The Innovators, College: The Engineering Pioneers Who Transformed America

by David P. Billington

Book Overview

The major engineering pioneers whose works transformed America into the world's leading modern power, from Robert Fulton and his inventions of the steamboat to Thomas Edison's construction of the first electrical power network. Introduces each of the major figures and explains how they came up with their ideas and how their works tranformed commerce, industry, and society.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0471140961
• ISBN13: 9780471140962
• Release Date: May 1996
• Publisher: Wiley
• Length: 272 Pages
• Weight: 0.90 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 6.1" x 9.2"

Customer Reviews

Practical Genius

I have always been eager to learn as much as possible about those who are generally considered to be the most creative thinkers. In this book, Billington discusses several of them such as James Watt, Robert Fulton, Samuel F.B. Morse, Andrew Carnegie, and Thomas Alva Edison. What makes this book even more interesting and informative is the fact that he also discusses many others about whom I previously knew little, if anything. For example, Thomas Telford ("the designer as artist"), Francis Cabot Lowell ("no one played a more central role in bringing the industrial revolution to the young United States"), J. Edgar Thompson (among the first inductees in Fortune's "Business Hall of Fame, together with Ford, Edison, and Morgan), and Henry Bessemer (determined how to manufacture malleable iron and steel without fuel, thereby permitting mass production). Because of what these and other "pioneer innovators" accomplished during the 19th century, the United States emerged as the world's leading industrial nation. "The emergence depended...upon a series of major engineering events: the steamboat, the textile factory town [e.g. Lowell, MA], the continental railroad, electric telegraph, the iron and steel industry, the steel bridge, and the incandescent light." Moreover, Billington includes all manner of graphic illustrations of major inventions and explains how that engineering "has transformed not only the material life of our nation but also its politics and its culture." In Chapter 3, Billington suggests three competing ideas about the origins of technological innovation: "one, of innovation as a consequence of applied science; two,, of innovation as a response to political and economic forces; and three, of innovation as the result of individual genius." Billington succeeds brilliantly in helping each reader to understand the creative thinking and the achievements of various engineering pioneers "who made America modern" as well as the origin(s) of their technological innovation.

neatly sketched vignettes of inventive engineers

Professor Billington presents a neatly sketched vignettes of engineering pioneers in America. The book is well illustrated and the engineering calculations readily accessible to the lay reader. My interest while reading _The_Innovators_ was rather uneven -- some chapters seemed far more engaging than others, but this may have been a consequence of greater familiarity with some technologies compared to others. Nonetheless, the short biographies put human faces behind many of the technical innovations we take for granted today. Too much contemporary reporting focuses on either political intrigues or scandal. As Jean Henri Fabre observed "history records the names of royal bastards, but cannot tell us the origin of wheat." _The_Innovators_, by contrast, presents a compact distillation of modern engineering that would benefit the technically trained and the lay public alike.