The Pleasure of Finding Things Out by Richard P. Feynman

The Pleasure of Finding Things Out is a collection of interviews and speeches of physicist and Nobel Prize winner Richard P. Feynman. The theme that runs through most of these items is Feynman’s ideas about what science is and how it is practiced.

 To Feynmen, the essence of a proper scientific attitude is doubt (a version of this idea goes back to René Descartes). It is an honest acceptance that you don’t know anything for certain, and you may accept other ideas about what is most likely true about the world in light of new experiences and better measurements. Science is the testing of ideas to see if they conform to reality and the knowledge that accumulates as a result.

 The physicist is critical of some of the social sciences, some parts of psychology and education research. They use experiment and measurement and other forms from science, but they do not produce results in the manner of the physical sciences. He doesn’t suggest the end of research in these areas, but that they tend to present findings as if there is “scientific” certainty when things are actually very uncertain.

 Feynman led an interesting life, and I took particular interest in his experiences related to very important engineering and policy issues in his lifetime. In one of the interviews, Feynman discussed his work on the Manhattan Project and life at Los Alamos. The editor included Feynman’s minority report on the investigation of the destruction of the space shuttle Challenger, which resulted in the death of all the astronauts on board.

 Richard Feynman also wrote

Six Easy Pieces

 If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in:

The Astounding, the Amazing, and the Unknown by Paul Malmont

Descarte’s Secret Notebook by Amir D. Aczel

Einstein’s Clocks, Poincare’s Maps: Empires of Time by Peter Galison 

The Girls of Atomic City by Denise Kiernan

Newton and the Counterfeiter by Thomas Levenson

Planck by Brandon R. Brown

The Powerhouse by Steve Levine

 Feynman, Richard P. The Pleasure of Finding Things Out. Jeffrey Robbins, ed. Cambridge, MA: Helix Books, 1999.

The Society for Useful Knowledge by Jonathan Lyons

Colonial America was a place that demanded much of settlers. While many appreciated the value of book learning, many came to America because of their strong opinions about a particular book, their new home required them to focus on practical knowledge for developing land, repairing hard-to-get goods and getting the most out of one’s one labor. In The Society for Useful Knowledge, Jonathan Lyons explores this emphasis on utility and its influence on colonial science and the revolutionary generation.

Ben Franklin is the most significant figure discussed by Lyon. He developed an appreciation early in life for the value of skilled labor, he was a printer himself, and he maintained this even as he became America’s most famous scientist and the new nation’s representative in Europe. Franklin’s influence in the American scientific community was huge even though he spent years in Europe; his connections to European scientists were part of the reason for his influence at home.

Franklin and his compatriots saw a great value in encouraging and disseminating useful information in science and engineering, especially if it might increase the productivity of American agriculture and manufacturing. Franklin founded one of the earliest scientific societies in the colonies and it eventually had many imitators. He also supported the establishment of what eventually became the University of Pennsylvania, though he broke with the other organizers when his emphasis on utility conflicted with their desire to provide an education focused on classical languages in the European mold.

Though Franklin was not trying to establish institutions that would lead to the revolution, he and many who worked with him did it anyway. Franklin and his Quaker neighbors preferred education in useful knowledge and trades. Many colonial scientists were self-taught and learned on their farms and workshops. They saw little value in the classical education popular in Europe that distinguished the aristocracy and upper class from others, but did little in their minds to suit a person for a role of value in the community. Americans needed to get stuff done and they didn’t care much about a person’s pedigree. This opened up opportunities for people of low social status to grow in wealth and influence. (Even in Europe, amateur scientists from many classes were common and it especially leveled the social ground around England’s coffeehouses.)

Franklin’s circle of mechanics and part-time scientists influenced the generation that followed them. Franklin’s personal reputation allowed him to be a leader in that generation who became the founders of the United States. The emphasis on practicality and experience, with the accompanying devaluing of ancient authorities in dead languages, influenced American political thought as well as its science, technology and education. The connections he made as a postmaster and scientific communicator also formed a model for the political influencers of his time.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

Common Sense by Thomas Paine

46 Pages by Scott Liell

Newton and the Counterfeiter by Thomas Levenson

Lyons, Jonathan. The Society for Useful Knowledge: How Benjamin Franklin and His Friends Brought the Enlightenment to America. New York: Bloomsbury, 2013.

