Today, we create new technologies to take us west.
The University of Houston's College of Engineering
presents this series about the machines that make
our civilization run, and the people whose
ingenuity created them.
The axe, the steamboat, and
the railroad tell three stories of technological
change. All three began in Europe. And George
Basalla tells how each became unique American means
for speeding our westward expansion.
First, our colonists used European axes. Europeans
had cleared their lands long ago. They would still
fell an occasional tree. But European axes were
designed to shape wood, not to clear land. We
needed far more bite with each axe stroke.
Around 1715, American blacksmiths began
counter-weighting the back of axe heads. That
improved the balance and increased the cut on each
stroke. Ever since, American axe heads have been
made with a blade on one side of the handle and a
flat weight on the other. We suddenly tripled the
speed of felling trees.
The steamboat was also a European invention. We
built our first steamboats on the Eastern seaboard.
They, like the early European ones, had the same
shape as sailing vessels.
Almost immediately we began making riverboats in
the inland river port of Pittsburgh. As we moved
away from the cosmopolitan seacoast to America's
interior river system, we began thinking like river
people. Almost immediately, we turned steamboats
into buoyant flat-bottomed water lilies --
shallow-draft boats with nothing left to protect
them against ocean waves.
Then railroads joined the westward movement.
English railroads had been built in straight lines.
If there was a hill, the English dug a tunnel. If
there was a stream, they built a bridge.
Our landscape was too grand for that. American
mountains were a far cry from English hills. Our
distances were too great for simple straight lines.
If our railroads hadn't followed the curve of the
land, we never could have afforded them.
So we reinvented the locomotive to negotiate less
friendly track. We put sets of small idler wheels
on the front of our locomotives. They distributed
the weight and gave greater stability on curves. We
shifted our attention from the quality of the
roadbed to the quality of the locomotive. Then we
simply flung track across our immense land.
Today, we've made our westward trek. Our priorities
are different. Now the environmental assault of the
felling axe frightens us. We remember how many
people died in riverboat accidents. We want to turn
attention back to the quality and safety of
railroad beds. We're through expanding into a
But felling axes, river gamblers, and Casey Jones
are deeply woven into our sense of self. They form
our once-wild child whom we now leave behind -- as
we prepare to survive the 21st century.
I'm John Lienhard, at the University of Houston,
where we're interested in the way inventive minds