REMAKING THE WORLD: Adventures in Engineering.

By Henry Petroski. Knopf. 239 pp. $24

Just after World War I, the irascible sociologist Thorstein Veblen proposed a way to bring about a fair distribution of wealth and well-being: let engineers run society. Veblen’s suggestion would appeal to few people today. Those who have remade our material world are rarely consulted on social reform or economic development policy, or accorded the kind of recognition lavished on leading scientists.

In these essays, Petroski, a professor of history and engineering at Duke University, renews our esteem for the social and cultural accomplishments of engineers. In one piece, he overturns the perverse symbolism of a famous photograph showing Albert Einstein towering over the hunchbacked electrical engineer Charles Steinmetz. In another, he recounts the history of how the prizes endowed by mechanical engineer Alfred Nobel came to be awarded to scientists but only rarely to engineers.

As a counterpoint to such hints of professional defensiveness, the author’s essay on Kuala Lumpur’s Petronas Towers—the tallest buildings in the world—lauds the genius of the engineers who solved the extremely difficult and dramatic problems presented by so vast an undertaking. In one sense, these towers are the latest in a long line of ambitious projects that Petroski examines in other essays—the Eiffel Tower, Ferris’s Wheel, the Panama Canal, Hoover Dam—all of which required skill and imagination to solve a multitude of structural and construction challenges. But he also points out the political impacts of such projects. Gigantic business towers especially function as status symbols, announcing the arrival of a nation into the powerful club of industrializing societies. He ends the essay by recounting how the towers’ engineers transferred knowledge and know-how from their own societies to other regions. By establishing networks of businesses, suppliers, technical schools, workers, and communications media, they helped invent the organizational systems that make such massive projects possible.

In a few of the essays (most of which appeared in the American Scientist), one wishes for less of Petroski’s reasoned description and more of the conflict, indecision, ambition, and even humiliation that engineers experience when they juggle the givens of the physical world with the unpredictabilities of social, political, and economic interests. The author’s talent, however, is a writing style characterized by seemingly effortless serendipity, drawing the nonspecialist as well as the technical expert into his topics in pleasurable and unexpected ways.

—Miriam R. Levin