Duke University Alumni Magazine

By Henry Petroski. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995. 479 pp. $30

ome years back, Henry Petroski and his family toured England, taking a number of odd jogs off the more familiar tourist routes to look at England's much-documented array of bridges that span rivers, bogs, and highland gorges to carry trains, automobiles, cyclists, and pedestrians to new destinations. The Petroski children were not thrilled. Dad's obsession with bridges became something of a family joke.

     Fifteen years later, his fascination with bridges and their builders has turned into his sixth and most ambitious book, Engineers of Dreams: Great Bridge Builders and the Spanning of America. Petroski, who is Aleksander S. Vesic Professor of Civil Engineering, chairman of the department of civil and environmental engineering, and professor of history at Duke, says he wrote Engineers of Dreams because he could not find a book about America's bridges and their builders comparable to the volumes written about England's achievements in the field.

     Among his previous works are the remarkably successful account of the history of a most common object, The Pencil, and his more expansive The Evolution of the Useful Things. In the fiercely competitive and unforgiving market of trade-book publishing, he has managed to carve out a literary niche that is almost his alone--namely, rendering the technical accessible to the lay reader while maintaining enough scientific substance for his books to be quite popular as texts in engineering courses around the country.

     In his latest book, his considerable talents as a writer and historical researcher are tested in a new form for the author. While his other works have been peopled with interesting characters--both engineers and entrepreneurs--the books were more essay-like and stylistically variable. Engineers of Dreams is, most fundamentally, biography. "The subject is so convoluted, complex and long," says Petroski. "I needed some way to organize the story of bridge building in the United States besides the evolution of technology."

     He devotes a chapter to each of five distinguished engineers, along with their competitors and colleagues: James Eads, who finally connected Illinois and Missouri by spanning the Mississippi River at St. Louis in 1874 with the bridge that still bears his name; Theodore Cooper, whom Eads mentored and who would go on to design the ill-fated Quebec Bridge across the St. Lawrence River in Canada; the cautious Gustav Lindenthal, one-time commissioner of bridges for New York City, who designed spans across the Monongahela and the Allegheny in Pennsylvania but is most revered for his masterpiece, the Hell's Gate Bridge, a railway link across the East River in New York; the quiet Othmar Ammann, chief designer of the George Washington and Verrazano-Narrows bridges in New York City; and David Steinman, who grew up in the shadow of the Brooklyn Bridge, who worked closely with both Lindenthal and Ammann, argued prolifically in print for better professional standards in the field of engineering, and ultimately designed the Mackinac Bridge in Michigan, his masterpiece.

     Most notable in all these stories is the complexity of the building process itself. Petroski describes the technical challenge of spanning great distances over water and gorges while anticipating the effects of local weather, river currents, and other load stresses. He also gives due to the political, financial, social, and aesthetic issues inherent in bridge construction.

     Bridge building in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was often a tragic story, costing many laborers' lives and leading to several spectacular failures. Petroski manages these dramas with as much tension as the cables that held together the ill-fated bridges in suspension for only so long. He also suggests much about the disruption of historic neighborhoods and the changes wrought by the "communication" bridges immediately provided between what had been two separate and distinct communities. In this way, Engineers of Dreams is an anthropological study.

     Today, America's bridges--those monuments to the pioneering spirit of American industrial and (mostly) urban development-- are often taken for granted by travelers and government officials. "Barring accidents," Petroski writes, "bridges, like health, are most appreciated when they begin to deteriorate and fail. Thus, politicians seemed to become interested in bridges when they found that so many of them were structurally deficient. In 1992, for example, this included about one out of every five of the half-million or so bridges in the United States--an improvement over some previous years."

     But Petroski urges us to see these grand structures anew, to appreciate the daring and the human cost that went into their designs. Demonstrating his gift for sensuous detail, he explains: "...unless these bridges are approached with a proper perspective, whether by the armchair traveler from behind a book or the actual traveler from behind a steering wheel, their greatness and achievement can hardly be appreciated. The right of way that approaches a massive cantilever head-on affords no view of the bridge to speak of, and the way across can appear from a train window to be little more than a series of slanted steel obstructions to the view of a majestic river. The whoosh-whoosh-whoosh of relative motion gives no hint of the human dreams and drama that began over a blank and silent drawing board."

     By his own monumental project, Engineers of Dreams, Petroski himself has built a sturdy bridge--between past and present, between engineer and layperson, and between literature and technology. For the reader, there is great pleasure in the crossing.

--Georgann Eubanks