Twentieth Century Limited: Industrial Design in America, 1925-1939 by Jeffrey L. MeikleReview by: Mark H. RoseIsis, Vol. 71, No. 4 (Dec., 1980), pp. 677-678Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of The History of Science SocietyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/230537 .

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BOOK REVIEWS-ISIS, 71: 4: 259 (1980) 677

* Technology

David P. Billington. Robert Maillart's Bridges: The Art of Engineering. xv + 146 pp., illus., apps., tables, bibl., index. Princeton: Prince- ton University Press, 1970. $17.50.

Awarded the Dexter Prize of the Society for the History of Technology in 1979, Billing- ton's book is a brilliant, highly readable essay on the interplay between art and science in engineering design. Maillart, a Swiss engineer, built bridges of such breathtaking beauty that they have become cult objects among avant garde intellectuals. But Maillart was not, as sometimes thought, one who denied science to achieve plasticity of form in reinforced concrete. Rather Maillart was, in Billington's view, an artist-engineer, the expression of engineering design at its best.

To understand design Billington distin- guishes among basic science, engineering science, and design. "The goal of scientific theory lies in explaining the natural world, structured by forces disassociated from hu- manity. Whereas the goal of engineering theory lies in explaining the artificial world built by forces associated with human civiliza- tion" (p. 103). Engineering scientists, inspired by the basic sciences, often strive for rigor and generality. The result is what Billington terms a "hierarchical theory.7" The results, as he points out with considerable relish, are often disastrous. Such theories tend to obscure the options available to the designer. The creative designer, such as Maillart, first selects from among the forms that are technically possible the one most beautiful, most economical, and best suited to the particular setting. Like Maillart he then develops a special theory, a "categorical theory" in Billington's terms, best fitted to this particular design. For Mail- lart as for Billington the form determines the proper mode of analysis, rather than a general scientific theory dictating the design.

This is a beautiful book. It is lavishly illustrated, and written with remarkable clar- ity, insight, and wisdom. Emest Hemingway once said that prose is architecture, not interior decoration. Billington has written a book whose prose architecture is as beautiful as the bridges about which he writes. It illuminates dimensions of science and theory that have been neglected heretofore. It should be of especial interest to those who teach courses on the humanistic dimensions of science and technology.

EDWIN T. LAYTON, JR.

Jeffrey L. Meikle. Twentieth Century Limited: Industrial Design in America, 1925-1939. xiv + 249 pp., illus., bibl., index. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1979. $17.50.

During the 1920s the purchasing power of Americans increased by nearly one fifth. Manufacturers sought to capitalize on the increase in spending by locating the core ideas directing the preferences of consumers, a fickle and unpredictable group. The economic collapse of the 1930s hastened the search for methods to move merchandise from bulging warehouses.

Historian Jeffrey L. Meikle finds the origins of the industrial design profession in these changing economic and aesthetic con- texts. Designers such as Walter D. Teague and Norman Bel Geddes worked with adver- tising and industrial executives on redesigning products. Rounded and rectangular toasters, refrigerators, and stoves replaced the earlier, traditional designs of engineers; plastic and shiny chrome, the materials of the new age, replaced cast iron and marbelized sheet steel. Industrial designers also sketched office in- teriors, installing subdued lighting and sound- proofing.

An ideology of social control and economic growth informed the work of industrial designers. Their controlled office environ- ments were supposed to reduce "friction" between personnel. The slick designs of refrigerators and automobiles would grease the wheels of commerce and hasten popular acceptance of the technological order. At once these prospects pleased merchants and office managers and proved self-satisfying to designers who imagined themselves leading the economy to prosperity and society to harmony.

Bel Geddes's design of the General Motors Futurama exhibit for the New York World's Fair of 1939-1940 capped this tradition, highlighting the limited vision of designers and the limits of the market place in which they worked. Visitors to Futurama observed lovely farms and perfected cities, both con- structed around a gigantic highway system. This exhibit only prescribed another version of a frictionless America. By 1939, however, engineer-planner Robert Moses directed high- way design and location in New York, and he dismissed Geddes's plan as impractical.