Professional Amateur by T. A. Boyd

Charles F. Kettering’s legacy as a philanthropist is memorialized in the names of the institutions he supported such as the Kettering Foundation and the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. As an engineer, I’m more familiar with is reputation as an inventor and innovator, especially in automotive engineering.

Kettering’s associate, T. A. Boyd, memorialized him in the biography Professional Amateur. I think the title is intended to convey Kettering’s humility and determination to not let expertise or established knowledge get in the way of progress. As an engineer, and arguably a scientist, Kettering was devoted to experimentation.

As with others of his era (he was born in 1876), Kettering’s education was not traditional by current standards. After graduating high school, he began teaching in one-room schoolhouses in Ohio such as the one he had attended. He later attended the College of Wooster, studying Greek with an eye toward becoming a pastor, and eventually graduated from the Ohio State University with a degree in electrical engineering. Problems with his eyes caused interruptions in his formal education.

Kettering valued his school experience, but he also valued his practical experience. He got a job installing poles for a telephone company and worked his way into installing lines and switchboards. He and friends undertook amateur experiments in chemistry and electricity. Even as a child he took great interest in nature.

After introducing us to his early life, the book turns to his career as an inventor and research engineer. He established what is now Delco, which he sold to General Motors. He had a long career leading the research efforts at GM. The final chapters of the book describe Kettering’s views on business and education and his career as a public speaker.

Kettering met his wife, Olive, while working for a rural telephone company. Their son, Gene, followed his father into engineering and eventually had a successful career in designing and building diesel-electric locomotives a General Motors.

Boyd was a friend of Kettering, who was still alive when Professional Amateur was published. Needless to say, the book is very complimentary to its subject. Few faults are attributed to the man, except that Kettering is depicted as being so absorbed in his research that he would overlook social conventions like keeping a nice suit clean, entertaining guests, or remembering the purpose of his appointments. The research engineer left his business affairs mostly in the hands of trusted partners so he could concentrate on the work that interested him, though Boyd’s depiction indicates Kettering was shrewd about business.

I don’t think the book is intended for children, but it is written in simple and direct style that might be accessible to many young readers. It was published in 1957, so more recent or thorough biographies may be available. For instance, Kettering introduced tetraethyl lead to gasoline as a way to reduce knock and improve fuel efficiency. Though it was considered safe at the time (as Boyd points out), the lead emissions from automobiles has be reevaluated sense and we no longer use leaded gasoline. The book was written before anyone was seriously aware of or concerned about this issue, so it does not consider it.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

The Age of Edison by Ernest Freeburg

The Essential Engineer: Why Science Alone Will Not Solve Our Global Problems by Henry Petroski

Make a Joyful Sound by Helen Elmira Waite

The Pinball Effect by James Burke

Boyd, T. A. Professional Amateur: The Biography of Charles Franklin Kettering. New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., 1957.

Better for All the World by Harry Bruinius

Harry Bruinius takes the title of his book, Better for All the World, from a quote from famous United States Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.  In his opinion, written for a court majority that authorized states to forcibly sterilize some people, Holmes expressed the notion that it was better to sterilize a defective person than to permit them to have defective children who may place greater burden on government systems for justice and welfare.

This legal justification for forced sterilization was just one of the policy victories of the eugenics movement in the America. Eugenicists were also influential in establishing state marriage laws and federal immigration quotas and restrictions.

Even from its start, notions of social engineering and politics tinged the science of eugenics. Francis Galton coined the word that applied to both the study of heredity and the improvement of humanity through selective breeding over generations. Galton established the field based on concepts from his cousin Charles Darwin’s books on evolution, Gregor Mendel’s studies of plant heredity, and his own statistical studies of human characteristics. Though he mostly kept these speculations to himself, he considered the possibility of improving humans through breeding just as farmers improved plants and livestock.

