Technology and Culture

Robert C. Post

This year in Lisbon, SHOT concludes a fiftieth-anniversary commemoration that began in 2007 in Washington, D.C. Fifty years. While attending a meeting of the American Society of Engineering Education at Cornell University in 1957, Mel Kranzberg announced his intention “to start our own society and our own journal.” The next year, SHOT was chartered in Cleveland and the first annual meeting took place at the Smithsonian Institution. This series of events took place in a historic context, naturally, and there have been other recent golden anniversaries. My favorites include publication of On the Road and On the Beach, books emblematic of the temper of the latter 1950s. So, too, The Affluent Society and Parkinson’s Law. A review in this issue of Technology and Culture reckons 2008 as “the fiftieth birthday of the history of the book as a field of academic research” (p. 782). Then there is the fiftieth anniversary of the Common Market, the International Geophysical Year, the Los Angeles Dodgers, Little Rock, Sputnik, and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration—and President Dwight Eisenhower’s appointment of T. Keith Glennan as NASA Administrator. This particular fiftieth anniversary is especially meaningful in SHOT annals, for not only did Glennan play a crucial role—as president of Case Institute of Technology—in providing Kranzberg with “the time and material assistance” to get SHOT off the ground, Mel played a crucial role in assuring that NASA would have a“commitment to history.”1

Still another fiftieth anniversary deserving attention in the context of SHOT’s founding is the anniversary of the bridge soaring across the straits between Lake Huron and Lake Michigan and providing ready access to Michigan’s upper peninsula, noted for its mineral riches, its vacationland, and its university in Houghton known in SHOT circles as “Tundra Tech.” Just as SHOT is linked to NASA via Kranzberg’s professional and personal relationship with Glennan, it is linked to this bridge via his plan to launch SHOT under a succession of eminent chief executives who would attract attention to the new organization, and attract support. The designer of the Mackinac Straits Bridge was David B. Steinman, an illustrious civil engineer during an epoch when ever more dramatic suspension bridges captured popular fancy. Steinman also became the president of SHOT, the second in a succession that began with William Fielding Ogburn and after Steinman continued with Lynn White jr., Cyril Stanley Smith, and Peter Drucker.

Each of these men was known beyond his own professional precincts, each in effect a public face for his profession, and that was quite according to plan. While Mel Kranzberg had no thought of imbuing SHOT with a “disciplinary ideology” (contrary to a loopy assertion in a recent issue of History and Technology), during the early years he most certainly called the shots about organizational strategy and structure. In the 1980s, as he recounted to me and to John Staudenmaier the conversation with Carl Condit when he first aired the idea of “our own society and our own journal,” Condit’s response was “Okay, Mel, it’s your idea, you do it.”2 Some thirty years after the event, maybe Mel was just telling a story. But whether or not Condit spoke these exact words, they certainly convey an accurate sense of SHOT’s one-man-show reality. Of course Kranzberg sought advice on important issues, consulting trusted friends such as Condit and John Rae, and on one occasion he even called for a plebiscite to determine the name of the journal that he was arranging to have published by Wayne State University Press in Detroit.3 But when it came to filling key offices, when it came to conferring or withholding actual power and status in the new society, Mel’s say is what counted.

Among his academic cohort, the man who had the most prestige and to whom he listened most attentively was Lynn White jr., and it was White who Mel had in mind as the first president of SHOT. But White demurred. He had accepted a UCLA professorship after fifteen years as president of Mills College, and he was busy preparing courses as well as trying to distill into one book“everything I know and some things I merely suspect.”4 For much of 1958 White and Kranzberg traded thoughts about other possible candidates, including Roger Burlingame, Robert Merton, Richard Shryock, and Abbott Payson Usher. Acting on Mel’s behalf, essentially as a one-man nominating committee, John Rae knew exactly what was expected of him when provided with “the necessary ‘hints.’”5

