Modest Expectations--Engineers Stand in the Shallow End of the Future Pool

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1769

The novel underneath its title can be good or bad in spite of it, independent of the flag under which it flies. Its just helpful, usually, if the title is as good as the book—better even, because, after all, Modest Expectations isn't quite as good as the real thing. But “Modest Expectations” seems as thought hat would be the title of future vision in this advertisement that appeared in 1929. It is an advertisement in Collier's magazine by an engineering company during the time in which The Engineer and the possibilities of engineering were running full-blaze in the United States. There was a belief in the idea of engineering as a cure-all to present and future problems, and the word was as prevalent in the sphere of social interaction as the prefix “e-” was in the early days on internet business and communication in the 1990's.

It seems as though there were few occupations immune from the “-engineer” suffix, whether they had anything specifically to do with engineering, or not. The “control safety engineer” described a crossing guard; “sanitary engineer” referred to what was known as a garbage man; “nutrition control engineer” was a food server, and so on, position names changed by the hundreds if not more, elevating the status of a profession by simply applying the meme's suffix to the job title. IF you judged the overuse of the term by the actual accomplishments and achievements of engineering of the times, it was probably justified, give the enormous progress of engineering. In just the first decade of the 20^th century enormous change were made in the way life was/would be lived with the introduction of the steam turbine generator, the internal combustion engine, heavier-than-air powered aircraft, the audion, the vacuum diode, the thermionic valve, Bakelite, and so on, all of which would soon bring technological change to create revolutionary changes in the way life was structured in the U.S. And worldwide.

But given the gigantic changes in the first 30 years of the 20^th century, what was it that the engineer was seeing in this advertisement, “The Engineer Looks into the Future”? What was it in the hand of the engineer in the illustration, what was he placing down in the city of tomorrow, today? A faster train, or space ship or part of a vacuum tube people-mover, or what?

It turns out that this engineer didn't have such lofty future-vision plans—in fact, the vision was subterranean, and the thing in the engineer's hands was cast iron pipe. Yes, the future was in materials, and that material manifested itself in cast iron pipe, courtesy of the Cast Iron Pipe Association.

Now cast iron had been around for a long time before 1929—even used as pipe the idea goes back into the 16^th century. There were bridges made of cast iron in the 18^th century, and the movement towards the modern skyscraper maybe traced back to cast iron facades and construction in the 1850's. I'm not so sure why cast iron pipe was so significant in 1929—perhaps it wasn't so very widely used. But I must admit to having a “moment of discovery” while I tried to reason why the future of engineering looked into a hole in the ground filled with cast iron pipe.

Another interesting image that comes a little earlier on is this advertisement for the “Institute of Efficiency” (in 1917), which in effect takes the running-rampant ideas of engineering and applies it to the ways in which people ran their personal lives. Efficiency was as much a catch-word as “engineering”, and it was in this decade that saw the appearance of Scientific Management (Fred. Winslow Taylor) and its numerous offshoots. What bothered me about this ad marshaling the positive factors of the study-at-home courses in efficiency was its inefficient use use of space and communication of the idea. Not the least of which was the very odd bit in the bottom right corner, which the reader was supposed to fill in and clip off and send to the Efficiency people. There's really no room to write, and you can't actually mail the thing—and, if I was trying to get someone to purchase something about improving their efficiency I might have wanted to make it much easier for them to send me something with their name on it.  The whole effort just seems not very efficient.