Engineers’ Achievements - Pushing the Limits: New Adventures in Engineering - page 164

Each list contained a single bridge, with the first list's San Francisco- Oakland Bay Bridge,
which opened in 1936, being displaced by the nearby Golden Gate Bridge, which opened just
six months later, in 1937. The mid-century list recognized the greater engineering achievement of
the now lesser-known structure, but the late-century list featured the notable but when-constructed
state-of-the-art span that had by then become the outstanding tourist symbol of San Francisco. (The
Golden Gate had also been passed over for the six years older George Washington Bridge in the
design of a stamp commemorating the centennial of American engineering in 1952.) Engineers are
as subject as anyone to fashion and short-term memory: Four of the seven wonders on the revised
ASCE list were achievements of the second half of the twentieth century. We all tend to forget what
has not been recently in the news.
The National Academy of Engineering, which celebrated its twentyfifth anniversary in 1989,
elected to mark the occasion by announcing a ranked list of ten outstanding achievements of the
period of its existence. These were judged to be:
Moon Landing
Application Satellites
Microprocessor
Computer-Aided Design and Manufacturing
CAT Scan
Advanced Composite Materials
Jumbo Jet
Lasers
Fiber-Optic Communication
Genetically Engineered Products
The list was not greeted with unanimity, especially among civil engineers, who saw as also de-
serving of recognition such neglected achievements as the cable-stayed bridge, the tubular sky-
scraper, and the interstate highway system, which, although not exactly invented during the period,
were then certainly pushed to new limits. Indeed, it is a characteristic of engineering that, whatever
the period, new achievements will overshadow the old. Something different in kind can always steal
the spotlight from something different in scale.
In a booklet promoting the academy's outstanding engineering achievements, the twenty-five-
year period ending in 1989 was described as one that “witnessed more advancement in technology
and, consequently, greater change in the lives of people than any previous 25-year period in re-
corded history.” This sentiment echoed that expressed ninety years earlier in the New York Times,