American reformers of all political persuasion welcomed Galton’s ideas; they were looking for reliable, scientific means of tackling poverty and crime. Galton’s method were used to study families and supposedly proved that traits related to poverty, criminality, low intelligence, and the harder to recognize (therefore more dangerous) feeblemindedness. These studies also uncover a troubling pairing in females of feeblemindedness and fecundity. The implication was that the good stock of moral, productive Americans risked overrun by a class of hereditary degenerates. America’s best needed to produce larger family, and its poor and feebleminded needed to be restrained from passing on their inferior traits.

Much of Bruinius’ book focuses on this American eugenics movement. Representing leadership in the scientific community is Charles Davenport. He popularized the work of Galton, convinced the Carnegie Institute to fund a station to study eugenics, and did research that contributed to the early development of genetics. Representing the bridge between science and policy is Harry Laughlin. A Missourian and a protégé of Davenport, his reports and advice to Congress helped to inform restrictive immigration policy and support state programs of forced sterilization of convicts and the feebleminded, ultimately upheld in by the Supreme Court, as previously mentioned, in the case of Buck vs. Bell.

The development of eugenics policy in the U.S. was being watched overseas. In particularly, racial purity laws enacted by the Nazis in Germany explicitly cited American research and legal precedents. Many reformers in America and elsewhere were gratified by the apparent success of eugenics policies in Germany.

Even as it was reaching its peak as a political reform movement, laboratory science was undermining eugenics. Laboratory studies of the mechanisms of heredity, which had discovered chromosomes by the 1930s, were showing that heredity and the expression of traits, especially moral or personality traits, were much more complicated and harder to predict than the eugenicists assumed. Through its association with the Nazis, eugenics became wholly discredited in the public mind, though its effects lingered in American policies for decades.

Our understanding of genetics and heredity has improved a lot. Biotechnology has made a new kind of genetic engineering possible. The eugenicist dreams of eliminating disease and creating better people in future generations is more attainable than ever, at least in limited ways.

If this puts our evolution in our hands, are we ethically and morally evolved enough to use this power? Are humans intelligent animals or are we unique creatures? Are human rights inalienable characteristics of human beings, or are they social constructs, ideas that can rise, fade, or change like other ideas? How does the good of the species relate to the good of the individual? What does it mean to be a parent? The way we answer these questions, and other related to the implications of our science and technology, will establish what kind of people we are, and possibly the destiny of generations to come.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

A Little History of Science by William Bynum

The Abolition of Man by C. S. Lewis

The Ghost Map by Steven Johnson

IBM and the Holocaust by Edwin Black

Maus by Art Spiegelman

Men of Tomorrow by Gerard Jones

War Against the Weak by Edwin Black

Bruinius, Harry. Better for All the World: The Secret History of Forced Sterilization and America’s Quest for Racial Purity. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006.

The Age of Edison by Ernest Freeburg

For those of us who can remember a time not so long ago when we didn’t have telephones (computers really) in our pockets and the Internet was something few were connected to, even of those few who had computers in their homes, the current state of communication technology can seem revolutionary. This is tame compared to the changes wrought by technology that seems commonplace to us now. In The Age of Edison, Ernest Freeburg describes the amazing changes brought about in the 50 years following the introduction of electric lighting.

Though Thomas Edison is a huge figure in electric lighting, especially in the United States, Freeburg is careful to avoid the myth of the solitary inventor bringing an idea out of thin air. Many people were working on electric lighting.  Edison’s incandescent bulb had advantages over other lights, especially because he conceived of a complete lighting system with power sources, distribution and controls in addition to lamps. There were predecessors in the field, so Edison was working in a social context of seeking to provide superior lighting.

These competitors were not only other electric light inventors, but also older technologies, especially gas. Because electric power did not reach rural areas until the 1930s, much older artificial lights, like kerosene lamps, persisted even as electric lights became common in middle-class urban homes.

The first customers of electric lights were not homeowners, but businesses and cities who were already customers of lighting systems. These lights transformed cities, which various economic forces were causing to grow. From public lighting, electric systems were adapted to retail businesses, arts, entertainment, and science.

The early electric lighting market was competitive, unregulated, and wild. Electrocutions and fires were too common and widely publicized. Light companies were forced to improve safety by a political movement that supported municipal government control and ownership, and insurance company interests. This led to electric codes, the founding of the Underwriter’s Laboratory (UL) in 1893, college programs in electrical engineering, and the unionization of electrical workers.

