Building the Nineteenth Century

Reviewed by: Building the Nineteenth Century * Martin Reuss (bio) Building the Nineteenth Century. By Tom F. Peters. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1996. Pp. 535; illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $47.50. Few would deny that industrialization greatly accelerated the development of both technology and technological systems, including building construction, but Tom F. Peters maintains that no one prior to the nineteenth century recognized that building construction was a process. Engineers constantly challenged conventional scientific wisdom and used art and intuition to design their structures. Mathematical rationalization, which sought to reduce design to formulas and numbers, made little headway with these men. After analyzing the evolution of transportation, communication, and various building materials, Peters takes his readers through three stages in the development of the modern building process. The commercially useless Thames Tunnel (the result of engineering vanity similar to that which led to the Royal Gorge Bridge in Colorado) and the initial construction plans for the Suez Canal symbolize the preindustrial stage. The Britannia and Conway Bridges, as well as the second phase of the Suez Canal construction, characterize a transitional period. The Sayn Foundry in Germany, London’s Crystal Palace, and Paris’s Eiffel Tower and Galerie des Machines illuminate the evolving systems approach to construction. The systems approach culminates in the third stage with the Langwies Viaduct and the Panama Canal, in which mechanization and new technological thought allowed rational, efficient, and economic organization of the building process. The author perceptively shows how each project—and project engineer—contributed to the modern building process. Peters’s analysis of building construction alone makes the book worthwhile reading. Yet another feature distinguishes this book: its illustrations and detailed captions. While a book of this sort cries out for illustrations, rarely has the call been so successfully met. These illustrations do not simply complement the text; they significantly enhance it. They run throughout the book and form a story line of their own; even the endnotes have substantial illustrations. Both publisher and author deserve commendation for this effort. Less successful is the index, which is alphabetically arranged according to topic, forcing readers to consult more than one topic to identify all relevant page numbers. The book’s organization is also a bit confusing, jumping back and forth chronologically in places. Peters’s heroes exhibit “matrix thinking,” a mix of nonlinear, contextual thinking and scientific analysis. This form of thinking, he argues, characterizes technological thought and is divided into two thought patterns, transformation and translation. Transformation involves applying old ideas to new objects. Translation moves information from one field to an [End Page 145] entirely different one. Peters’s favorite example is Marc Isambard Brunel’s studying the worm-shaped pipeworm, learning how this mollusk drilled, and applying his knowledge to the construction of his tunneling shield in building the Thames Tunnel. Any book this ambitious is bound to raise questions. One important issue deals with the notion of process. While time management, economic concerns, and mechanization reflect capitalist society’s emphasis on efficiency and financial reward, the builders of Egyptian pyramids and medieval cathedrals could hardly have ignored these matters. Primitive mechanization prevented the rationalization of construction to the extent obtained at the beginning of the twentieth century, but early builders may nonetheless have valued sound organization and administration. In short, does process always imply rationalization, or can it be any series of actions that results in a certain objective? Peters’s story climaxes with the construction of the Panama Canal. Although he tells the construction story very well, his reliance on poor sources leads him into error. He mistakenly asserts that President Theodore Roosevelt placed the canal in the hands of the army when he appointed an army engineer colonel, George W. Goethals, as chief engineer and chairman of the Isthmian Canal Commission. However, the commission remained the body responsible for the construction of the canal. Engineer officers reported to the commission, not to the chief of engineers. Of more importance, Peters argues that Goethals’s army experience enabled him to rationalize construction organization in a way that decisively influenced large building projects in the twentieth century. “The key to Goethals’s success was his West Point education” (p. 315). Yet

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