social needs while also acting as the instruments of social change. Medieval monks, for example, brought hydropower and wind power to Europe and inspired a quest for perpetual motion, which led to the invention of mechanical clocks, which then became a necessity once the Black Death had decimated Europe and put a premium on time and how it should be spent. While historians may question that particular chain of connections (as well as others that Lienhard puts forth), his wealth of detail about the who, the what, and the how of pivotal inventions is quite wonderful. One of the best chapters deals with priority, in which one learns of all the unsung predecessors of Bell’s telephone, Fulton’s steamboat, Morse’s telegraph, Edison’s light bulb, and Benz’s automobile. Another chapter underscores how machines come to reveal their purpose—recounting, for example, how the telephone was initially regarded primarily as a business tool while typewriters were considered a novelty, never meant to replace the handwritten letter. In due course Lienhard discusses spectacular failures of technology—bridge collapses, airplane crashes, etc.—and he makes the surprising point that (at least in terms of airplanes) it is designed instability that enables maneuverability and hence safety. However, his general conclusion is that “success breeds complacency breeds failure breeds caution”—which leads again to success, hubris, and on to failure.All told, lots of neat stories of invention and inventors, told by a witness and participant who deplores the passive voice. “You and I have made the world we live in,” he says—and he, for one, rejoices in it. -- Copyright © 2000 Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Edition details

• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Publication date: 2000
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0195135830
• ISBN 13: 9780195135831
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 272