Technology and Culture

446 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Charles Ellet, Jr.: The Engineer as Individualist, 1810-1862. By Gene D. Lewis. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1968. Pp. viii—(-220. $7.50. Charles Ellet is a little reminiscent of those stock-character Yankees whom 19th-century Englishmen delighted in portraying: ambitious, shrewd, skillful, egotistical, and ingenuous. Early in life he pinned his hopes for advancement on education. After three years as an assistant engineer on canal construction, he determined to study engineering in France at the Ecole des ponts et chausees. The decision was an important one. It was made, in the first instance, out of ambitions for wealth and social position. Ellet was convinced that a professional career based on the engineering apprenticeship system would forever restrict him to a “middle station” in life. The decision was critical, too, in that while European training gave him good intellectual tools for his career, it also inflated his sense of self-importance. Ellet’s personality is an important issue, both in understanding his career and his biographer’s difficulties. One of Ellet’s early assignments was as assistant engineer on the James River and Kanawha Canal, a posi­ tion he secured partly from friendship with Benjamin Wright, the chief engineer. When Wright resigned, Ellet was chosen to replace him, but not without some management reservations about his “dictatorial, if not sarcastic” temperament. Three years later, Wright was back and Ellet was out, ascribing his sudden dismissal to jealousy and hypocrisy. When he turned to bridge building, the problems were similar. His European experience had introduced him to suspension bridging, and he eagerly looked for the opportunity to practice the new system in America. His first effort across the Schuylkill was successful and earned him a measure of fame, but subsequent suspension construction across the Ohio River and at Niagara involved Ellet in complicated squabbles which diminished his real abilities. And so it went throughout his life, from large schemes for river navigation and flood control in the Missis­ sippi Valley to his ideas for winning the Civil War. For the loyal biographer, Ellet’s personality poses a problem. Profes­ sor Lewis has attempted to resolve it by a liberal application of Daniel Calhoun, whose study, The American Civil Engineer, provides the prin­ cipal interpretive framework. Ellet is characterized as the individualist, an engineer seeking the role of independent consultant at a time when engineering was increasingly dominated by corporate organization. But individualism, as Lewis uses it, is not the real issue. For engineers, the question was whether or not they would adopt a management orienta­ tion—the attitudes which lay behind corporate organization—as the model for their own professional lives. Ellet clearly did. Along with most engineers at the time, he helped to promote the companies for which he worked, publicizing their activities and selling their stock. He wrote extensively on the most profitable rate structure for transporta­ tion companies, occupied managerial positions himself, and behaved, at TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 447 least in this respect, generally the same as those engineers Lewis would make his antitheses. Because Lewis devotes so much effort to knit together these trouble­ some elements of talent and egocentrism, he misses some potentially interesting questions. He is aware of gaps in our knowledge of the transmission of technology, yet he fails to explore the relationship be­ tween Ellet’s European training and the application of it in America. Ellet’s plan for river navigation and flood control raises another issue. In the period following the Civil War, civilian engineers sought to gain control of federally-financed river and harbor improvement from the army’s topographical engineering corps. Did the failure of Ellet’s plan mean that the struggle actually began forty years earlier? Out of a desire to trim neatly all the rough edges of his character, Lewis also stumbles into strange historical terrain. European historians may find curious the statement: “New techniques and inventions in engineering were frequently introduced in Europe even as late as the Civil War” (p. 87). American historians will wonder at such remarks as “labor discontent was a characteristic phenomenon of nineteenthcentury America” (the explanation Lewis gives on p. 43 for...