Seeing like an engineer: Water projects and the mediation of the incommensurable

Technology and Culture

Volumn 49, Issue 3, 2008, Pages 531-546

  Reuss, Martin ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 50849086387     PISSN: 0040165X     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/tech.0.0049     Document Type: Review

References (18)

1. Roberta J. Magnusson, Water Technology in the Middle Ages: Cities, Monasteries, and Waterworks after the Roman Empire (Baltimore, 2001), 118-21.
2. James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven, Conn., 1998).
3. Historians who have exploited archaeological resources in water history include Magnusson (n. 1 above); Dora P. Crouch, Water Management in Ancient Greek Cities (Oxford, 1993);
4. Trevor Hodge, Roman Aqueducts and Water Supply (London, 1989);
5. André E. Guillerme, The Age of Water: The Urban Environment in the North of France, A.D. 300-1800 (College Station, Tex., 1988);
6. Terry S. Reynolds, Stronger Than a Hundred Men: A History of the Vertical Water Wheel (Baltimore, 1983), and subsequent articles;
7. Louis C. Hunter, A History of Industrial Power in the United States, 1780-1930, vol. 1: Waterpower in the Century of the Steam Engine (Charlottesville, Va., 1979);
8. and Patrick M. Malone, Canals and Industry: Engineering in Lowell, 1821-1880 (Lowell, Mass., 1983), and subsequent studies and articles. Archaeological resources for historians also include cultural resource management (CRM) reports prepared, usually by archaeologists, for various U.S. public works agencies prior to project construction. See also the reports, photographs, and illustrations of the Historic American Buildings Survey/Historic American Engineering Record (HABS/HAER). For online access, go to: http://www.loc.gov/rr/print/coll/145_habs.html (accessed 6 May 2008). There are also numerous articles dealing with water projects in IA: The Journal of the Society for Industrial Archeology and in American Canals: Bulletin of the American Canal Society.
9. Historian Mike Chrimes first drew attention to the importance of Bazalgette's contract documents and drawings; according to Chrimes, "the printed contract documents and lithographed contract drawings were part of a meticulous attention to detail in the contract procedure which are the basis of civil engineering contracts today." See Chrimes, Civil Engineering, 1839-1889: A Photographic History (Phoenix Mill, UK, 1991), 87-88.
10. Ibid., 11.
11. David E. Nye, America as Second Creation: Technology and Narratives of New Beginnings (Cambridge, Mass., 2003).
12. Maurits Ertsen calls the waduks "night reservoirs" and provides a Dutch spelling for the word, nachtwadoeks; see Ertsen, Prescribing Perfection: Emergence of an Engineering Irrigation Design Approach in the Netherlands East Indies and Its Legacy, 1830-1990 (Rotterdam, 2005), 91-93.
13. Scott (n. 2 above), 89-90.
14. On this point, see Edwin T. Layton Jr., The Revolt of the Engineers: Social Responsibility and the American Engineering Profession (Baltimore, 1971), esp. 53-78.
15. On early corps analytical techniques, see Martin Reuss, "The Art of Scientific Precision: River Research in the United States Army Corps of Engineers to 1945," Technology and Culture 40 (1999): 292-323.
16. Frank N. Schubert, "From the Potomac to the Columbia: The Corps of Engineers and Anadromous Fisheries," unpublished draft (December 1978). Office of History, Headquarters, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Alexandria, Virginia.
17. For a discussion of the parameters molding water resources development in the United States, see Martin Reuss, "The Development of American Water Resources: Planners, Politicians, and Constitutional Interpretation," in Managing Water Resources: Past and Present, ed. Julie Trottier and Paul Slack (Oxford, 2004), 51-71.
18. Scott (n. 2 above), 94-95, 340.