The Train and the Telegraph: A Revisionist History. By Benjamin Sidney Michael Schwantes. Hagley Library Studies in Business, Technology and Politics. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019. xix + 199 pp. Illustrations, map, notes, bibliography, index. Hardcover, $54.95. ISBN: 9781421429748. - Volume 95 Issue 1

Reviewed by: Power Moves: Transportation, Politics, and Development in Houston by Kyle Shelton Bruce Seely (bio) Power Moves: Transportation, Politics, and Development in Houston. By Kyle Shelton. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2017. Pp. 312. $29.95. Kyle Shelton’s study of transportation in Houston, Texas, touches on important elements of urban history, including politics; demographics, race, and class; geography and environment; public policy; and most importantly, transportation and mobility. The book explores and compares specific moments in Houston’s development of roads and public transit from the mid-1950s through the 2010s. The result is a longitudinal study of urban transportation that documents significant changes in policy, politics, and technology. The book’s five substantive chapters follow individual episodes in transportation development in Houston. The first tracks planning and initial construction of Houston’s expressways during the 1950s and 1960s. Houston’s [End Page 369] efforts resembled those of other cities, where state and municipal engineers and business leaders (real estate developers in Houston) dominated highway planning. Shelton shows the elite’s main motive was Houston’s continued economic growth and regional domination; local residents were not part of the conversation. Two road projects illustrate Shelton’s point, one in the white suburbs and another in a minority urban neighborhood. Neither group could alter the chosen routes, but African-American neighborhoods paid a much higher price. Shelton shows, however, that citizens throughout Houston learned from these initial skirmishes. By the mid-1960s, many residents pressed for a voice in transportation decision-making, engaging in what Shelton labels infrastructural citizenship. The second chapter presents a case study of citizen involvement, as individuals in a Hispanic neighborhood stopped construction of the Harrisburg Freeway through their community. My one criticism is that Shelton could have examined the federal Bureau of Public Roads’ role in Houston’s highway planning and construction efforts. Shelton shows that Texas highway department engineers were involved, but the views of BPR engineers mattered. They had to approve any project using interstate funding. And Shelton notes in passing that changing federal stances on urban expressway routes and environmental impact statements help explain shifts in Houston’s highway politics after 1965. Bringing federal officials into the narrative likely would have added to Shelton’s history. The next two chapters examine how public transit came to Houston. Shelton explores the politics behind a failed referendum in the mid-1970s and a successful campaign to fund transit in 1978. Minority voters allied with certain white suburban dwellers spearheaded the first plan’s defeat, while the same voters carried the second to a successful conclusion. The difference is explained by the transit agency’s decision to seek public input after the initial failure. In a major step for Houston, the agency paid attention to black and brown residents, and was rewarded. This public policy landscape differed markedly from the top-down structure responsible for Houston’s highways during the 1950s and 1960s. The fourth chapter details competition in the 1980s between a heavy-rail transit system and new toll roads across metropolitan Houston. The political landscape was shifting again, with the emergence of regional political fragmentation. Within a period of months, a ballot proposal on transit failed while a plan for toll expressways passed. This outcome not only launched another road-building boom, but also shattered the coalition that shaped transit policy during the 1970s. White suburbs generally rejected transit programs they saw as primarily benefitting urban neighborhoods, and which also might encourage minority residents to move into their enclaves. A final chapter examines expansion of the city’s light-rail system across [End Page 370] Houston after 2000, especially the protracted struggle to lengthen the Green Line. Tracing lengthy debates about the line’s location, Shelton demonstrates the limits of infrastructural citizenship. He shows that the transit agency clearly consulted residents, but could not, in the end implement the preferences of local residents. Shelton’s study of infrastructure politics across time is important. It bridges a gap in urban and technological history, linking politics and technology. He shows how urban politics in Houston changed from totally top-down to more democratic, and finally to the geographic, racial, and socio-economic fragmentation of...

