The Gentleman Scientists by Tom Schachtman

The period of time around the American Revolution coincided with the Enlightenment. In Gentleman Scientists and Revolutionaries, Tom Schachtman endeavors to present a history of American science during this time and show how scientific ideas influenced the founding fathers.

Shachtman starts with the colonial period. Because many of the formally educated people in America, including clergyman, had studied in Europe, Enlightenment science was taught to many of the founding fathers to some degree in their youths. As frontiersman, even in American cities and upper class, practical knowledge was considered to be an acceptable subject along with classical subjects. At the time, they wouldn’t have used the word “science,” nor would they have strongly distinguished the study of science from the professions of engineering, architecture and medicine or even agriculture and skilled trades.

Americans were well-read, and the many newspapers of the time introduced common people to scientific debate. In particular, Philadelphia newspapers (including one operated by Benjamin Franklin’s brother) sensationalized the debate over variolation (inoculation) to prevent small pox. The American reputation for science was slow to develop in the colonial period, but Franklin’s success in studying electricity proved that the colonies could produce scientists to match the European adepts.

The Revolutionary War did not bring scientific study to a stop, but it necessarily diverted a lot of attention. Even so, people continued to seek scientific and technological advances, especially if they might help the war effort.

After the war, the United States continued to develop its scientific talent. Schacthman culminates his book in the presidency of Thomas Jefferson and the period shortly after it. By this time, the nation had a depth of scientific talent and could mount and expedition to the western edge of the continent, start a steamboat line, and demonstrate that meteors originated in outer space.

Scientific ideas of the time shaped the founders’ political thinking. In particular, the Enlightenment was a period when many people abandoned the notion that knowledge was received from authorities. Knowledge could be discovered through observation of nature and the application of reason. In particular, people might discover the laws of effective government in much the way that Isaac Newton discovered the laws of motion.

A related idea was that knowledge was tested, adjusted and improved by experimentation. They did not imagine that they were creating a perfect government, they were instead applying the lessons they learned from previous experiments in ancient and European governments to a new experiment that may or may not produce the results they hoped for. In some ways, Americans are

still participating in that same experiment.

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

A Professor, a President, and a Meteor by Cathryn J. Prince

Common Sense by Thomas Paine

Defining Noah Webster by K. Alan Snyder

Empires of Light by Jill Jonnes

46 Pages by Scott Liell

The Invention of Air by Steven Johnson

His Excellency by Joseph J. Ellis

Steam by Andrea Sutcliffe 

Undaunted Courage by Stephen Ambrose

Schachtman, Tom. Gentleman Scientists and Revolutionaries: The Founding Fathers in the Age of Enlightenment. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2014.

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.

A Professor, a President, and a Meteor by Cathryn J. Prince

A Professor, a President, and a Meteor, a book by Cathryn J. Prince, is a biography of Benjamin Silliman. Silliman helped to establish the United States as a scientific leader.

Silliman was part of the post-Revolutionary generation. His father, Gold Selleck Silliman, was a general in the Continental Army. Benjamin Silliman had hoped to make a name for himself in the law, but was persuaded by a family friend to pursue science, though it was not a career likely to lead to prominence in America.

American science was not well regarded in those days, especially in Europe. A falling star, and Silliman’s diligent and careful study, changed that.

In 1807, a large meteor fell over Weston, Connecticut. Silliman, a very young, new professor of chemistry at Yale, and his colleague James Kingsley, went as quickly as they could to the remote community. The carefully interviewed witnesses, surveyed the location of meteorites, and collected samples. Silliman took samples back to New Haven to analyze them in his lab.

Silliman helped to establish that meteors originated in outer space. Popular theories at the time were that they came for lunar or terrestrial volcanoes or somehow formed in the atmosphere. The notion that something from outer space could fall to Earth was radical.

Silliman other contributions to American science were his work as a popularizer and mentor. He was an able teacher and able to communicate science to a broad audience. His public lectures on science around the country were very popular. He also helped to train a generation of American scientists. At the beginning of his career, he had to go to Europe to study chemistry and geology, at the end of his career and budding scientist could be educated in the U.S.

Silliman’s ability to reach the people of his day was his devotion to his Christian faith. He saw no serious conflict between his religion and his science. He was able to stay out of debates with clergymen that would have brought opposition to his scientific views.

In spite of the title, I found little reason to drag the president into it. Thomas Jefferson was in office at the time of the Weston Fall. Silliman, like other New England Federalists, had little liking for his policies, nor did Jefferson much care for his adversaries in the region. In addition, the president did not highly esteem geology or astronomy, instead preferring biological sciences that he considered to have more practical application. Prince brings up these difference in the book, but they never seem to add up to a serious conflict between Silliman and Jefferson.

