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Close on the heels of Marconi's achievement came the proliferation of the automobile and the airplane; a great world war revealed the more deadly side of technology. By 1929, the year my father was born, sociologists like Robert and Helen Lynd had "unearthed the beginnings of the technological division between parents and adolescents that later decades would be moan." Their pioneering study, Middletown (based on Muncie, Ind.), recalled a golden yesteryear when families spent evenings together and neighbors dropped by and "sat on the lawn," an activity that bored the teenagers, who wanted to go off and drive with their friends.
The excerpts in Visions covering the period from the Depression to the end of World War II outline a growing confidence in the possibility and then the reality of the atomic bomb. Contributions by luminaries such as Robert Oppenheimer, Gen. Leslie Groves, and Vannevar Bush provide revealing insights into how that complex and epoch-defining enterprise was viewed at the time. Postwar reflections on the bomb in subsequent essays reveal a growing demoralization with the role that science and technology played. The great Oppenheimer—the intellectual father of the bomb—best captured this sentiment: "In some sort of crude sense which no vulgarity, no humor, no overstatement can quite extinguish, the physicists have known sin; and this is a knowledge which they cannot lose."
Rhodes's selections for the postwar boom chronicle an emerging excitement with the "magic" of technology in the development of the transistor and the digital computer and countless new products, from frozen orange juice to the birth-control pill. The Soviet Union launched Sputnik in 1957, the year I was born. The U.S. government was galvanized by the upstaging, and suddenly Big Science was given a blank checkbook. Rhodes's selections from the sixties include two pieces on the American space program by John Glenn, one a delightful first-person account of weightlessness; also included here are "The First Laser," by its inventor, Theodore Maiman; Eisenhower's famous warning about the "military-industrial complex"; a number of environmental pieces by people like Rachel Carson and Barry Commoner; a couple of essays on the emergence of Japan; and a variety of speculations about the future of computers.
What is remarkable about many of these important technological achievements is the degree to which they rested on the fundamental scientific discoveries of the first half of the century. What had looked to many like esoteric, ivory-tower speculation during the Golden Age of Physics, when scientists like Bohr, Heisenberg, Einstein, and Dirac were—as we say in the trade—at the "peak of their powers," turned out to be highly useful results with a cornucopia of surprising applications.
The final section of Rhodes's book brings us to the present. A disturbing piece on the Challenger disaster, which occurred as my first child was learning to walk, shows the folly of a "system" where managers overrule engineers. An engineer named Roger Boisjoly sent a memo to the Engineering VP at Morton Thiokol in July 1985 with the in tent to "insure that management is fully aware of the seriousness of the current O-Ring erosion problem." Notes that Boisjoly took at a meeting the day before the fateful launch (Jan. 28, 1986) reveal strong opposition from relevant engineers about the ability of the infamous O-Rings to do their jobs in the unusually low temperatures anticipated for the launch.1
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