The Civilized Engineer - Softcover

Florman, Samuel

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0312025599 ISBN 13: 9780312025595

Verlag: St. Martin's Griffin, 1988

Inhaltsangabe

Civil engineer Samuel Forman's The Civilized Engineer is aimed at both those observing and commenting externally on engineering, and the practicing engineer--to reveal something of the art behind great engineering achievements, and to stimulate debate upon the author's hypothesis that "in its moment of ascendance, engineering is faced with the trivialization of its purpose and the debasement of its practice."

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Samuel C. Florman, a civil engineer, is a principal in a major New York-area construction company. In addition to scores of articles, Mr. Florman is the author of the novel The Aftermath, as well as The Introspective Engineer, The Civilized Engineer, Blaming Technology, and his classic, The Existential Pleasures of Engineering. He lives in New York City.

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The Civilized Engineer

By Samuel C. Florman

St. Martin's Press

Copyright © 1987 Samuel C. Florman
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-312-02559-5

Contents

Title Page, 
Copyright Notice, 
Dedication, 
Introduction, 
1. Concrete and Kafka: A Personal Overture, 
2. The Existential Pleasures of Engineering — A Generation Later, 
3. Heritage: (1) From the Beginning, 
4. Heritage: (2) In the Age of Science, 
5. The Engineering View, 
6. Ethics: (1) Rhetoric and Good Intentions, 
7. Ethics: (2) Illusion and Change, 
8. Ethics: (3) Credo for a New Age, 
9. Loyalty, Or Why Engineering is Sometimes Like Baseball, 
10. Some Thoughts About Income — Monetary and Psychic, 
11. Educating the Public: Biting Off More Than We Can Chew, 
12. The Fall of Rome — According to the Press, 
13. The Fantasy of the Electronic Future, 
14. Down to the Sea in Print, 
15. Disasters and Decision-Making, 
16. The Deceptive Allure of Risk Analysis, 
17. Risk and the Loss of Challenger, 
18. The Civilized Engineer: (1) The Concept, 
19. The Civilized Engineer: (2) The People, 
20. The Civilized Engineer: (3) The Schooling, 
21. The Civilized Engineer: (4) Women, 
22. The Civilized Engineer: (5) Prospects for Change, 
23. Thoughts from the Dais: A Personal Coda, 
Acknowledgments, 
Notes, 
Index, 
Also by Samuel C. Florman, 
Copyright, 

CHAPTER 1

Concrete and Kafka: A Personal Overture

"I became an engineer."

Thus begins John Hersey's novel, A Single Pebble, in which the protagonist travels to pre-revolutionary China seeking a site for a dam along the Yangtze River. As he encounters a civilization little changed since the Middle Ages, the young man finds his faith in technology giving way to awe and self-doubt.

I, too, became an engineer and have spent a number of years thinking about, as well as practicing, this much misunderstood profession, albeit in less dramatic settings than the chasms of the Yangtze, and with less discouraging conclusions than Mr. Hersey's.

How does one decide to become an engineer? I made the decision in 1942 during my senior year at the Fieldston School, a sylvan campus in the Riverdale section of the Bronx, forty-five minutes by subway and footpath from where I lived in Manhattan. The idea had occurred to me earlier — especially during several visits to the 1939 World's Fair — but I was far from being the stereotypical engineer. I did not, for example, build radios, assemble models, or fiddle with car engines. Living in the city, I had no access to cars, and when some mechanical device failed in our apartment, my parents called on the building superintendent. Like my fellow students at Fieldston, I read a lot of books and wrote a lot of papers. My favorite subject by far was English, particularly a senior seminar in which we reviewed great Western literature from Aeschylus to James Joyce. Nevertheless, I did my best work in mathematics, and was gently urged by several of my teachers to consider a career in science.

There were no "two cultures" in those days and I can recall no division between students of different sorts of talents, rather mutual respect and a shared appreciation of achievement. If this sounds idyllic, well it was. Not that we lived in a state of constant elation — we were teenagers, after all — but academically the place was heaven. We knew we would follow many different career paths: the world seemed incredibly open and full of possibilities — in the arts, the sciences, and the professions. Business, however, we regarded with a scorn compounded of intellectual elitism and post-1930s radicalism. Ironically, the fathers who paid our not inconsiderable tuition were mostly hard-working small businessmen.

Of the acceptable career alternatives, science, medicine, and engineering were considered more or less on a par with law, journalism, and the arts. Excellence is what counted; our class had an abundance of it and our expectations were high. We were not surprised in later years when the most accomplished student in the class studied physics at Harvard, got his doctorate there, and ended up at Los Alamos, any more than we were when the president of the student council became a nationally syndicated newspaper columnist, ofttimes called a pundit. We were a class full of potential pundits.

Although I wanted my life's work to be creative and stimulating, I was not totally oblivious to money. A part of my Depression-bred consciousness was concerned about some day being able to support a family. For all the appeal of mathematics and physics, it wasn't clear to me how one made a living in those fields. This was even more true of writing and the arts. Business, as I have said, was out of the question, and as for medicine, needles made me queasy. So I chose engineering. Engineers, from the little I knew, studied science and used their brains. They also got jobs and earned salaries. And, after a fashion, they were cultural heroes. The newsreels that I saw every weekend between two movies at Loews 83rd Street often featured the dedication of a new TVA dam or some other impressive public work. There was much cutting of ribbons and drinking of toasts, each event celebrating a counterattack against rural dust bowls or urban slums. And when the movies themselves depicted engineers — usually in the B film, to be sure — they were stalwart men in high-laced boots engaged in heroic endeavors such as building railroads or prospecting for oil. Intellectually challenging, financially sensible, and withal a touch of romance and adventure — engineering seemed like an ideal calling.

I had never heard it suggested that engineers were lower-middle-class, eccentric, or uncultivated — today I believe the epithet is "nerd" — nor did it occur to me that anybody held such opinions. The only sour note was sounded by an uncle who observed that instead of wanting to be an engineer I should aim to be someone who hires engineers, thus implying that I was about to join an exploitable sub-class. The remark enraged my father, who had no clear idea of what engineers did but was proud to have a son who was going to enter a profession.

When it came time to select a college, I naturally thought about M.I.T. Two of my engineering-bound classmates went to that august institution and never regretted their choice. But there was something about the huge labyrinth of laboratories that made my spirit sink, and still does in spite of all the good things I know about the place. Instead, I chose Dartmouth College, whose beautiful New Hampshire campus captured my heart.

I had only the vaguest idea of how one went about getting an engineering education. According to the Dartmouth catalog it seemed that I would "go to college," earn a Bachelor of Arts degree while majoring in the sciences, and then pursue an engineering degree in graduate school. This is how General Sylvanus Thayer thought it ought to be when, in 1867, he gave Dartmouth $40,000 for the purpose of establishing the Thayer School of Engineering. As Superintendent of the U. S. Military Academy from 1817 to 1833, the general had overseen the development of that institution into a distinguished school of applied science, and in his later years he decided to endow a graduate school of engineering at a liberal arts college. He believed that before embarking upon professional training one ought to become "a gentleman." The Thayer School's two-year...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: St. Martin's Griffin
• Erscheinungsdatum: 1988
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0312025599
• ISBN 13: 9780312025595
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 276
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
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