Most of Kranzberg’s hints had been about historians of one sort or another, and none of these had panned out. But the name of an eminent sociologist had also come up, as well as the name of an engineer. While Kranzberg had a benign view of engineers in general (indeed, he envisioned engineers as SHOT’s primary constituency), he told White that he “tend[ed] to view sociologists with suspicion.” He also added this remark, however: “I recognize that one of the strong points of our organization is that it is interdisciplinary.”6 And so it happened that SHOT’s first president was Ogburn, who had retired a few years earlier as the Sewell L. Avery Distinguished Service Professor of Sociology at the University of Chicago. Though Mel had known Ogburn only by reputation, as a man for whom “technology and its consequences were at the center of his intellectual career,”7 they hit it off well at the first annual meeting in Washington in December 1958. But Ogburn was not young, nor vigorous—born in 1886, he had served as president of the American Sociological Society thirty years before and had held demanding appointments with both the Hoover and the Roosevelt administrations—and he died after only a few months in office. And thus was set in motion a plan that Mel later said was on his mind from the outset, “alternating academicians and nonacademicians,” men of eminence as scholars with men of eminence in engineering or applied science.8

Kranzberg had described David Steinman in the December 1958 issue of the SHOT Newsletter (the premier issue) as a man who “had revolutionized the artistic, engineering, and scientific aspects of bridge building in the more than 400 bridges he has built on five continents.” The newest was the bridge across the Straits of Mackinac, and its completion had brought Steinman at age seventy-two (he was a few days older than Ogburn) considerable acclaim. Kranzberg had never met Steinman, but of course knew of him from his “works” and also from all the fanfare about “Big Mack,” including a well-circulated article that began: “Few men have lived who could match Dr. Steinman in achievement.”9 Most important,he knew of him from a close friend in Cleveland, Sara Ruth Watson. Watson was a Western Reserve University Ph.D. who taught a course in the history of civil engineering along with courses in English literature at Fenn College, a Cleveland engineering school. (Fenn became part of Cleveland State University in 1965.)10

Sara Ruth’s father, Wilbur J. Watson, headed a prominent Cleveland engineering firm and also wrote books celebrating bridges as instruments and emblems of civilization. Among these was Bridges in History and Legend (1937), an elegant fine-press volume coauthored with his daughter Sara Ruth, illustrated by her sister Emily, and with an introduction by William E. Wickenden, who was Glennan’s predecessor as president of Case Institute of Technology.11 Like Wilbur Watson, David Steinman was interested in the history of bridges as well as structural design, and in 1941 he too had enlisted Sara Ruth Watson as coauthor of a book about bridges as “the fulfillment of human dreams and hopes and aspirations.”12 Chapter 11 was titled “The Roeblings and the Brooklyn Bridge,”and four years later—with the encouragement of Lewis Mumford—Harcourt, Brace published Steinman’s 300,000-word manuscript on the Roeblings, The Builders of the Bridge. Henry Petroski, in a book which includes a keen critical assessment of Steinman and his work (and who I will cite or quote often from here on), tells how he even toyed with the notion of writing a screenplay.13

Steinman grew up on New York’s Lower East Side, under the approach to the Brooklyn Bridge, just as a second East River bridge, the Williamsburg Bridge, was under construction nearby; he was fond of calling these two bridges his “surrogate parents.” Something of a mathematical protégé, he graduated from the City College of New York in 1906 at age twenty, and he received a civil engineering degree from Columbia University three years later with a thesis on the “Design of the Henry Hudson Bridge as a Steel Arch” (a bridge across the Spuyten Duyvil Creek connecting Manhattan and the Bronx which actually materialized in 1936). He wrote his doctoral dissertation,“Suspension Bridges and Cantilevers: Their Economic Proportions and Limiting Spans,”while teaching civil engineering at the University of Idaho, and then in 1917 he returned to New York to become professor of civil and mechanical engineering at City College. He worked briefly for the New York Central Railroad, assisted the eminent Gustav Lindenthal in the design of the Hell Gate Bridge, and then set himself up as a consultant. His big break came in 1924 when he was offered a partnership by Holton D. Robinson, whose earlier projects had included work on the Williamsburg Bridge. Their first commission was the design of the Ponte Hercílio Luz connecting the Brazilian state of Santa Catarina with its capital on the island of Florianópolis (at the time the longest suspension bridge in South America), their second was the Carquinez Strait Bridge (the first major bridge on San Francisco Bay), and subsequently the firm of Robinson and Steinman designed hundreds of other bridges, as Mel Kranzberg would note in the SHOT Newsletter.