Prince, Cathryn J.  A Professor, a President, and a Meteor: The Birth of American Science. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2011.

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

A Little History of Science by William Bynum

Copernicus’ Secret by Jack Repcheck

Defining Noah Webster by K. Alan Snyder

The Essential Engineer by Henry Petroski

His Excellency by Joseph J. Ellis

The Invention of Air by Steven Johnson

Miss Leavitt's Stars by George Johnson

Newton and the Counterfeiter by Thomas Levenson

Triumvirate by Bruce Chadwick

Undaunted Courage by Stephen Ambrose

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 Explorer King by Robert Wilson

Clarence King was probably the most well-known American scientist of his time. It doesn’t hurt that his scientific reputation was built on exploration of the then still wild west of the United States of that he could spin a tale. Robert Wilson recounts the life of the accomplished geologist in The Explorer King.

King was born in 1842. He was raised in Newport, Massachusetts. He was educated at Yale’s Sheffield Scientific School.

As a young man, King was enamored of art critic John Ruskin. Ruskin thought the rugged Alps of Europe to be the best subject of art for their beauty, colorfulness, ruggedness and variety. When he met western geologists and mountaineers through mentors at Sheffield, he wanted to be part of it.

He headed out for California in 1863 and became part of the state’s geologic survey. He would spend the next decade studying the geology and geography of the American west, especially its mountains. He showed great physical prowess and courage as a mountaineer.

After working on the California survey, he went on to lead surveys. In 1864, he was chosen to lead a survey of Yosemite.

He built on his reputation from the Yosemite survey to lobby Congress to fund a survey of the 40^th Parallel, roughly the route the transcontinental railroads would follow. Though it was under the auspices of the Army Corp of Engineers, it was the first federally-funded scientific endeavor that was completely staffed by civilians. While working on this survey, he was the first to discover active glaciers in the U.S. His team published new methods of silver smelting to make the mines for productive (the survey’s first report dealt with mining in order to show the commercial value of their research to money-conscious Congressmen).

The 40^th Parallel survey made King famous, though not because of the many contributions to science that came from it. King’s team heard rumors of a diamond discovery in Colorado. It would have been very embarrassing for them to have walked over such a valuable mineral resource without observing it. They tracked down the site of the discovery and determined it was a hoax; the site had been planted with rough diamonds and other uncut gemstones that the con men had bought mostly with money from their marks. Stories of massive fraud sells newspapers, especially when the names of big money men in San Francisco and New York are attached to it. King was the hero of the story.

When the U.S. Geological Survey was created, King was appointed to be its first director. His career as a scientist was already on the decline. He would turn his attention to making money in mining, but he would not be successful. He would have no money when he died.

This leads to an interesting point about King, though it is not the focus of Wilson’s biography. King had nothing to leave for his secret family. He was married to a black woman. This was a very unusual thing at the time. To protect his reputation, he kept the marriage a secret. He did not even reveal to his wife his real identity until shortly before he died (she knew him as James Todd). His friend John Hay provided for Ada Copeland Todd (and the five children she had with King) after King died in 1901.

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

A Professor, a President, and a Meteor by Cathryn J. Prince

The Fifth Heart by Dan Simmons

Sea of Glory by Nathaniel Philbrick

Undaunted Courage by Stephen Ambrose

Wilson, Robert. The Explorer King: Adventure, Science, and the Great Diamond Hoax—Clarence King in the Old West. New York: Scribner, 2006.

Circles by James Burke

Circles is a collection of essays that science journalist James Burke wrote for Scientific American. These 50 short histories focus on science and technology, as you might expect from the magazine that originally published them. Burke also covers culture and literature, which are inextricably tangled in those other subjects anyway.

The conceit of these essays is that they start and end at more or less the same place, making a circle. These trips through history, like history itself, are hardly tidy little circles. Burke skips from place to place, person to person, and period to period like a mad time traveler. The jumps are not random, each step has a connection to its predecessor, eventually finding a connection back to the starting point. Even so, the effect is sometimes chaotic.

I think Burke wanted to convey something of the chaos of history. It is easy to look at the history of some bit of science or technology and see it as a clearly delineated arc. We make superhighways from early concept to full-fledged idea and fly by everything else without noticing it. Burke takes the scenic route, noting the oddball side trips and serendipitous stumbles that are the typical milestones of our creeping advancement in knowledge.