Commercial interests dominated the early development of electric lighting. This was not the only reason electric lights had critics, but it was a significant reason. Intellectuals criticized the unartistic randomness of commercial messages seeking outshine each other. They were not especially successful in curbing electric lights, but the industry began to mature in this context and develop more attractive, effective and efficient lighting systems that were adapted to uses in homes and businesses.

Freeburg wraps up with Henry Ford’s 1929 jubilee of the invention of the incandescent electric lamp. In 50 years, the invention transformed almost every part of American life, especially urban life that was quickly becoming more common as people left farms for opportunities in cities. One of the telling things is that the event was broadcast on radio. In 1879, people huddled around candles and lanterns if they had to have light when the sun went down, but well within the span of a lifetime electric lights became dominant and electric appliances were common enough that radios were in homes and many were able to participate in a distant celebration of a transformative technology. It is hard to imagine how amazing these changes were to the people who experienced them.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

Dreams of Iron and Steel by Deborah Cadbury

Freeburg, Ernest. The Age of Edison: Electric Light and the Invention of Modern America. New York: Penguin, 2013.

American Nerd by Benjamin Nugent

What makes a nerd a nerd? In American Nerd, Benjamin Nugent doesn’t try to put aside nerdy stereotypes. He gives them a context.

Nerds are people who seem to others to be like machines.  They are often passionate about a technical interest, they use jargon, they avoid confrontation, they favor logic over emotion, and they enjoy working with machines.

One of the interesting things about the book is that Nugent provides examples of machine-like nerds from literature.  The prototypical nerd is Victor Frankenstein of the Mary Shelley masterpiece.  Frankenstein has a powerful intellect and technical skill.  After all he makes a body from corpses and brings it to life.  On the other hand, he lacks emotional depth and the ability to connect.  Shelley shows this in his withdrawal from family and in his inability to cope with his creation when it is a living being.

Of course, nerds are not machines.  One thing that makes them nerd is their passion for their interests.  No machine is passionate.  Even though nerds are passionate, they generally aren’t comfortable with emotionalism.  People send out a mass of confusing and contradictory signals.  Nerds prefer lower-noise communication that is direct, rational, formal, and rule bound.

In this regard, Nugent compares nerds to people with Asperger’s syndrome.  Asperger’s involves difficulty in reading the emotional cues of others and in affecting appropriate responses.  It a result of their neurological makeup; Asperger’s has a physiological basis.  Because of this, people with the condition share with nerd’s preference for formalized communication, social discomfort, and attraction to scientific and technical fields where logic and rules prevail.  Nerds don’t necessarily have Asperger’s, but people with Asperger’s might often end up becoming nerds.

While I’m on that subject, I thought it was interesting that Nugent cited research about Asperger’s and engineering, my own profession.  There is evidence that suggests that autism spectrum disorders appear in engineers more than in the rest of the population.  Also, 15 percent of people with Asperger’s have an engineer in their family, about three times the typical frequency.

In many ways, engineering is a profession of logic and rules.  It also calls for creativity and social skills.  A project of any size is the work of several people.  Engineers have to work with their peers and often with people from other fields:  CADD operators, equipment operators, architects, surveyors, contractors, skilled laborers, craftsmen, lawyers, accountants, and government regulators just to name a few.  The social aspect of practicing engineering, and the inherently social mission of the profession, is greatly underplayed.

Nugent points out that the dichotomy between head and heart, thinking and feeling, drawn by Romantic authors and popular teenagers to distinguish the machine-like from the genuinely human, the in crowd from the nerds, is not necessarily a true one.  To support this argument, he calls on T. S. Eliot’s critique of Romanticism and defense of metaphysical poets.  The Romantics appealed to the heart, but the metaphysical poets used heart and head together, little distinguishing between thoughts and feelings, and produced affecting poems that were also full of ideas.  We don’t have to choose between following our hearts and using our heads; if we’re wise we’ll do both.

