What's New May 16, 2009

Alternative Fuels and Energy Resources Articles and Links (Updated)
Bill Introduced to Bring Back the Streetcar
Bill Would Create National Tunnel Inspection Program
Bill Would Require Surface Transportation Inspections by Public Employees
Bill Would Create National Tunnel Inspection Program
City Utilities of Springfield (MO) Joins Water Coalition
Coverage of Infrastructure Economic Stimulus
Drinking Water Week May 3-9
How to Write a Manual by Elizabeth Slatkin
May 9 is National Train Day
Missouri Communities Receive $1.36 Mill in Brownfield Grants
Missouri Receives $185 Mill for Weatherization, Energy
My Googleganger never rests: http://getsatisfaction.com/people/keenan_273643
Pharmaceuticals in Water (Updated)
What I Read (3)
What's New May 1, 2009

What's New Jan. 28, 2009

American Water Works Association Chooses New Officers
Amtrak May Benefit from Tunnel Bill
Book Review: The Unfinished Game by Keith Devlin
Civil Engineers Give American Infrastructure a Low Grade
Congress to Consider Recovery Bill
Drinking Water Not Getting as Much of Stimulus Package as Advocates Hoped
Environmental Protection Agency Announces Decision on Missouri Impaired Waters List
Glossary (Amended)
God Wants You to Be Rich by Paul Zane Pilzer
Googleganger: high school football player
Government Accountability Office Summarizes Shipments on the Missouri River
http://truman.missouri.edu/uploads/newsletters/PlainSpeakingWS03.pdfhttp://truman.missouri.edu/uploads/newsletters/PlainSpeakingWS05.pdfhttp://engineering.missouri.edu/alumni/magazine/EngrMagazine06.pdfhttp://www.columbiatribune.com/2005/Aug/20050803News015.asphttp://www.flouridealert.org/news/2338.htmlhttp://www.dddnews.com/story/1248425.html
Network with Infrastructure Watch on Facebook
New Infrastructure Report Card to be Released January 28
Ray H. LaHood Appointed Secretary of Transportation
Ritual
Spirituality
Take Small Steps to Improve Financial Outlook
The Unfinished Game by Keith Devlin
What’s New Jan. 19, 2009
XING - Groups - All Groups - Consulting Business - Article thread ...
XING - Groups - All Groups - Entrepreneurs Playground - Article ...

The Wright Brothers by David McCollough

Brothers Orville and Wilbur Wright rose to fame at the beginning of the 20^th Century by building the first successful manned, powered flying machine. In popular culture, they tend to be presented as geniuses who went out to Kitty Hawk and started flying one day. In his biography of these men, The Wright Brothers, David McCollough does not dispel the notion of genius, but he focuses on their courage, determination, careful study, methodical approach, and persistence in the pursuit of something they believed could be.

As boys, the brothers were inspired by a toy to consider the possibility of flight. As grown men, they made a careful study of it. Before beginning their experiments, they gathered the available information, including contacts with earlier experimenters in flight such as Octave Chanute and Samuel Pierpont Langley (the director of the Smithsonian Institute who’s “aerodrome” was a failed early flyer). When they began conducting their own experiments with kites (and later using a small wind tunnel they made), they found the published data to be lacking in useful or correct information.

Therefore, it was mainly on their own that the brothers invented their flyers and the means of piloting them. They had the practical view that inventing a flying machine included inventing the method for controlling it in flight.

An interesting note is that the Wrights funded their experiments and first airplanes with their own money. Their bicycle shop must have produced a decent income, but they lived modestly. They lived in a modest home together with their father and sister until after they completed built three working airplanes, the third model being the one they demonstrated publicly. Even after they began to make money making airplanes and decided to build a new, larger house, they shared it. Wilbur’s only request for the new house was that he have his own bedroom and bathroom.

McCollough emphasizes how much the success of Wilbur and Orville was a family affair. They were close to their widowed father, who survived Wilbur by two years. Once they began to demonstrate their airplane and make a build a business on it, their sister Katherine became a social manager for them, and she share a house with Orville until she married at the age of 52 (she passed away three year later). Orville had a long life and saw many improvements in aviation after he sold the company, including Charles Lindbergh’s trans-Atlantic flight and the use of bombers in World War II.

The book is fairly brief. McCollough concentrates on the period when the Wrights were most involved in experimenting with, building, and ultimately demonstrating their invention. Even so, one gets a sense of what the brothers and their immediate family and friends were like.

David McCollough also wrote The Great Bridge. 

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

Make a Joyful Sound by Helen Elmira Waite

McCullough, David. The Wright Brothers. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2015.

Underground by Will Hunt

Will Hunt has been fascinated with underground places since his childhood discovery of an abandoned tunnel in his hometown. Perhaps abandoned isn’t quite right; Hunt found signs of occasional human occupation in the old tunnels. He pursued his interest in underground places and the way people used and experienced them around the world. He describes these experiences, and what these hidden chambers mean, in Underground.

Hunt’s explorations took him into both manmade spaces and natural caves. He retells adventures from the Paris catacombs and a trip across the city that was almost entirely underground. He entered mines and saw shrines miners created for the spirits (or monsters) that live in them, beings that are sometimes generous and sometimes dangerous. Perhaps these are relatives to the spirits, strange creatures and gods reputed to live in natural caves.

Caves and tunnels are important to varying degrees to almost all religions. Shamans, priests and philosophers have long traveled under the earth to seek insight or communication with other worlds. Hunt ties this to the hallucinations and distorted sense of time humans experience when they are deprived of sensory stimulation. He does not denigrate these experiences, but sees them as something universally human. The altered state of consciousness one might enter in the utter darkness of a cave is simply another way the mind works, and possibly the root of all religion.

People did not always understand what was underground, and we are still making discoveries. Even two centuries ago, the world under our feet was a mystery. As a fan of Missouriana, I was attracted to Hunts telling of the life John Cleves Symmes. A St. Louis-based trader and former Army officer, Symmes was a proponent of a hollow earth theory. We were not living in the inner world, but he imagined there were worlds within ours existing on a series of concentric spheres. From 1818 until his death in 1829, he traveled the country lecturing on this theory and raising money to mount an expedition. He never made that trip to inner worlds, but he was an inspiration to the authors of hollow earth stories such as Edgar Allen Poe, H. G. Wells, Edgar Rice Burroughs and Frank L. Baum.

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 Astounding, the Amazing, and the Unknown by Paul Malmont

The Big Roads by Earl Swift

The Brooklyn Bridge by Judith St. George

The Explorer King by Robert Wilson

The Girls of Atomic City by Denise Kiernan

London Under by Peter Ackroyd

Rising Tide by James M. Barry

Road to the Sea by Florence Dorsey

Second Chronicles

The Water Room by Christopher Fowler

Hunt, Will. Underground: A Human History of the World Beneath Our Feet. New York: Spiegel & Grau, 2018.