The Strength of American Materials -- An Environmental History of Engineering Science
One of the many pleasures of writing "Tocqueville's Ghost" for HSNS (discussed on AmericanScience here) was revisiting Ann Johnson's “Material Experiments: Environment and Engineering Institutions in the Early American Republic,” from Osiris in 2009.
It's a fascinating essay and makes a convincing case for rethinking the sort of science and engineering going on at West Point and in the Corps of Engineers in the early nineteenth century. Johnson shows how the West Point/Corps project adapted the French Polytechnique model in research as well as teaching, creating in the process a very productive "research school." She shows how prominent men of science like Alexander Dallas Bache carried on later celebrated work (most prominently his steam-boiler experiments, above) that owed much to their time working with Joseph Totten and the Corps of Engineers at Fort Adams.
Just as interesting for our blog and our HoTeEs/HoTMESs discussions, is the way Johnson succeed…
It's a fascinating essay and makes a convincing case for rethinking the sort of science and engineering going on at West Point and in the Corps of Engineers in the early nineteenth century. Johnson shows how the West Point/Corps project adapted the French Polytechnique model in research as well as teaching, creating in the process a very productive "research school." She shows how prominent men of science like Alexander Dallas Bache carried on later celebrated work (most prominently his steam-boiler experiments, above) that owed much to their time working with Joseph Totten and the Corps of Engineers at Fort Adams.
Just as interesting for our blog and our HoTeEs/HoTMESs discussions, is the way Johnson succeed…