If you’re looking to understand what nerds are into, you probably won’t find much in this book that you don’t already know.  If you’d like a look at the origins of the idea of nerdiness and a thoughtful theory of what makes nerds nerds, Nugent’s book will fill the bill.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

Arthur & George by Julian Barnes

The Essential Engineer by Henry Petroski

How to Build an Android by David F. Dufty

Men of Tomorrow by Gerard Jones

Quiet by Susan Cain

Nugent, Benjamin.  American Nerd: The Story of My People.  New York: Scribner, 2008.

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News from My Alma Mater

Congratulations to Fu-hung Hsieh, professor biological engineering and the University of Missouri (I’m a graduate of that department), and Harold Huff of the Food Engineering Lab for their development of a soy chicken product called Beyond Meat.  The work was featured in the Winter 2013 issue of Mizzou (you can find more on the web here→).  The university has licensed the product to a company that will be manufacturing it in Columbia, MO.

Apparently, it is easier to make soy look, taste, and feel like chicken than to get people to eat their vegetables.  That may be more of a social issue than an engineering problem.

The Essential Engineer by Henry Petroski

Petroski, Henry. The Essential Engineer: Why Science Alone Will Not Solve Our Global Problems. New York: Vintage, 2010.

Policy makers seem to love science. I can see why. Science provides a sense of specificity, certainty and consensus. It contrasts with the vagueness, variability and competition that policy makers usually have to deal with. That is more like the world engineering.

This interrelation of policy-making, science and engineering, especially the latter two, is the subject of Henry Petroski’s book, The Essential Engineer. In particular, Petroski emphasizes the important, and often overlooked, role of engineering is solving pressing problems.



I doesn’t help that people conflate science and engineering, especially by thinking of engineering as branch or application of science. Petroski is clear about the differences. Science is about increasing knowledge. Engineering is about invention. Sometimes scientists do engineering, especially when they create a devise or process to help them in their work of discovery. Sometimes engineers do science, especially when their engage in research and experimentation to gain a better understanding or problems that are not well understood.

The movement of knowledge from science to engineering practice is well understood. Petroski describes how this became ingrained in American research and development policy. Engineering often precedes science and engineers often must invent solutions in areas that are not well understood by science. Galileo’s improvements to the telescope made possible his advancements in astronomy. The science of thermodynamics grew almost entirely out of the desire to understand steam engines, which engineers had been building and improving in the absence of scientific understanding.

This misunderstanding exacerbated by our culture and education. Policy elites and scientist generally have no education in engineering. As an undergraduate studying engineering, I took science classes with students majoring in the sciences. I took classes in political science, economics and other social science and business-oriented classes with students majoring in those fields. I would have been greatly surprised to find in one of my engineering classes a student who wasn’t majoring in engineering.*

Petroski does not try to bring down science. He’s a civil engineering professor at a sizeable university, so he has probably spent quite a bit of time doing science. He does distinguish how science is helpful, mainly as a warning. Science can help us identify and define problems and assess the risks involve. When we begin to devise solutions to those problems, especially when there is no definitive solution and judgment is needed to way the pros and cons of multiple possible answers, we are moving into engineering.

The Essential Engineer is not a technical book. It for anyone who may have an interest in the role of technology in addressing our problems, especially larger societal problems. Petroski draws illustrations from current events and history (he is a professor of history as well as engineering). The book is enlivened with a storytelling feel.

* There were exceptions. I took a course in food processing that was dual-listed in agricultural engineering and food science. It was a required course for both disciplines. Electrical engineering students almost automatically minored in math, and some clever and ambitious students double-majored in those subjects. With a little better planning, I could have swung a minor in agricultural economics, and I almost wish I had. When I got into wastewater engineering, I wished I had taken more microbiology. My pursuit of additional education lead to a graduate degree in public administration. Government agencies have been employers or clients most of my career. It is common for engineers to get a masters degree in business, especially as they become managers.

Henry Petroski also wrote Paperboy.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in
The Ancient Engineers by L. Sprague de Camp
The Big Necessity by Rose George
Newton and the Counterfeiter by Thomas Levenson

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Paperboy by Henry Petroski

Petroski, Henry. Paperboy: Confessions of a Future Engineer. New York: Knopf, 2002.

Henry Petroski is an engineering professor who is well known for his books on engineering and technology. Paperboy is a memoir of his boyhood.