Steinman had a dream. In 1926 he proposed a bridge across the Narrows at the entrance to New York Harbor called “The Liberty Bridge,” with 800-foot towers (“higher than the Woolworth Building”) and a 4,620-foot main span, along with observation decks, an elaborate clarion, and Gothic tracery. It was to be a privately financed toll bridge, in the manner of many bridges built during the boomtimes of the late 1920s, notably the Ambassador Bridge connecting Detroit and Windsor, Ontario. But New York’s powerful Congressman Fiorello H. La Guardia objected to such means of financing, and Petroski tells us that Steinman “did not have the ear of Robert Moses.”14 Steinman’s dream died hard: A rendering of The Liberty Bridge appeared as the frontispiece of his 1941 book with Sara Ruth Watson, and a brochure issued by his firm in the late 1940s still had this rendering of “the world’s greatest engineering achievement.” As a sort of consolation prize, Steinman won a $9.4 million contract to refurbish the Brooklyn Bridge, strengthening the trusswork and removing the tracks for trolleys in order to create more lanes for motor vehicles. (The New Yorker ran a characteristically evocative feature [17 May 1952] with “a Boy Scout who blew taps” for the trolleys that had been running since 1898.) For the site where he had envisioned his own Liberty Bridge, however, Othmar Ammann—who also designed the George Washington Bridge and whom Steinman regarded with intense rivalry—would design the Verrazano Narrows Bridge, erected in the early 1960s. As for Steinman’s de facto crowning achievement, it was a little less imposing than what he had planned for the Narrows (552-foot towers, a 3,800-foot main span), but it was the world’s longest suspension bridge at the time of its completion, five miles between anchorages, and, at $100 million, surely the costliest, nearly four times more than the Golden Gate. It was not the monument Steinman had dreamed of for thirty years, but it was a great bridge and certainly, as he put it himself, “a triumph of science and art.”15

Petroski writes that “fully understanding how bridges have been conceived, financed, and built requires a fully integrated view of technology, society, and culture.”16 The story of the Mackinac Bridge is filled with political intrigues and seemingly overwrought claims about “public necessity,” as would be any story of a $100 million public-works project, especially in a part of a country usually perceived as wilderness.17 Begun in May 1954 and opened in November 1957, the bridge was materializing at exactly the same time as Mel Kranzberg was gathering his thoughts and energies for a new organization “to promote the study of the development of technology and its relations with society and culture.” Formal dedication of the bridge by Governor G. Mennen “Soapy” Williams took place on 26 June 1958,four weeks after Kranzberg filed SHOT’s incorporation papers at the Cuyahoga County Courthouse in Cleveland. Six months after that, Steinman’s name as first vice president was part of Rae’s slate of SHOT officers that Kranzberg brought to a vote. Four months later, Ogburn was dead and Steinman was startled “to be suddenly catapulted into the duties of the presidency of our organization.”18

The Mackinac Bridge.

