John B. Jervis

360 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE JohnB. Jervis: An American Engineering Pioneer. By F. Daniel Larkin. Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1990. Pp. xix+192; illustra­ tions, notes, bibliography, index. $27.95. In John B. Jervis, F. Daniel Larkin has given us the basic account of that 19th-century civil engineer. Using the ample archival resources, he has examined the whole trajectory, from Erie Canal apprenticeship through the Delaware and Hudson Canal and the Croton Aqueduct to a mixture of managerial and engineering responsibilities on railroads in the Midwest. He has examined Jervis’s design style, as well as his business style, concluding on the “irony that the very person who searched for simplicity in life was instrumental, through his engineering and entrepreneurial activities, in creating a more com­ plex society” (p. 153). A more “philosophical” biography might expand on certain ques­ tions. Jervis, as Larkin tells us, gave us the swivel truck for locomo­ tives, the separately hung set of front wheels that made it possible for locomotives to negotiate tighter railroad curves. This swivel truck was one of many design innovations that gave American engineering its early distinctive style: light construction, rigidity through framing, often an articulation of members around point connections. But was this style simply an emergent, arising from the practical decisions made by many builders, or did it arise from deeper commitments? As Larkin shows, Jervis used hollow-wall construction for lightness even when he built the massive masonry structures of the Croton High Bridge. Did this have any relation to the flourish of the ogival spillway that he used to protect the Croton Dam? Are we dealing with an autonomous technical response, or with the “social construction” of an aesthetic style? We need greater elaboration on Jervis’s religious and political persuasions. That he was a Calvinist tells us little. What kind? Did he make any accommodation to 19th-century thought styles? We have here, too, Jervis the Yorker Democrat who turns Barnburner and then Republican, but also Jervis the engineer who worked with and for railroad corporations during much of his career. And we have the Jervis who wrote in 1868 against greenbacks and the repudiation of money values. Where would that put him in relation to the reworking of social values that seemed to work through the generalincorporation movement? Where would it put him in relation to that reworking ofJacksonian hard-money thought that found an eventual home in the National Banking System? How should we place Jervis in relation to other regional writers on economic change, such as Alexander Bryan Johnson or Edward McPherson? In the same way that balloon-frame construction repudiated a timber-framing style that was comfortable with heavy materials, Jervis’s business style and therefore the “light American style” of construction were deeply involved with a repudiation of an earlier TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 361 artisanal moral economy. Jervis ordered the assistant in charge of the Croton office to remove from it all “articles that do not belong to it and which only promote confusion. . . . Allow no smoking and no play of any kind in the office” (p. 67). The bare effort to economize on accounts extended directly into the raw materials of style. Lushness was private, like emotion in the family. Similarly, when Jervis de­ fended himself against political charges, his public contempt for any “political Engineer” (p. 89) was of a piece with his rejection of the florid and self-indulgent in engineering operations. Against Jervis’s bare-walls conception should be compared Monte Calvert’s picture of the family resources of early mechanical engi­ neers. Larkin is exactly perceptive on the ironies that lurk in Jervis’s drive for “simplicity.” Other writers may yet give us a more florid, cultural reading of the same record. Daniel Calhoun Dr. Calhoun is retired from the Department of History at the University of California, Davis. Thomas A. Edison and the Modernization ofAmerica. By Martin V. Melosi. New York: HarperCollins, 1990. Pp. ix + 221; bibliography, index. Paper. This volume is part of the Library of American Biography, a well-known series suited to teaching undergraduates. Like other books in the series, it contains 200 pages of unfootnoted

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