This memoir is a reflection of the times, the 1950s, as well as the author’s life. It shows a microcosm of a nation recovering from World War II and gearing up for the space race. The paperboys of New York weren’t interested in reading the newspapers they delivered, so they weren’t consciously aware of the social forces at work around them. (Even so, Petroski uses headlines from the Long Island Press to show what was going on at the time.) A boy with Petroski’s talents might have gone into any number of things, but with Sputnik overhead, government policy and watchful teachers nudged him into engineering. It was a good fit.

Petroski doesn’t leave technology completely out of the picture. As a paperboy, he had to master the art of folding and flipping papers. He assembled and maintained his own bicycle. He watched his orderly uncle, an accountant, put together exactly what he needed to build an attic closet with no waist.

Young Petroski had many traits that would have made engineering attractive to him: curiosity about how things work, mechanical aptitude, facility with mathematics, some perfectionism, more pragmatism, ability to think both concretely and abstractly, appreciate that things are made and making involves choosing. I have known and worked with many engineers in my career in that profession and nearly all of them share at least a few of these traits with Petroski.

A particular part of Petroski’s school experience stands out to me because it illustrates how real life is different from a story. His high school algebra teacher, Mr. Duncan, took an immediate dislike to him, apparently because it picked up on algebra so easily. Duncan began to call Petroski “Herman Peterson,” provoked him and sent him out into the hall. The budding engineer sat in the hall, following the lessons through the door, and remaining the leading student in the class. This hardship continued until Petroski advanced into upper-class math courses. A story probably would have had some satisfying resolution, but real life experience involved just moving on.

In one section of his memoir, Petroski discusses newspaper titles. It’s the kind of list-making thing many engineers are prone to do. The weekly paper in my hometown was the Bloomfield Vindicator. I have never heard a name for newspaper that was cooler than Vindicator. I’m reminded by it of those show that were popular in the 1980s about a nameless stranger who comes into town to bring justice to oppressors of the downtrodden like The Equalizer, Stingray, and The Pretender (which may have been from the 1990s). A syndicate combined the Vindicator with another publication and given it the unimaginative title of North Stoddard Countian.


If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in
Copernicus’ Secret by Jack Repcheck
Descarte’s Secret Notebook by Amir D. Aczel
The Invention of Air by Steven Johnson
Newton and the Counterfeiter by Thomas Levenson
The Science of Leonardo by Fritjof Capra

When the Rivers Run Dry by Fred Pearce

I originally posted this review at Infrastructure Watch, where I write about infrastructure and the environment.

Pearce, Fred. When the Rivers Run Dry: Water—The Defining Crisis of the Twenty-first Century. Boston: Beacon, 2006.

Mankind’s attempts to harness rivers have had unintended consequences. Schemes to make land more productive have created deserts. Crops on drained land have produced less food and value than the swamps they displaced. Rivers hemmed in to prevent flooding have flooded more frequently and worse than before.

Pearce isn’t against technology. He sometimes expresses admiration for the dams, canals and other engineering feats about which he writes. However, he’s not impressed when this technology deprives people of the water and wealth it was intended to provide.

Water and wealth is a connection Pearce often makes. For all the lip service paid to the social benefits of grand water schemes, the water tends to go where the money is.

Overall, the world has become more water poor. The poorest have generally lost the most.

In spite of the history, Peace sees hope in the potential of technology that works with the water cycle instead of against it. It is already happening on a small scale where ancient where people are reviving ancient methods of capturing rainwater. Indian farmers are adapting dessert containers for use as a cheap, and more efficient, drip irrigation pipe. On the large scale, river engineers are cutting levees, restoring wetlands and allow river to return to curvy courses. In agriculture, the biggest user and waster of water in much of the world, there is a move to crops that are more appropriate to the locally available rainfall and less dependent on irrigation. Even in Los Angeles, a city known for the lengths it has gone to in order to quench its great thirst in a dry land, activist are seeking to create a more porous city that captures and uses the water that falls there naturally.

To illustrate his points, Pearce travels the world to see the disastrous results of bad water management, the extreme example being the disappearing Aral Sea. He also points out what works, like a restored qanat in Iraq.

