Description
Every great bridge is a wager against physics — and a portrait of the person who made it. In Engineers of Dreams, Henry Petroski — engineer, historian, and one of the finest writers about technology alive — tells the story of the ambitious men who threw spans across America’s great rivers and harbors.
From the St. Louis arch crossing to the George Washington and the Golden Gate, Petroski follows the dreamers who learned to hang steel across impossible distances: their bold calculations, their rivalries, their triumphs, and the failures that taught the profession its hardest lessons. Along the way he shows how each bridge was also a civic argument — about what a city believed it could become.
Part history, part engineering primer, part character study — an adventure novel with footnotes, for anyone fascinated by how things get built and Petroski, a Duke engineering professor, writes about technology better than almost anyone alive — precise, humane, and quietly awed by his subject. the obsessive, visionary people who build them.
Every great bridge is a wager against physics — and a portrait of the person who made it. In Engineers of Dreams: Great Bridge Builders and the Spanning of America, Henry Petroski — engineer, historian, and one of the finest writers about technology alive — tells the story of the ambitious men who threw spans across America’s great rivers and harbors.
From the St. Louis arch crossing to the George Washington and the Golden Gate, Petroski follows the dreamers who learned to hang steel across impossible distances: their bold calculations, their rivalries, their triumphs, and the failures that taught the profession its hardest lessons. Along the way he shows how each bridge was also a civic argument — about what a city believed it could become.
Part history, part engineering primer, and part character study, this book reads like an adventure novel with footnotes. Perfect for readers fascinated by how things get built — and by the obsessive, visionary people who build them.
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