Steinman suffered a stroke in May 1960 and died in August. During his time as a SHOT officer, he had been drawn into the negotiations with Wayne State, and he had also provided a list of “prominent consulting engineers” who might be persuaded to support SHOT as sponsors ($50) or associates ($100) by means of a letter over his signature. He had begun thinking about a presidential address and had sent Kranzberg a paper on the Brooklyn Bridge to consider for publication in T&C. But, even though there is a substantial file of Steinman correspondence in Kranzberg’s papers, there is little evidence that he had much of an influence in shaping the fledgling SHOT—and, indeed, Mel confessed to Lynn White that Steinman was “content to rubber-stamp all the activities which I performed in his name and in the name of the organization.” He certainly served a vital purpose in enhancing SHOT’s visibility by virtue of his own notoriety, however, just as did the presence on the advisory council of ex-president Herbert Hoover and Senator Ralph Flanders of Vermont, a former president of the ASME. And, even if President Steinman never presided over SHOT in any literal sense (nor does it appear, for that matter, that he and Kranzberg ever met), he did “help present the needs of the society” to important people, in exactly the role that Kranzberg and White had initially envisioned. Moreover, there was much about his career to make him worthy of attention by historians of technology, much that resonates with classic themes in SHOT’s literature.

Steinman was a rather peculiar character personally. He never spoke of his Lithuanian Jewish parents and seems to have wanted to suggest, in Petroski’s words, “that his beginnings were in the stone and steel of a mythic bridge rather than in the flesh of immigrants.” About the Brooklyn Bridge, Steinman waxed poetic:

Against the city’s gleaming spires,
Above the ships that ply the stream,
A bridge of haunting beauty stands—
Fulfillment of an artist’s dream.

From deep beneath the tidal flow
Two granite towers proudly rise
To hold the pendant span aloft—
A harp against the sunset skies.

Peculiar, too, was his apparent desire “to measure his life by his documented degrees, honors, and achievements, and almost to lust after any recognition or achievement that he did not yet have.”19 Though by all accounts a kindly mentor and considerate with subordinates, he was not universally popular among peers. His egocentrism was especially evident in contrast to Ammann’s storied modesty. Robert Vogel—newly hired as the Smithsonian’s curator of civil engineering—visited Steinman in 1958, in his New York office in the Roebling Building on Liberty Street. What he recalls most vividly were “office walls decked solidly, floor to ceiling and wall to wall, with certificates, awards, diplomas, and medals.” Even though tangible evidence of his accomplishments was ubiquitous, symbols of rank and status meant a great deal to Steinman. He pushed for a system of licensing engineers on the basis of formal education and for using formal modes of address as in Latin cultures: “Engr.” with personal names, like “Dr.”

Signing his own letters “Engr. D. B. Steinman” may have just seemed quirky, but the idea of licensing—of emulating a closed profession on the order of the American Medical Association—aroused real dissension among leaders of the so-called founder societies, especially the American Society of Civil Engineers. In The Revolt of the Engineers, Edwin Layton writes that many of these elders “considered licensing a form of collectivism little different from unionism.” And Layton also notes a more compelling reason for opposition. Many accomplished engineers lacked even a college degree, let alone a doctorate like Steinman, and men without degrees had become managers with no hands-on relation to the profession. “If the profession were to be reconstructed around the idea of licensing, many such men would lose their influence.”20 The conflict, which became especially divisive within an organization called the Engineers Council for Professional Development, often pitted Steinman against William Wickenden, the president of Case Institute, who was adamantly opposed to licensing.

In 1934, when it became evident that Wickenden’s side would prevail, Steinman and fellow dissidents broke away and formed their own organization, the National Society of Professional Engineers. Although it remained relatively small (30,000 members in 1954), the NSPE pushed successfully for the adoption and enforcement of state licensing laws, and, more important, it “represented a power center outside the founder societies and an important source of agitation for professional ethics.” Even though Steinman was anything but liberal in his view of such matters as collective bargaining, Layton suggests that his organization “functioned to some extent as the conscience of the profession.”21