The problems with this book, few in number, are probably caused by the topic and by the nature of the available sources. To assess the social thought of designers man- dates a description of their designs. Meikle

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678 BOOK REVIEWS-ISIS, 71: 4: 259 (1980)

dwells on changes in facades, occasionally overlooking the social conditioning that shaped them. While he offers perceptive accounts of the changing organization of design studios, the frequent leaps from one organizational format to the next leave the intervening social processes unexplained. This approach is a common one among those trained in history and the social sciences.

This book contributes to recent scholarship in the history of technology. Technological innovation, it seems, followed commercial and artistic impulses and extended the profes- sionalizing process; technology, in the design arena, was not autonomous. Equally, the technical systems and designs outlined so brilliantly by Meikle complemented the emerging middle landscape. On the green rims of American cities, a full-service kitchen apparently meshed in the minds of house- holders with ideas of hardy self-reliance, social homogeneity, and clipped hedges. Meikle, then, has placed this book in the internal and social traditions of the history of American technology. At both, he is excellent, and the beautiful typography of the book itself is a bonus.

MARK H. ROSE

Quinta Scott; Howard S. Miller. The Eads Bridge. Photographic essay by Quinta Scott, historical appraisal by Howard S. Miller. 142 pp., illus., index. Columbia, Mo./London: University of Missouri Press, 1979. $19.

The great iron and steel arch bridge across the Mississippi at St. Louis was opened for traffic in 1874 and is one of perhaps a dozen major bridges of the nineteenth century that can be said to be milestones in the history of bridge building. Thus, the book by Scott and Miller is a most welcome addition to the literature on the world's great bridges. It is a photographic and historical essay on the Eads Bridge. The book is an impressive combina- tion of art and scholarship, the epitome from the industrial archaeologist's point of view of what can result from combining the pains- taking recording of a structure with meticulous archival research.

The photographs really convey the essence of this monumental structure. They provide not only general views of the bridge but an understanding and concem for details such as' the joints, the members, and the interplay of the ironwork and the stonemasonry. Photo- graphs, however, do not reveal all the information needed to evaluate the historic

significance of this bridge. Full site recording requires measured drawings. One hopes that this work has been accomplished. In any case, references to other photographs and drawings would be a welcome addition to the book.

Miller's history of the bridge concentrates largely on the career of James B. Eads and his role as chief engineer, entrepreneur, financier, and organizer. Prior to his involvement with the bridge, Eads spent his life on the Missis- sippi; he was the acknowledged expert on un- derwater salvage. He had no formal training as an engineer and was thus one of the last self-taught bridge builders, in the tradition of Thomas Telford, to build a major long-span bridge. The bridge, however, ushered in a new era for the civil engineering profession, which was put on an organized professional basis for the first time following the Civil War. Eads, as project engineer, is credited with the overall design, the introduction of structural steel members, and the use of large pneu- matic cassions. Thus the bridge was a bold step forward in the art of bridge building. Miller points out that the credit should not go entirely to Eads, since he recruited two German engineers who did the engineering work and patterned their design after the iron arch bridge across the Rhine at Koblenz (1864). One would like to know much more about Messrs Flad and Pfeifer and their careers prior to their work on the Eads Bridge. Further, it is not clear just what advance- ments Eads made in sinking the pneumatic cassions to bedrock nor what influence his work had on others. The technique was used by W. Roebling on the Brooklyn Bridge, but this is not mentioned in the text.

This is a very readable book that should appeal to both specialists and general readers.

EMORY KEMP

* Classical Antiquity

Euclid. Les Eklments. Greek text with French translation and notes by Georges J. Kayas. Two volumes. Volume I: Books I-VI, XI- XIII. xxxv + 226 + 258 pp. Volume II: Books VII-X. xxvii + 166 + 186 pp., figures, in- dexes. Paris: Centre national de la recherche scientifique, 1978. Fr 420.

Why was this book produced? To make available J. L. Heiberg's Greek text of the Elements? But for considerably less cost one can obtain the four volumes of the new Teubner edition, which, unlike the edition of

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