Previous articleNext article No AccessModernThomas C. Lassman. Edward Condon’s Cooperative Vision: Science, Industry, and Innovation in Modern America. xxi + 287 pp., notes, bibl., index. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018. $45 (cloth). ISBN 9780822945345.Bruce SeelyBruce Seely Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Isis Volume 111, Number 1March 2020 Publication of the History of Science Society Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/707778 Views: 32Total views on this site Citations: 1Citations are reported from Crossref © 2020 by The History of Science Society. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article: Isis Current Bibliography of the History of Science and Its Cultural Influences 2020, Isis 111, no.S1S1 (Jan 2021): 1–317.https://doi.org/10.1086/713361

with uncertainty as the early years of telegraphy. Managers feared that telephone equipment might prove unreliable, and that a rapid change in dispatching methods might result in accidents or a breakdown in service. Schwantes has packed a commendable amount of information and analysis into a slim volume. His reliance on numerous railway and telegraph company archives, trade journals, government documents and an impressive array of secondary sources attests to the thoroughness of his research. The writing style is lucid and conveys clearly the evolution of two complex technologies, without reliance on specialist jargon. The telegraph and the railroad were arguably the two most important technological achievements of the nineteenth century. Their happy marriage has long been taken for granted, by Chandler and others. Anyone with a serious interest in either technology should pay careful attention to Schwantes’s findings. He has done a superb job of showing the ways in which individual personalities, national circumstances, public policies and historical contingency made that relationship far more complex than might have been imagined.

Space collaboration has become quite common in recent years, thanks in large part to the high cost of such endeavors. This article reviews a rather early example of space collaboration, the partnership between China and the United States (U.S.) during the period 1978-2000. The collaboration began with general discussions and grew to include the use of Chinese rockets to launch U.S. satellites into orbit. We discuss where this collaboration worked successfully, where it did not, and why it ended. The ultimate collapse of the collaboration highlights the complexity of joint international projects for the factors that caused failure included the Cold War dynamic of geopolitical competition for international military and economic dominance and its continuance into the 1990s in Sino-U.S. relations; the domestic political landscape in both countries, which included bitter Democratic-Republican party rivalries in the U.S. and the top-down centralized decision-making system in China with significant influence by the People's Liberation Army; and the economic interests of U.S. aerospace contractors. But the issue that most directly ended cooperation in space was U.S. concerns about the transfer to China of sensitive satellite and rocket technology. For this history, we draw upon existing English language materials and Chinese language sources that have not been available to English-speaking scholars to illuminate China's involvement in this collaboration. We also describe subsequent Chinese space activities to pursue additional collaboration and offer comments about possible future Sino-U.S. space cooperation, against this backdrop of long-running national security concerns about transfers of knowledge and technology. (C) 2019 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Reviewed by: Wind Wizard: Alan G. Davenport and the Art of Wind Engineering. by Siobhan Roberts Bruce Seely (bio) Wind Wizard: Alan G. Davenport and the Art of Wind Engineering. by Siobhan Roberts. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012. Pp. 278. $29.95. This is a professional biography of the leading figure in the development of tall towers, buildings, and bridges safely able to withstand the wind. Alan Davenport (1932–2009) was a British engineer who spent his professional career in Canada. He entered the engineering program at the University of Toronto in 1954. The event of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge collapse in 1940 had provided a graphic warning to structural designers about the danger of ignoring the wind, and Davenport was fascinated by the challenge. He pursued a doctorate at Bristol beginning in 1959, and his dissertation explored issues related to turbulence. He used statistical analysis in order to bring order to that untidy field, and he also drew on concepts from meteorology, aeronautical engineering, and structural engineering. In 1961, Davenport accepted a position at the University of Western Ontario, where he remained for his entire career. Siobhan Roberts organizes the book into three chapters that examine Davenport’s attention to very tall buildings, long bridges, and wind-related natural disasters. Davenport was a pivotal figure in each area. He consulted on many of the tallest buildings erected since 1960, beginning with tests of the design for the original World Trade Center towers in 1964. He contributed to successful designs for (among others) the Sears Tower in Chicago, the CN Tower in Toronto, the notorious John Hancock Center in Boston, the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank with its trapezoidal aperture [End Page 281] near the top of the structure, and the world’s tallest building, the Burj Khalifa in the United Arab Emirates. Davenport also studied the fabric roofs of the Calgary Saddledome and the Hajj Terminal in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. Davenport also consulted on many suspension bridge projects around the world during his career. Bridges truly fascinated him, and they were topics of significant engineering interest after the Tacoma Narrows failure. Roberts examines Davenport’s role on many projects, but it was especially interesting to follow his work over many years to stabilize the Bronx-Whitestone Bridge in New York City. This bridge shared some design features with the Tacoma Narrows, and as a result the Bronx-Whitestone could exhibit unacceptable dynamic behavior. Changes resulting from Davenport’s studies eventually produced a significantly more stable and safer structure. Finally, Davenport’s interest in safe structural designs led to studies of the behavior of any building in the face of tornadoes and hurricanes. He studied electric power line towers, as well as low buildings and houses. In each chapter, Roberts explores how Davenport studied the performance of structures in the face of wind. Her research rests largely on his papers and numerous interviews. Davenport was not a fluid dynamicist, although he was comfortable with numerical calculations. Instead, he approached wind engineering with two main techniques. First, he applied probability to the wind phenomenon he encountered, enabling him to understand the full range of situations and to design with a sense of real problems. He refined his understanding in unique wind tunnels using scale models of structures that also included topography and local environments. His models of buildings were crucial to his success, for they provided essential information on the dynamic performance of key structural elements. Likewise with bridges, he developed ideal models of the structure but also used detailed models of sections and of full designs. Davenport also monitored the performance of finished structures to compare calculated and real performance. This brief review cannot capture the full range of Davenport’s approaches, but it is worth highlighting that Roberts argues that Davenport’s understandings of the behavior of structures in the wind grew not only from lots of data, but also from understanding the essentials. Thus the book’s subtitle, the art of wind engineering, captures a central feature of Davenport’s approach. Overall, the book is nicely done and the many illustrations are well-chosen and important. Davenport’s story is worth telling and Roberts tells it well...

