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Author: Donald C. Jackson
Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
Published: 2005
Total Pages: 352
ISBN-13: 9780806137339
DOWNLOAD EBOOKOffers compelling insight into how designer Eastwood battled government bureaucrats, corporate patrons, and fellow hydraulic engineers to build seventeen dams in the western U.S. during the early twentieth century based on his innovative multiple-arch design. Reprint.
Author: Donald C. Jackson
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
Published: 2017-03-15
Total Pages: 345
ISBN-13: 0822978598
DOWNLOAD EBOOKIn Pastoral and Monumental, Donald C. Jackson chronicles America's longtime fascination with dams as represented on picture postcards from the late nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century. Through over four hundred images, Jackson documents the remarkable transformation of dams and their significance to the environment and culture of America. Initially, dams were portrayed in pastoral settings on postcards that might jokingly proclaim them as "a dam pretty place." But scenes of flood damage, dam collapses, and other disasters also captured people's attention. Later, images of New Deal projects, such as the Hoover Dam, Grand Coulee Dam, and Norris Dam, symbolized America's rise from the Great Depression through monumental public works and technological innovation. Jackson relates the practical applications of dams, describing their use in irrigation, navigation, flood control, hydroelectric power, milling, mining, and manufacturing. He chronicles changing construction techniques, from small timber mill dams to those more massive and more critical to a society dependent on instant access to electricity and potable water. Concurrent to the evolution of dam technology, Jackson recounts the rise of a postcard culture that was fueled by advances in printing, photography, lowered postal rates, and America's fascination with visual imagery. In 1910, almost one billion postcards were mailed through the U.S. Postal Service, and for a period of over fifty years, postcards featuring dams were "all the rage." Whether displaying the charms of an old mill, the aftermath of a devastating flood, or the construction of a colossal gravity dam, these postcards were a testament to how people perceived dams as structures of both beauty and technological power.
Author: Daniel M. G. Raff
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2017
Total Pages: 371
ISBN-13: 0198787766
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThis book explains how things get organized and how routines emerge in businesses and business life. The chapters explore historical episodes in a wide variety of settings, and encourage a view of firm operations and development that is much more realistic, and much more practically helpful, than the standard economic perspective.
Author: David P. Billington
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2013-08-07
Total Pages: 300
ISBN-13: 1400849128
DOWNLOAD EBOOKPower, Speed, and Form is the first accessible account of the engineering behind eight breakthrough innovations that transformed American life from 1876 to 1939—the telephone, electric power, oil refining, the automobile, the airplane, radio, the long-span steel bridge, and building with reinforced concrete. Beginning with Thomas Edison's system to generate and distribute electric power, the authors explain the Bell telephone, the oil refining processes of William Burton and Eugene Houdry, Henry Ford's Model T car and the response by General Motors, the Wright brothers' airplane, radio innovations from Marconi to Armstrong, Othmar Ammann's George Washington Bridge, the reinforced concrete structures of John Eastwood and Anton Tedesko, and in the 1930s, the Chrysler Airflow car and the Douglas DC-3 airplane. These innovations used simple numerical ideas, which the Billingtons integrate with short narrative accounts of each breakthrough—a unique and effective way to introduce engineering and how engineers think. The book shows how the best engineering exemplifies efficiency, economy and, where possible, elegance. With Power, Speed, and Form, educators, first-year engineering students, liberal arts students, and general readers now have, for the first time in one volume, an accessible and readable history of engineering achievements that were vital to America's development and that are still the foundations of modern life.
Author: David P. Billington
Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
Published: 2017-04-20
Total Pages: 385
ISBN-13: 0806157895
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThe massive dams of the American West were designed to serve multiple purposes: improving navigation, irrigating crops, storing water, controlling floods, and generating hydroelectricity. Their construction also put thousands of people to work during the Great Depression. Only later did the dams’ baneful effects on river ecologies spark public debate. Big Dams of the New Deal Era tells how major water-storage structures were erected in four western river basins. David P. Billington and Donald C. Jackson reveal how engineering science, regional and national politics, perceived public needs, and a river’s natural features intertwined to create distinctive dams within each region. In particular, the authors describe how two federal agencies, the Army Corps of Engineers and the Bureau of Reclamation, became key players in the creation of these important public works. By illuminating the mathematical analysis that supported large-scale dam construction, the authors also describe how and why engineers in the 1930s most often opted for massive gravity dams, whose design required enormous quantities of concrete or earth-rock fill for stability. Richly illustrated, Big Dams of the New Deal Era offers a compelling account of how major dams in the New Deal era restructured the landscape—both politically and physically—and why American society in the 1930s embraced them wholeheartedly.
Author: William E. Caswell
Publisher: GeneralStore PublishingHouse
Published: 2004
Total Pages: 104
ISBN-13: 9781894263962
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Published: 1928
Total Pages: 1018
ISBN-13:
DOWNLOAD EBOOKAuthor: Norris Hundley
Publisher: University of Nevada Press
Published: 2020-12-08
Total Pages: 415
ISBN-13: 1948908891
DOWNLOAD EBOOKMinutes before midnight on March 12, 1928, the St. Francis Dam collapsed, sending more than twelve billion gallons of water surging through Southern California’s Santa Clara Valley, killing some four hundred people and causing the greatest civil engineering disaster in twentieth-century American history. In this carefully researched work, Norris Hundley jr. and Donald C. Jackson provide a riveting narrative exploring the history of the ill-fated dam and the person directly responsible for its flawed design—William Mulholland, a self-taught engineer of the Los Angeles municipal water system. Employing copious illustrations and intensive research, Heavy Ground traces the interwoven roles of politics and engineering in explaining how the St. Francis Dam came to be built and the reasons for its collapse. Hundley and Jackson also detail the terror and heartbreak brought by the flood, legal claims against the City of Los Angeles, efforts to restore the Santa Clara Valley, political factors influencing investigations of the failure, and the effect of the disaster on congressional approval of the future Hoover Dam. Underlying it all is a consideration of how the dam—and the disaster—were inextricably intertwined with the life and career of William Mulholland. Ultimately, this thoughtful and nuanced account of the dam’s failure reveals how individual and bureaucratic conceit fed Los Angeles’s desire to control vital water supplies in the booming metropolis of Southern California.
Author: Jacques Leslie
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 2007-05-15
Total Pages: 363
ISBN-13: 0374707855
DOWNLOAD EBOOK"If the wars of the last century were fought over oil, the wars of this century will be fought over water." -Ismail Serageldin, The World Bank The giant dams of today are the modern Pyramids, colossally expensive edifices that generate monumental amounts of electricity, irrigated water, and environmental and social disaster. With Deep Water, Jacques Leslie offers a searching account of the current crisis over dams and the world's water. An emerging master of long-form reportage, Leslie makes the crisis vivid through the stories of three distinctive figures: Medha Patkar, an Indian activist who opposes a dam that will displace thousands of people in western India; Thayer Scudder, an American anthropologist who studies the effects of giant dams on the peoples of southern Africa; and Don Blackmore, an Australian water manager who struggles to reverse the effects of drought so as to allow Australia to continue its march to California-like prosperity. Taking the reader to the sites of controversial dams, Leslie shows why dams are at once the hope of developing nations and a blight on their people and landscape. Deep Water is an incisive, beautifully written, and deeply disquieting report on a conflict that threatens to divide the world in the coming years.