You can order this book here.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in Water by Marq de Villiers.

The Big Necessity by Rose George

George, Rose. The Big Necessity: The Unmentionable World of Human Waste and Why it Matters. New York: Metropolitan, 2008.

Rose George wants people to talk about something they don’t usually talk about: shit. Human excreta is a huge problem in much of the world. Even in the West where flush toilets are nearly ubiquitous, safe disposal of the waste is a daunting problem. There is probably nothing that could do more to improve human health, productivity and prosperity worldwide than to improve the disposal of human excreta, i.e. to really deal with our shit.

George deals with both the highs and the lows of disposing human waste. The pinnacle is found in Japan, the land of high functioning toilets. Japanese butts are pampered with heated seats and built-in warm-water bidets just for starters. On the other extreme, some people have nothing better to resort to than open defecation in the bushes or even the street.

There is no simple, one-size-fits-all solution to sanitation. One reason is water. The waterborne sewage systems of the relatively water-rich, flushing West would not even begin to work in the dryer parts of the world. Even where great and affordable technology exists, sanitation can be thwarted by misunderstandings of culture and society.

George’s look at how culture effects sanitation make a lot of sense, but it is easy to overlook. Many sanitation programs have failed because well meaning planners have imposed solutions from the top. The successful solutions seem to be coming from the bottom, where people find solutions that fit the local customs or where local awareness is awakened before solutions are proposed.

Another interesting thing about the book is that George has talked to many people who are trying different ways to solve the sanitation problem in different parts of the world. There a lot to be learned from their successes and failures. Maybe by openly discussing the shit, and seeing what works and doesn’t from both a social and engineering standpoint, we can come up with better policies and programs—or simple human interactions—that will lead to better living for everyone through sanitation.

Order this book here.

The Great Stink by Clare Clark

Clark, Clare. The Great Stink. Orlando, FL: Harcourt, 2005.

William May, the fictional protagonist, is a surveyor for the real Metropolitan Board of Works. From 1856 to 1870, the board led by its chief engineer Joseph Bazalgette who plays a minor part in the novel, built 80 miles of sewers under London. This massive infrastructure transformed the city and the Thames that runs through it.

May spends a lot of time in the crumbling old sewer that are soon to be joined and transformed by the board. The filth of London is the least of the horrors of Victorian England that he must overcome. He faces the Crimean War, a military hospital ship, corruption in politics and business, an insane asylum, prison, an indifferent justice system and his own misunderstood mental illness.

Though the novel is set in the midst of an enormous engineering project and the main character has such a breadth of experience, the story focuses on a few people coping with a changing (modernizing) world. Their stories are brought together by petty murder committed by a greedy man.

May, who except for his misfortune might be considered middle-class by 19th century standards, is contrasted to Long Arm Tom. Tom is a tosher; he makes his living recovering copper and other valuable material from the sewage and waste of the city. Many of London’s poorest lived by extracting meager value from waste. The great sewer project was brining and end to Tom’s profession.

May and Tom are witnesses to a murder. May almost hangs for it; it is luck, including the good fortune of having a conscientious lawyer assigned to his case, that rescues him. Tom becomes an accessory to the murder, and later uncovers it to get revenge.

Class was a huge part of English life, and it clearly comes through, but Clark resists taking a romantic view of it. Tom is not virtuous because or in spite of his poverty. He is a wily and unscrupulous denizen of a corrupt world. May is a professional who ostensibly has the most to gain from the social changes occurring, but deeply damaged and almost destroyed by the highs and lows of a society in flux. His lawyer, Sydney Rose, is the scion of an impoverished peerage. He is motivated by his hopes to move up in society as much as by any sense of noblesse oblige. His victory is due as much to luck and determination.

The pace of the book is slow compared to other thrillers of mysteries. The book is as much about May and Tom coping with a changing world as it is about murder mystery. It tempo picks up in the final chapters as Rose begins to put together a defense for May.

Overall, it is an enjoyable book. It works in its combination of history, mainstream fiction, mystery and picturing of a world that is rapidly changing through new technology.

(If you're interested in the history of the great London sewer project, see this review of Dreams of Iron and Steel by Deborah Cadbury.)

Order this book here.