We argue that road engineers-in the cases presented in the articles in this special section-were acting as cultural actors, playing a greater role than experts and especially policy makers. Even as they utilized technical information in cultural debates, road representation had huge symbolic value in driving the social and political discussions. However, once road experts used and accepted such political tools, they could not disconnect themselves from the political process, which determined success and failure in these projects.

This chapter provides a historical overview of the U.S. system of engineering education from its origins in the nineteenth Century until the present. It is organized chronologically, describing the early institutional formation of the U.S. system of engineering education; the post World War II ascent of engineering scienceengineering science ideology; late- and post Cold WarCold War changes in engineering education. As a broad brush stroke history, this text does not attempt to be comprehensive, nor does it touch on every major historical development. Instead, the chapter adopts a more analytic view of the structural features of the U.S. system of engineering education and it transformation over time. The primary intent of the chapter is to provide background historical knowledge for the other chapters in his volume, but it also closes with several observations of broader interest.

Journal Article Engineers for Change: Competing Visions of Technology in 1960s America Get access Matthew Wisnioski. (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2012. xviii, 286 pp. $35.00.) Journal of American History, Volume 100, Issue 4, March 2014, Pages 1277–1278, https://doi.org/10.1093/jahist/jau127 Published: 01 March 2014

Nanotechnology-infused products have begun to enter the market in spite of the fact that many sectors of society are still debating whether or not exposure to such products will result in detrimental side effects. Due to a lack of regulation of nanoproducts, it is difficult to track these products to assess how they interact with humans and the environment. Acknowledging this limitation, several studies are starting to investigate situations where individuals are exposed to nanoparticles in the workplace; it is to be noted that manufacturing of materials is the first stage in the product life cycle where exposure may occur. This paper reviews and discusses the potential societal implications associated with the manufacturing of nanoparticles: health concerns, workers’ perceptions, rights, ethics, and the role of policy and regulation. Scenarios are presented, possible implications are discussed, and recommendations are given for appropriate action. Finding the right solution to the identified implications represents a critical challenge. In summary, it is imperative that all stakeholders including industry, academia, government entities, and the public adopt a proactive attitude to ensure that nanotechnology matures in a sustainable manner.

An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content.

Proposed types of responses to various kinds of disaster, both natural and man-made. The importance of listening to groups who are generally ignored, particularly women. A number of areas for future study are identfied which should lead to better preparation for disasters on the part of both experts and (the widest possible number of) stakeholders.