Technology and Culture

552 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE rate consolidation. The most important figure here is Henry Clay Payne, whose organizational talents, political abilities, and economic power thwart reform factions, labor unions, a united city council, competing transit operators, bankruptcy proceedings, and the de­ pressed economy of 1893. This publication is indicative of a new breed of historians of tech­ nology who are beginning to ask much broader questions about the role of technology in the development of American society. McShane, who has now finished his doctoral degree at Wisconsin and is cur­ rently teaching at Carnegie-Mellon, has produced an initial study whose value resides in the many unanswered questions it poses rather than in a significant contribution to the understanding of technology and reform. Raymond H. Merritt* The Tallest Tower. By Joseph Harriss. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1975. Pp. xi+257; illustrations. $10.00. Like David McCullough’s The Great Bridge, this book is concerned not alone with the engineering and technological problems of design and erection of a structure but with the larger significance—its con­ nections with the era that created it. In short, it is a sociological study of the epoch that produced the Eiffel Tower. The author, an American who-has lived much of his life in Paris, studied at the Sorbonne and at the Institut d’Etudes Politiques,joined Time as a correspondent based in Paris and later in Algiers and Brus­ sels, and is now an editor in the Paris office of Reader’s Digest. The Tallest Tower is written, not for the engineer or specialist, but for the layman. The book is easy to read (it has a breezy,journalistic style) and is spiced with humor and with human interest. The author’s thesis seems to be contained in this statement: “the bizarre structure became the epitome of its time: a compendium of engineering methods and materials developed during the first century of the In­ dustrial Revolution, it is also the most expressive statement of how one part of the human race felt about itselfat one point in history” (p. 1). The author proceeds to tell the story of the Eiffel Tower in simple, chronological order. The fair of 1889 was planned, not so much to mark the centennial of the Revolution, but to demonstrate to the world that France was economically sound and, in technological know-how, was in the forefront of modern industrial societies. It was Edouard Lockroy, minister of commerce and industry, who *Dr. Merritt is director of Cultural and Technological Studies and associate profes­ sor of history and systems design at the University of Wisconsin—Milwaukee. TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 553 took up the idea of the tower, and saw to it that Gustave Eiffel’s design was accepted. To express the new age of industrialism, new materials and methods were demanded; and Eiffel, with his proposal to build a thousand-foot tower of wrought iron, was the man to conceive and carry out these innovations. He had had thirty years’ experience in building railway bridges and other metal structures; the Pia Maria Bridge at Oporto, Spain, and the Garabit Viaduct in France are still beautiful structures. But, in spite of the reputation of its designer, and before construc­ tion was well under way, angry esthetes, artists, and intellectuals of Paris were writing protestations to the press to halt the erection ofthis ugly monster of the mechanistic, materialistic age. All Paris seemed to be outraged. Eiffel’s reply to these protests is a classic expression of functionalism: “The first principle of architectural beauty,” wrote Eif­ fel, in Le Temps, “is that the essential lines of a construction be deter­ mined by a perfect appropriateness to its use” (p. 25). Obviously the idea that “form follows function” did not originate with Louis Sulli­ van. The narrative of the construction of the tower is less exciting than that of Brooklyn Bridge and is less involved with the political and social scene because Eiffel was the typical engineer, isolated from these mainstreams of his era, and also because so carefully and meticulously had he designed every detail that the building of his tower was accomplished in two years with few problems...