ABSTRACT
Prominent innovators always have critics. But they are not always in equal balance like yin and yang, or action and reaction. Modern man— the scientist, the explorer, the builder of bridges and waterways and steam engines, the visionary entrepreneur— had become the central creative force. The early twentieth century saw the diffusion of telephones, automobiles, tractors, indoor plumbing, aspirin, electricity, radio, and movies. American cities especially were transformed by early skyscrapers. Industrial engineer Frederick Taylor used time and motion studies to fit workers into the assembly line like cogs in a machine, suggesting that engineers had expertise in managing humans as well as mechanical elements of the system. The vast dams and hydroelectric schemes which were planned or built—the Boulder Canyon Dam being the outstanding example—impressed everyone with the magic power of the mechanical engineer, who could organize such power over nature, harnessing enormous and savage rivers which, a generation ago, had seemed untamable.
