Moving Targets: Elliott-Automation and the Dawn of the Computer Age in Britain, 1947-1967 (review)

Abstract

738 about new approaches to regional transport needs. Put simply, why did the private automobile again triumph, again at taxpayer expense? In this interesting exploration, I wished Nunnally had also drawn on history; Christine Meisner Rosen explored similar issues in The Limits of Power: Great Fires and the Process of City Growth in America (1986). The other well-built chapter is the only one by a historian. John Anfinson looks at two earlier and pivotal episodes when Minneapolis collided with its own river. His essay offers some perspective on remembering and forgetting events both pivotal and passing. In the Gilded Age, Minneapolis became a major center for flour milling, thanks to the Saint Anthony Falls at the city’s center. But in 1869, a new miller tried to get into the business by building a tunnel under the river, diverting a portion of the water to a less-crowded site downstream. Instead the tunnel collapsed, drawing into its bed nearly the entire flow of the Mississippi. This disaster threatened the rationale for the city itself, and the problem continued, more or less, until the Army Corps of Engineers built a solution across the river in 1876. Anfinson also explores Minneapolis’s tangled efforts to use the Mississippi both to derive safe drinking water and dispose of wastewater—a contradiction that claimed many victims for too long. Anfinson tells both stories well, and his implicit conclusion suggests this book will languish unread: we are better at forgetting. Less-useful chapters here include a potted history of urban planning by Roger Miller that misses (and misreads) much of the historians’ literature on this subject, and an opening chapter by Thomas Fisher. An architect, Fisher ventures into history with an extended rumination on how American engineering—indeed American society—shifted into a dangerous “fracture-critical”mode during and after the 1950s. Long on posturing and moralizing, the essay substitutes coincidence and conjecture for evidence. For that matter, none of the contributors shows any awareness of the work of Henry Petroski, a distinguished civil engineer with a special interest in bridges and the country’s leading authority on failure in engineering.