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• W4376543707 abstract "142 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE were played by the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (set up by Congress in 1915), university engineering departments, aircraft manufacturers, the military services, airlines, professional engineer­ ing societies, and more; but we are told practically nothing about what happened within or among these groups, politically, economically, or socially. Vincenti alludes to informal “communities of practitioners”— for example, a “fastener community” involved in the development of flush riveting—that were crucial to technical progress, but again he does not flesh out the picture. Citing his “absence of background in sociology,” he says, “I make no attempt to theorize about the social process” (p. 237). Well, I see absolutely no reason why Vincenti, who has made many notable contributions during the course of a distin­ guished engineering career, should yield the floor in this humble way, least of all to sociologists. Nevertheless—despite my wish for more human drama and despite my qualms about trying to define the undefinable—I found much in this book that is worthy of attention. Samuel C. Florman Mr. Florman, a civil engineer, is vice president of Kreisler Borg Florman Construc­ tion Company, Scarsdale, New York. He is a columnist for Technology Review and his most recent book is The Civilized Engineer. The Pencil: A History of Design and Circumstance. By Henry Petroski. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1990. Pp. xi + 434; illustrations, notes, appendixes, bibliography, index. $25.00. There is a widespread and well-justified belief among engineers that their profession is underappreciated and misunderstood in the United States. Henry Petroski explains that success in engineering is achieved by making systems that serve us so well we take them for granted. Engineers only appear in the news when something they have designed fails to meet our expectations. Doctors or lawyers, on the other hand, are called in when we are unwell or in trouble and leave our immediate ken when we feel better or have won our case. We appreciate their services and are willing to pay handsomely for them. But we soon come to believe that a car so well engineered that it handles as if it were an extension of our own body or a sewage system that regularly removes our effluents without backing up is an ordinary thing that anyone can make; their designers are not known to us and we have little basis for appreciating the problems they have solved for us. In The Pencil, Petroski combines two approaches to explain the work of an engineer. He integrates a detailed account of the making of a device (the lead pencil) that is so common we take it for granted with TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 143 a history of the technologies used in pencil making. We learn that success in engineering requires that every component in the product has to be made to function together, that the necessary materials have to be located and means established to assure their availability and quality, and that methods and equipment for processing and assem­ bling the components have to be designed so as to ensure quality of the product and make the cost affordable. It took some 300 years of experimentation with design, materials, and production methods to accomplish this for the lead pencil. While revealing the substance of engineering, Petroski also shows that study of the history of a technology is empty without study of the technology itself. We find that we cannot well appreciate the many successive steps in pencil development without knowing the technical and economic reasons behind each problem that had to be overcome. Petroski is a skilled writer and he adds interest to the story of the engineering of the pencil by excursions into the biographies of the participants. In the United States these include, among others, Henry David Thoreau andJoseph Dixon. For those who like business history, he has included accounts of the commercial difficulties and successes of the principal pencil manufacturers. Some of the author’s excur­ sions into biography and history range widely, making The Pencil a rather long book. Instructors using it in history of technology courses may find that their students do not need to read it all to..." @default.
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• W4376543707 date "1992-01-01" @default.
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• W4376543707 title "The Pencil: A History of Design and Circumstance by Henry Petroski" @default.
• W4376543707 doi "https://doi.org/10.1353/tech.1992.0153" @default.
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