1939 by David Gelernter

I’ve been time traveling.  I went back to visit the 1939 World’s Fair in New York.  I tagged along with a couple of locals, both to New York and 1939, Mark and Hattie.  I was looking forward to it because, like me, Mark studied engineering and is attending the fair for the first time.  I wondered how he might react to the visions of future technology on display, like the superhighways anticipated by Democracity and the Futurama (which I read about in The Big Roads by Earls Swift).  I grew up in an era of Interstates, commuting, and electrified kitchens, so the even the visions of the future on display at the fair are the past to me.

I also time traveled to 1995 to take a look back at the fair with Hattie.  I was reintroduced to her by a computer science professor.  (The professor was David Gelernter.  This is a review of his book, 1939: The Lost World of the Fair.)  Back then I was starting my career in Kansas City, so I didn’t worried about running into myself in New York.

I was fascinated by what I saw of the fair.  These people had a vision of the future.  It might seem modest to us, but it was big to them.  They dreamed of the good life in which many more people owned homes in pleasant suburbs, drove to work in their own cars on broad roads, had enough to eat, and were relieved from drudgery by electric appliances.  Within a generation, in spite of the difficulties of a major war, they largely brought their dream into reality, and we have fitfully enjoyed the results.

Gelernter compares the fairgoers to Moses looking into the Promised Land (an apropos analogy considering he also writes about what it was like to be Jewish in America at the time).  Their vision of a land of milk and honey is very much the time we live in.

This leads to one of the many points of comparison Gelernter draws between that generation and ours.  They had drive, even a kind of joy, because they had a goal toward which to strive.  The cultural angst that began to show in the 1960s is in part a sign that we had arrived.  Our goals were achieved and we hand no reason to strive, so we lost our way.  We perish for lack of vision.

I find Gelernter to be a pretty good critic of technology.  You might expect a computer science professor to be enthusiastic about the changes computers have wrought.  He is more impressed with the improvements made by that older generation.  He looks at roads and refrigeration and the host of other mid- to late-Twentieth Century technologies and sees that they made improvements to human health and happiness.  The differences made by computers pale in comparison. I can remember that in 1995, I could cut up documents with a pair of scissor, tape pieces of them together, mark the mess up by hand and give it to a person in the office we called a clerk.  A short time later, the clerk would bring me back a freshly-printed, neat document, a final version of what was represented by my taped-together prototype.  The clerk would even do a little copy editing.  When a computer can do that, I’ll be impressed.  In other words, I think Gelernter’s critique holds water even 17 years later.

Gelernter may be glad that I got the sense of time travel for which he was going.  He might be disappointed that I didn’t like Mark and Hattie much.  I slipped away from them as much as I felt I safely could.  I wanted to see the fair, and though it may seem hardhearted, I had little interest in the ups and downs of their romance or their fretfulness over the war in Europe.  I think someone could write a good novel about this couple and how the day they got engaged at the fair became a touchstone for Hattie even decades later.  If I had expected a novel, I might have liked these characters, but I was expecting a history, and I found them distracting.

Gelernter, David.  1939: The Lost World of the Fair.  New York: Free Press, 1995.

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The Power Makers by Maury Klein

Maury Klein’s book The Power Makers is a history of power from the Thomas Newcomen’s steam engine to the foundations of America’s electric grid.

Unlike many historians who look at the history of electric power, Klein gives a lot of attention to steam. We haven’t had steam engines directly powering industrial plants for decades, but steam turbines are still central to the production of most electricity in the United States. Even nuclear power plants use steam turbines to run their generators, they just use the heat from nuclear reactions rather than from the combustion of coal or natural gas to boil water and heat the steam to more than a thousand degrees.

Klein gives attention to many lesser known names in the history of power. He shows that Thomas Edison and George Westinghouse had rivals other than each other, such as Elihu Thomson. Nikola Tesla is well known as the genius who invented the AC motor, but other engineers helped develop his prototype into a commercial product, such as mathematically talented engineer Benjamin Lamme. Many talented inventors tried their hands at making electric lighting and power systems better. Only some of them had the vision, business sense, good partners and luck to turn their ideas into successful products. Few of them are widely known today.

