The Engines of Our Ingenuity: An Engineer Looks at Technology and Culture

Based on episodes from Lienhard's widely broadcast public radio series, this intriguing set of essays begins with a simple premise: more than we often care to admit, our lives are shaped by our machines. Fleshing out this proposition, Lienhard ransacks 2,000 years of scientific and technological history, cobbling together a quirky biography of the strange being he calls homo technologicus. From Galileo's inspired tinkerings to a thumbnail history of the DC-3, this book plunges into the annals of mechanical culture and turns up a technophile's delight of canny observations. For example, an obscure German clergyman suggested that the Americas be named for the Italian navigator Amerigo Vespucci, and one of Napoleon's resident archeologists turned up the Rosetta Stone during a military stalemate in Egypt. A fascinating history of St. Paul's Cathedral in London reveals that architect Christopher Wren sneaked the magnificent dome into his plans after a stodgy commission insisted on an ungainly spire instead. Then there's J. Willard Gibbs, the man Lienhard calls ""the greatest American scientist who has ever lived,"" who made forays into vector analysis and statistical mechanics that paved the way for Einstein and Fermi. Though Lienhard groups his material conceptually (one chapter reviews major landmarks in the history of inventions, another examines war and technology), his freewheeling associations can make one's head spin. Still, approached as an almanac of serendipitous discoveries, this work remains a fitting introduction to the human obsession with invention. (June)