From Insight to Innovation: Engineering Ideas That Transformed America in the Twentieth Century by David P. Billington Jr. (review).

Abstract

Reviewed by: From Insight to Innovation: Engineering Ideas That Transformed America in the Twentieth Century by David P. Billington Jr. Arthur Daemmrich (bio) From Insight to Innovation: Engineering Ideas That Transformed America in the Twentieth Century By David P. Billington Jr. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2020. Pp. 336. In this well-crafted history of major twentieth-century engineering-based technologies, David Billington Jr., covers dams, the national highway system, skyscrapers, nuclear power, and jet engines before shifting to development of transistors, microchips, personal computers, and the internet. Written with a generally educated reader in mind, Billington's text includes nicely rendered line drawings and illustrations. Unusually for a historical text, the author includes boxes in each chapter with technical descriptions and some mathematical and chemical formulas, presented in clear and understandable prose. Billington does not present technology as proceeding under its own inexorable logic, instead giving primacy to the engineers who developed and deployed key insights. He introduces these engineers—including a few women, like Marilyn Jorgenson Reece, who is covered in a chapter on "Highways and Skyscrapers"—with some brief context on their backgrounds. While the book does not go into any great biographical depth, Billington does not shy away from honest assessments, like that of William Shockley's racist views of intelligence. However, the focus throughout is on the advances in technology and engineering, not the engineers, changes to engineering education over time, or who becomes an engineer in America. The book concludes with several broad insights. First, historical engineering projects left physical legacies and created path-dependency that is often overlooked. Second, the government has a large and ongoing role in the development of major technology systems, both as a direct sponsor of large projects and as a purchaser, primarily through the military for the examples of transistors and microchips. Third, largescale engineering should be more attentive to the environment in the future. None of these will surprise readers of Technology and Culture. The audience for this book is not entirely clear, in part because its approach [End Page 1262] to the history of technology is rather retrograde. The book's chapters each stand more or less on their own, and there is little overall narrative or analysis across the technologies and systems described. There are hints at political choices for each area, but these are quickly set aside and presented without historical depth. The reader gets a sense that political and policy tradeoffs are important—for example between the environment and employment as exemplified by dams, or between energy generation and human health risks as exemplified by nuclear power—but does not learn that design and engineering decisions were shaped deeply by those debates. The book would be stronger if it had also explored changes over time to the ways in which public concerns with technological systems have been raised and resolved. Likewise, major topics in recent scholarship in the history of technology are largely absent. Little attention and no voice is given to people and communities displaced by the large technological systems described. Nor does the book give attention to inclusion and involvement (or lack thereof) of women and People of Color in engineering. Readers are not given a discussion of racist decisions, such as the location of highways that dispossessed Black Americans and broke up previously stable communities. Similarly, despite ostensibly being a book about innovation, the book does not explicitly analyze or offer insights on how to think about innovation. Consumers make no appearance in the book, even when discussing the personal computer and the internet. Billington sidesteps the maintenance and unintended economic consequences of the dams, roads, and power systems he describes. Instead, the book explains how dams, roads, nuclear power, jet engines, transistors, microchips, and the internet work and gives quick introductions to the lead engineers for key technology milestones of the twentieth century. It succeeds admirably in this. But who is seeking that set of historical insights separated from the political, policy, consumer market, and other factors that have drawn the attention of historians and sociologists for the past fifty years? Ironically, even while opening one set of black boxes and describing in lucid and approachable language how various technologies...