Electrification had clear, direct effects in industry and transportation. Klein discusses how it’s influence reached into other sectors of the economy. Corporate management and finance changed to meet the needs of a growing new technology. For instance, Edison General Electric was able to take advantage of a new New Jersey law that allowed corporations to own businesses in other states. Electric companies grew, expanded and consolidated through numerous mergers and acquisitions. They had a demand for capital that nearly rivaled the railroads, another transformative technology that had shortly preceded electric power.

As the availability of electricity grew, certain industries were able to grow, too. Some chemical and metals manufacturing required abundant electric power to catalyze chemical reactions or generate the high temperatures of electric furnaces. Manufacturers flocked to Niagara after a lager hydroelectric power station started operation there in 1895.

Klein brings the many thread of his story of power together by reflections on three great fairs: the 1876 Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia, the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago and the 1939 New York World’s Fair. In the first, a giant steam engine that powered exhibits by means of belts and pulley was a significant attraction. By the second, electricity was on display, and the White City fairground was a model for testing AC power systems. By the 1939 fair, large power utilities of the type we would recognize today were becoming common. By then it was no big deal to flip a switch or pull a lever and get power so, unlike the previous to fairs, no dignitary undertook a show of doing it; the power was on from the start.

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

The Age of Edison by Ernest Freeburg

Empires of Light by Jill Jonnes

The Grid by Gretchen Bakke

How We Got to Now by Steven Johnson

The Lighthouse Stevensons by Bella Bathurst

Lights Out by Ted Koppel

Make a Joyful Sound by Helen Elmira Waite

1939 by David Gelernter

Planck by Brandon R. Brown

The Powerhouse by Steve Levine

Rust by Jonathan Waldman

Steam by Andrea Sutcliffe 

Technology in World Civilization by Arnold Pacey

Klein, Maury. The Power Makers: Steam, Electricity, and the Men Who Invented Modern America. New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2008.

Arthur & George by Julian Barnes

I was going read only fiction over the holidays and give myself a break from writing reviews.  So I picked up Arthur & George by Julian Barnes.  I remembered I reviewed The Sherlockian by Graham Moore and began to feel obligated to review this other novel about Arthur Conan Doyle as well.

The books are very different.  The Sherlockian is a thriller and it is entirely fictional.  Barnes’ book is a more literary, historical novel based on real events.  If he had been writing a thriller, the story would have started when Doyle got involved in overturning the wrongful conviction of solicitor George Adelji for mutilating and killing animals in the rural community where he was raised by a Scottish mother and an Indian father who converted to Anglicanism and served as a vicar.  This doesn’t occur until you’ve already read 70 percent of the book.  Barnes doesn’t indulge the achronologic order a novel permits, but he does take his time, gets into the heads of his protagonists, and takes a long look at side stories.  This is why I refer to it as a literary novel in contrast to a thriller, which is more to-the-point and plot driven.

I wonder why Barnes decided to write a novel instead of a nonfiction account of the events.  I suspect there was plenty of source material.  Doyle was a prolific writer.  Newspapers abounded in England at the time.  Clues to the truth can be found in even the most obfuscatory court and government documents.  The Adelji case led to new laws, including the introduction of appeals courts to the British criminal justice system.  I suspect he wanted to explore themes that interested him without too strictly bound to a factual narrative.

There is the suggestion of a theme in the opening chapters.  Doyle and Adelji are introduced through their childhood exposures to death, something that would have been common in the 1800s.  Doyle famously became a spiritualist.  He was committed to the idea that death was passage into another life and that gifted people could communicate with the departed.  I do not know if Adelji’s views are on the record, but Barnes depicts him as something between neutral and skeptical.  He also seems indifferent and uncurious.  The only fact he is sure of is that everyone dies.  What happens after death, if anything, is unknown, and he finds the evidence of an afterlife to be weak.  These views are not contrasted; they are juxtaposed.

Ethics may be another theme.  Doyle derived his ethical view from his notions of chivalry.  Adelji, who comes across as a high-functioning person with Asperger’s syndrome, found his place in the order and logic of the law.  There was plenty of unethical activity, or at least human venality, presented in the story: racism, eugenic notions, sloppy police work, unjust courts, and heel-dragging bureaucrats.

I might have preferred a straight nonfiction account of the events.  Barnes novelization worked for me, though.  It was certainly more effective than the partial fictionalization attempted by David Gelernter in his history of the 1939 World’s Fair.

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

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

The Great Stink by Clare Clark

The Sherlockian by Graham Moore

Barnes, Julian.  Arthur & George.  New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006.

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