The approach doesn’t allow Burke to dive deep into any subject, but that is not what he wanted to do. That is why I would recommend it to other amateur historians. You can play the honeybee with Burke, flitting from flower to flower and sipping the nectar of each. Along the way you are likely something that intrigues you. You could start a historical journey of your own.

James Burke also wrote The Pinball Effect.

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

A Professor, a President, and a Meteor by Cathryn J. Prince

Ada's Algorithm by James Essinger

Arthur & George by Julian Barnes

Better for All the World by Harry Bruinius

The Brooklyn Bridge by Judith St. George

Canals and Their Architecture by Robert Harris

Copernicus’ Secret by Jack Repcheck

Descarte’s Secret Notebook by Amir D. Aczel

Dreams of Iron and Steel by Deborah Cadbury

The Ghost Map by Steven Johnson

The Great Bridge by David McCollough

The Great Stink by Clare Clark

The Invention of Air by Steven Johnson

The Lighthouse Stevensons by Bella Bathurst

Majestie by David Teems

Make a Joyful Sound by Helen Elmira Waite

On a Grander Scale by Lisa Jardine

The Real World of Sherlock Holmes by Peter Costello

War Against the Weak by Edwin Black

Burke, James. Circles: 50 Round Trips through History, Technology, Science, Culture. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000.

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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Related posts and articles
Students with autism lean towards STEM majors

STEM Books

I’ve reviewed 39 STEM-related books (and counting).  STEM is an acronym for science, technology, engineering, and mathematics.  As you may have seen in the news, there is a push to improve STEM education, interest students in STEM fields, and grow the number of workers in these fields.  The idea is that these will be the skills needed by workers of the future.  If you’re a STEM educator or a student considering a career in STEM fields, you might like to take a look at some of these books.

I’ll confess that I’m not an educator, but I think most of these books will be accessible to high school and college students, and a few to middle school students.  The list is also a reflection of my career and interests in engineering, public health, policy, and history.  Even with these biases, I think it is a good list for someone looking for STEM-related books.

How to Build an Android: The True Story of Philip K. Dick’s Robotic Resurrection by David F. Dufty

I was fascinated by robots as a kid.  I enjoyed reading Isaac Asimov’s robot stories.  I longed for the Omnibot 2000 in the Sears Wishbook.

Robots have come a long way.  In How to Build an Android, David F. Dufty describes the short strange life of a very complex robot made to look and talk like science fiction author Philip K. Dick.  The robot had a very sophisticated and lifelike head and complex artificial intelligence.  As with most complex things, it was the work of many people who had to solve a lot of problems.

If you’re interested in robotics, this is an interesting nontechnical book.  In addition, you’ll get introduced to some freaky sci-fi.  You may even get as (somewhat) legitimate reason to use the word “Dickhead” (capitalized, it refers to a fan of PKD, so don’t go using it on anyone).

The Big Roads: The Untold Story of the Engineers, Visionaries, and Trailblazers Who Created the American Superhighways by Earl Swift

The Interstate highway system in the United States is one of the most enormous structures built.  Some of the prospective STEM students who read this may actually be younger than the Intestate system, though in some sense it is never complete because it needs constant repair and maintenance.  The Interstates were completed in the 1990s, but the Federal-Aid Highways go back to 1916.

Earl Swift wrote an accessible history of the Interstates in The Big Roads.  If you interested in automobiles or transportation, it’s a good read.

Dreams of Iron and Steel by Deborah Cadbury

Deborah Cadbury describes seven wonders of engineering in Dreams of Iron and Steel.  It covers almost a century of history, but many of the events are concentrated in the Victorian Era.  That was a time of great technological innovation.

Though the book is history, many of the structures still stand.  Railways, the Brooklyn Bridge, the Suez and Panama Canals, and Hoover Dam stand testament to an age of big engineering.

The Physics of Superheroes by James Kakalios

Though the memory of Professor Wragg’s sneer prompts me to not make this confession, part of my interest in science and technology came from comic books.  Iron Man was cool.  Spider-Man’s web shooters were very cool.  Superhero comics are full of fantasy, admittedly, but the strange, unrealistic science and technology they depict have inspired many to study STEM in reality.

Physicist John Kakalios uses examples from comic books to explore real physics in The Physics of Supeheroes.  Sometimes comics get there science right.  Even when they get it wrong, it can be instructive.  If you know what people are talking about when they refer to the “New 52,” you may find this book to be a great introduction to physics.

1089 and All That: A Journey into Mathematics by David Acheson

Here is another confession: I’m not especially interested in math.  I endured a lot of math classes to study engineering.  Reading David Acheson’s 1089 and All That did not require such endurance.  For one reason, it is a short book.  For another, Acheson doesn’t expect his readers to be mathematicians; it is enough to follow the outline of the math he discusses.