Just as historians of technology are apt to ask “for whom?” when the word progress comes up, a similar question may be asked about conscience: “whose?” When it came to ethical issues, Steinman was often regarded by leaders of the engineering establishment as something of a scold, and it is not difficult to discern one root of his problems with those men. There was another. Just as the failure of the Quebec Bridge early in the century had cast a pall over perceptions of large-scale cantilever designs, the failure of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge in 1940 had done the same for long-span suspension bridges. If anyone were to be directly blamed for that calamity, it was Leon Moisseiff, who had been responsible for the basic structural design, and the design of the Golden Gate Bridge as well, and had been seriously considered for the same role with a bridge at Mackinac Straits. While Steinman was not involved in the official investigation of the Tacoma Narrows disaster, he had a different explanation for what had happened than did Ammann, who had a key role in the investigation. It had to do with what Steinman called “critical wind velocity.” Forty-two miles an hour had been sufficient to induce catastrophic oscillations at Tacoma Narrows. Steinman was confident that his Mackinac Bridge had a “perfectly assured aerodynamic stability for all wind velocities up to infinity.” The contested technical analysis need not be recounted here, for it has already been set forth with admirable clarity by Petroski. But a few lines are worth repeating:

Among the reasons for Steinman’s lack of recognition by some segments of the engineering establishment must certainly have been his insistence on keeping the embarrassment of the Tacoma Narrows collapse more in the forefront of discussion than many engineers, such as Ammann, would have liked. The more it was talked about, the more attention it might call to the underlying influence of his George Washington Bridge, and to other spans built in the design climate of the 1930s. In the early-to-mid 1940s, Steinman’s desire to understand and articulate theories on the stability of suspension bridges, not to mention to build still larger ones, had brought plenty of attention to the most ignominious event in engineering history.22

Steinman, it seemed, would not allow the profession simply to forget about failure or the possibility of failure, and this explains a lot of his difficulties with “some segments of the engineering establishment.” A profile in Engineering News-Record not long before he died referred to a “loss of affection” among contemporaries because of a personality that nobody could just “take or leave.”23 Though he had received medals from the ASCE as early as 1923 and even in 1959, that organization made dozens of awards every year and his obituary in Civil Engineering treated him as “just another dues-paying member.” And Engineering News-Record delivered what Petroski calls an ultimate “kick in the casket”: “His bridges, which will remain as great monuments to him, probably would have been designed by others if he had not come along.” Others? More than anything, Steinman had wanted people to understand that designing bridges was “one of the most specialized of all crafts; only a handful of men in the world today are capable of building a large span.” Even Steinman the historian did not escape criticism. In his own book on the Brooklyn Bridge, David McCullough wrote that Steinman’s “was based on superficial research and contains many inaccuracies.”24

Steinman received countless respectful obituaries—both a regular obituary and a news item in the New York Times—and surely he did not go to his grave without having amassed an extraordinary number of well-deserved honors. From a list that fills two closely spaced columns in the 1959 edition of Who’s Who in Engineering and includes the Gold Medal of the Americas and the Legion of Honor, one is worth singling out in conclusion because it is so freighted with irony. In 1941, The American Institute of Steel Construction inaugurated the J. Lloyd Kimbrough Gold Medal, named for the AISC’s first president to honor “an individual who has made an outstanding contribution to the structural steel industry through his or her design work.” The first recipient was Robert Moses, the next was Steinman, and afterward there was his nemesis Othmar Ammann.

What was very likely Steinman’s fondest obituary appeared in the journal published by the society that endowed him with his final honorific, Technology and Culture. Clearly, the memorialist saw Steinman through different eyes than whoever it was at Engineering News-Record that delivered a kick in the casket. To the woman who remembered a happy and respectful literary collaboration, Sara Ruth Watson, Steinman was a modern-day Renaissance man, and she quoted from his essay titled “The Spiritual Challenge of the Atomic Age”:

St. Thomas Aquinas once said that there are only three really important endeavors in life; to have faith in the right things, to hope for the right things, to love the right things. . . . Our faith, hope, and love for the good, the true, and the beautiful find their expressions in science, religion, and art. . . . All three are but different aspects of the same reality, of the same feeling for the sublime, rooted in the supreme mystery of being.25

The sublime. When David Steinman died, his design for a bridge across the Tagus at Lisbon had been accepted, and the Ponte Salazar (now Ponte 25 de Abril)—so often compared to the Golden Gate Bridge—would materialize in 1966. There were plans on his drawing board for double-decking the Golden Gate for rapid transit, for linking Denmark and Sweden, Siberia and Alaska, for bridging both the Bosporus at Istanbul and the Strait of Messina between Scylla and Charybdis.

