Engineers’ Achievements - Pushing the Limits: New Adventures in Engineering - page 162

of the millennium, albeit each declared finished one year early. Anything comparable that happened
in 2000 was not to be so commemorated, in the popular press at least, for another century, if not
another millennium. Should it have been any great surprise then that engineering and scientific or-
ganizations also threw reason to the wind—along with an opportunity to educate the public about
how we use numbers to count and mark things—and jumped on the millennial bandwagon?
Lists are always interesting, of course, even to the supernumerate— and even though they realize
the arbitrariness of numbers, including “round” numbers ending in 0 or 5. It is only an accident of
our base-ten system and the multiple recurrence of 5, we might tell ourselves rationally, that top-ten
lists or twenty-fifth anniversaries are special, but we get caught up in the process of compiling lists,
perhaps because they appear to have a rationality of their own, a beginning and an end, an ordering,
a definiteness, a decisiveness, a significance. The phenomenon is nothing new.
A survey conducted seventy years previously by the American Society for the Promotion of
Engineering Education sought to identify “the outstanding engineers of the past twenty-five years;
also those who might fairly be considered the greatest engineers of all time.” In addition to the still
familiar Edison and Ford listed among the outstanding engineers of the first quarter of the twentieth
century, there were John F. Stevens and George W. Goethals, who played central roles in the con-
struction of the Panama Canal, completed in 1914. These two men were also identified as among
the greatest engineers of all time, but a 1974 article about Stevens in Civil Engineering magazine
was entitled “The Forgotten Engineer.” (Ferdinand de Lesseps, the French entrepreneur who pushed
the Central American canal project, as he had earlier the Suez Canal, was named the fifth greatest
engineer of all time, even though he was not even an engineer.) Lists are fickle.
Number ten on the list of outstanding engineers of the first quarter of the twentieth century was
Ralph Modjeski, the builder of Philadelphia's Benjamin Franklin Bridge, completed for the nation's
150th birthday, in 1926, and thus a name still quite familiar in 1930. Two bridge builders were also
included on the list of greatest engineers of all time, but that is not to say that they got any re-
spect. James Buchanan Eads was misidentified as William B. Eads, and a John L. Roebling was
listed—presumably the John A. Roebling who had designed the Brooklyn Bridge.
Also included on the list, among Archimedes and Leonardo, were Charles Steinmetz and John
Ericsson. Steinmetz, now a name virtually unknown among younger generations, in the early twen-
tieth century was synonymous with engineering. The stooped-over, cigar-smoking character who
explained technology over the still infant radio and who ran for public office in New York State,
where he worked for General Electric, seemed to be universally recognized as the genius who
brought electricity to the masses. His theoretical calculations made long-distance transmission prac-
tical, and his production of lightning in the laboratory made theater. As late as the mid-twentieth
century, any engineering student might affectionately be called “Steinmetz,” but the allusion would
be lost by 2000.
Similarly, John Ericsson is now hardly a household name. Yet this builder of the Monitor ironclad
“revolutionized navigation by his invention of the screw propeller,” as stated on the little-known but
prominent monument to him that stands in Washington, D.C., to this day, beside the Potomac River,
next to the Arlington Memorial Bridge, and a stone's throw from the Lincoln Memorial. Lists do
not have the staying power of monuments, however.