I recommend this book because so many people have a fear of math.  1089 can be followed by many high school students and older folks with math phobias.  Just take a deep breath, relax, and follow along as well as you can.  You’ll see that math can be interesting, useful, and even beautiful in a way.

The Brooklyn Bridge: They Said it Couldn’t be Built by Judith St. George

Judith St. George’s The Brooklyn Bridge is a short history of and iconic bridge.  Written for the bridge’s 100^th anniversary, it is also the story of the engineers who sacrificed life and health to see it completed: John Roebling and his son Washington.  John Roebling was a German immigrant who built many suspension bridges and owed a wire-making business.  He gave his son and extraordinary education in bridge engineering for the time, and before beginning work on the Brooklyn Bridge he served as an officer in the Union Army during the Civil War.

Why should a cutting-edge STEM student read about a bridge that is almost 130 years old?  It’s because we still use and rely on very successful, centuries old technologies.  Improving and rebuilding our infrastructure will be an important part of our economy.  As recently as 2010, New York City and the federal government committed $500 million to repair and repaint the Brooklyn Bridge.

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

STEM lumps together science, technology, engineering, and mathematics.  Is there a difference between science and engineering?  Is it important?

Henry Petroski, a professor of civil engineering and history and author of The Essential Engineer, believes there is an important difference.  At heart, science is about increasing knowledge.  Engineering is about invention.  Of course, new knowledge makes new invention possible.  Just as often, though, engineering runs ahead of science.  Sometimes science didn’t advance until someone invented the instruments to conduct new observations and experiments.  The invention of the microscope made possible the science of microbiology.  Steam engines were built and greatly improved before we had a modern scientific understanding of thermodynamics.  In fact, thermodynamics was to a large extent born out of desire to understand steam engines. In this sense, it is an engineering science (study of manmade things) as much as a natural science (study of natural things) or branch of physics.

Petroski’s focus in the book is the importance of engineering to policymaking, where it is often overshadowed by science.  Policy, science, and engineering play off of each other a lot.  Most of my career as an engineer has been related to government, policy, and regulatory compliance.

The Ghost Map: The Story of London’s Most Terrifying Epidemic—and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World by Steven Johnson

The Ghost Map by science writer Steven Johnson is the story of the birth of epidemiology.  Epidemiology is a medical science that uses statistics to help us understand how diseases operate in a population.  Using various statistical and geographic tools, long before we had computers and GIS, physician John Snow demonstrated that cholera, once a recurring plague that wiped out hundreds of thousands of people in some outbreaks, was a waterborne disease.  This understanding, initially met with much skepticism, allowed officials to intervene to prevent the spread of the disease.  For those who say of their math classes, “I’ll never us this,” here is a case where math (and science and policy) were used to make a great difference.

Undaunted Courage: Meriwether Lewis, Thomas Jefferson, and the Opening of the American West by Stephen Ambrose

It is not much publicized today that the Lewis and Clark expedition of 1804 to 1806 had a partly scientific mission.  Captains Lewis and Clark were charges with bringing back samples of the flora, fauna, and culture of the western territories.  It was also hoped that they would find a water passage to the Pacific Ocean.  In Undaunted Courage, Stephen Ambrose writes about the scientific mission as well as the policy, diplomacy, and commercial hopes the expedition carried.

Of course, what attracts most people to the Lewis and Clark expedition is that it was a great adventure.  There is a place in STEM fields for thoughtful adventurers and explorers. 

Buried Alive: The Terrifying History of Our Most Primal Fear by Jan Bondeson

A list like this deserves something strange, creepy, and more fun than you care to admit.  Right now, thousands of very young future STEM workers are catching bugs and snakes, breaking their toys to see what is inside, or staring into space with a weird expression of vacancy and concentration.

Jan Bondeson’s Buried Alive is not a morbid book.  It is sometimes humorous, especially in consideration of topic.  From a STEM point of view, Bondeson shows how knowledge accumulates over time.  The fears and activities of our forefathers may seem strange to us, but they sometimes made sense in light of what they knew.  Buried Alive doesn’t simply play off our fascination with the grotesque and death, though the book might not have been written if we lacked that fascination, I think it reminds us to approach our ancestors with a touch of grace and humility.  Maybe our progeny will show us the same courtesy.

If you’re looking for something for a younger student, check out this post→ from Joanne Loves Science or these recommendations→ from STEM Friday.  By the way, I also write about engineering, infrastructure and the environment at Infrastructure Watch.

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