In his own way, Mel Kranzberg was no less a dreamer than David Steinman. For Mel, SHOT materialized, T&C materialized, but not his dream of a major research center at Case. The Tagus was bridged, the Bosporus eventually, but never the Strait of Messina. Faith, hope, and love were no less a part of Kranzberg’s vocabulary than Steinman’s. Steinman was also something of a mystic, which is just about the last thing anyone would have said about Kranzberg, trained as a French historian with implicit faith in the Enlightenment. But he certainly would have thought well of any man, as Sara Ruth Watson described Steinman, “in whom were integrated the scientist, artist, lecturer, educator, poet, and humanist.”26 And it is easy to understand why Kranzberg would have believed that such a man would make a valuable collaborator as he established his new organization, designed as a bridge, and not just metaphorically. One can imagine that he especially liked the final two lines in Steinman and Watson’s Bridges and Their Builders, which might also be suitable for SHOT in 2008 as it Looks Beyond:

From dream to deed, and from that deed again
To further dream, and deed more mighty yet.

1. See Melvin Kranzberg, “T. Keith Glennan (1905–1995),” Technology and Culture 37 (July 1996): 659–62. These were the last words of Mel’s ever published in T&C; this same issue included a set of essays titled “In Memoriam: Melvin Kranzberg (1917–1995).”

2. Robert C. Post, “Missionary: An Interview with Melvin Kranzberg,” Invention and Technology, winter 1989, 38; John Staudenmaier, Technology’s Storytellers: Reweaving the Human Fabric (Cambridge, Mass., 1985), 1.

3.See Robert C. Post, “History and the Society for the History of Technology,” Looking Back/Looking Beyond (SHOT Fiftieth Anniversary Meeting Site), “NSF Workshop,” available online at (accessed 23 April 2008).

4. Lynn White jr. to Carl Condit, 14 April 1958, Melvin Kranzberg Papers, Record Group 266, Archives Center, National Museum of American History. White’s Medieval Technology and Social Change was published by Oxford in 1962. A decade later he served successively as president of the History of Science Society, the Medieval Academy of America, and the American Historical Association.

5. Melvin Kranzberg to Lynn White jr., 15 April 1958, Kranzberg Papers. Mel had also named a youthful Edward Lurie to the nominating committee, but reported to White that “he was so busy finishing his book on Agassiz . . . that he was out of contact with the world.” Lurie, who died 8 March 2008, outlived all but two of Kranzberg’s initial group of advisors, Thomas Hughes and Morrell “Bo” Heald.

6. Kranzberg to White, 19 September 1958, Kranzberg Papers.

7. Rudi Volti, “William F. Ogburn, Social Change with Respect to Culture and Original Nature,” Technology and Culture 45 (April 2004): 396.

8. Kranzberg to White, 30 August 1960, Kranzberg Papers.

9. Robert Daley, “Dreamer in Concrete and Steel,” New York Times Magazine, 5 January 1958.

10. Sara Ruth Watson deserves to be much better known. Her course in the history of civil engineering, begun in 1940, was one of only two in the nation (the other was at Purdue), and ultimately she was a recipient of the American Society of Civil Engineers’ History and Heritage Award, not long after Carl Condit and not long before David McCullough. She was also a biographer of the British novelist Vita Sackville-West, Virginia Woolf’s lover, and she was the very first person to join SHOT as a charter member rather than an appointee to the executive committee or advisory council. Mel knew Sara Ruth as Sally, and there is a suggestion of their cordiality in a remark with which he concluded a letter after they had not seen one another for a while: “Maybe it’s because you don’t go to Temple and I don’t go to bars!”

11. Wilbur J. Watson and Sara Ruth Watson, Bridges in History and Legend (Cleveland, 1937). On Wickenden, see Bruce E. Seely, “SHOT, the History of Technology, and Engineering Education,” Technology and Culture 36 (October 1995): 739–72.

12. David B. Steinman and Sara Ruth Watson, Bridges and Their Builders (New York, 1941), xv.

13. Henry Petroski, Engineers of Dreams: Great Bridge Builders and the Spanning of America (New York, 1995). Petroski calls the Steinman biography by William Ratigan, Highways over Broad Waters: Life and Times of David B. Steinman, Bridgebuilder (Grand Rapids, Mich., 1959), “hagiolatrous,” and indeed it is: here he is depicted as “the leading builder of bridges in recorded time” (p. 13). In his review for Technology and Culture 2 (spring 1961): 204–5, John Kouwenhoven wrote that “it is deplorable that such an interesting man and such notable achievements should be so shabbily presented to the general reader.” Shabby though the book may be, anyone writing about Steinman must, for better or worse, pay attention to Ratigan.

14. Petroski, 351.

15. Steinman, quoted in Naseem Stecker, “A Mackinac Milestone,” Michigan Bar Journal, September 2007, 19. The “between anchorages” qualification was necessary because the Golden Gate Bridge had a longer main span.

16. Petroski, 18.

17. For a narrative that is cast, not unpersuasively, in terms of “perseverance, faith, and courage,” see Lawrence A. Rubin, Bridging the Straits (Detroit, 1985).

18. Steinman to Kranzberg, 4 May 1959, Kranzberg Papers. The SHOT constitution initially stipulated that there would be a first vice president who would succeed to the presidency, and a second vice president who would then move up.

19. Petroski (n. 13 above), 328, 327. Steinman wrote and published a great deal of poetry, some of which ended up getting reprinted in the Congressional Record. The poem quoted here, which carries on for several more verses, was titled “Brooklyn Bridge: Nightfall.”

20. Edwin T. Layton, The Revolt of the Engineers: Social Responsibility and the American Engineering Profession (Baltimore, rev. ed. 1986), 237.

21. Layton, 239.

22. Petroski, 356. In the Dictionary of American Biography entry by C. G. B. Garrett, one reads that “it seems questionable . . . whether Steinman fully understood the problem of torsional oscillations.” But contrast a more authoritative remark by Petroski (p. 368) about a 1954 article by Steinman in American Scientist: “Forty years after its appearance, the paper is remembered by engineers and scientists alike as having been a definitive resolution of the problem of suspension bridge oscillations, both practically and theoretically.”

23. “What Measure for this Man?” Engineering News-Record, 25 June 1959, 57–59.

24. David McCullough, The Great Bridge: The Epic Story of the Building of the Brooklyn Bridge (New York, 1972), 608–09. To temper the negativity, it is perhaps also worth quoting Justin Spivey’s remark that Steinman “retains his reputation as an engineer admirably capable of communicating with others outside his profession” (Review of Thomas Winpenny, Manhattan Bridge: The Troubled Story of a New York Monument, in IA: The Journal of the Society for Industrial Archeology 30, no. 2 [2004]: 49).

25. Quoted in Sara Ruth Watson, “An Appreciation of David Bernard Steinman (1886–1960),” Technology and Culture 2 (winter 1961): 23–27.

26. Watson, 25. In an oft-published 1980s photo of Kranzberg posed in front of a bookcase in his Georgia Tech office, on the shelf over his shoulder one sees the Ratigan biography of Steinman right between Hugh Aitken’s Syntony and Spark and Edwin Layton’s The Revolt of the Engineers.

Bob Post was the second editor of Technology and Culture and the twenty-first president of SHOT. Mackinac is pronounced Mackinaw.

Copyright© 2008, the Society for the History of Technology