Roads to nowhere: footnotes on a classic
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Roads to nowhere: footnotes on a classic Maxwell Gordon Lay: The harnessing of power: how nineteenth-century transport innovators transformed the way the world operates. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2018, 374 pp, £64.99 HB Silke Zimmer‑Merkle1
© The Author(s) 2020
When professors retire, they have accumulated an immense amount of precious knowledge during their academic life. Quite a few use this period of relative calm to finally put what they had always wanted to say between two book covers. In many cases, this is a generous gift to humanity. More often than not, the fruit of such labor is a welcome synthesis of the author’s life’s work. Some use it to give an academic overview of their work, while others try out new ideas, departing from the beaten track to test experimental approaches guided by a lifetime’s experience. And some just finish what they had once started, using forgotten notes found while cleaning out their desk drawers. Maxwell Gordon Lay is a renowned road and traffic engineer based in Australia. He is an author of many specialist articles on infrastructure and roadmaking and the Handbook of Road Technology as well as a publication in road history from the 1990s. Now in his eighties, he has published another historical book. Working on the history of technology, it is refreshing to find good reads with internalist views, particularly if they are up-to-date, with a socio-technical perspective. The back cover of The Harnessing of Power promises no less than to examine “how the nineteenth century’s transport legacy of bicycles, trains, ocean-going steamers, trucks, trams, buses and cars arose, creating numerous new technologies and markets.” A concise history of the nineteenth-century mobility revolution in (not even) four hundred pages. “The fact that I am an engineer clearly colours my views and influences my interpretations and I suspect that historians reading this work wish that I had been better schooled in their methods of historical research. On the other hand, one of the drivers of my interest in transport history has been the way in which some otherwise * Silke Zimmer‑Merkle silke.zimmer‑[email protected] 1
History Department – Institute of Technology Futures, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), Karlsruhe, Germany
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very capable historians have misunderstood, often grossly the engineering aspect of the issues they were describing.” (323). Occasionally, authors succeed in identifying the strengths and weaknesses of their own book themselves, and this is the case here. Let me explain. When I agreed to review Lay’s new book, I was very much looking forward to it, given that his Ways of the World: A History of the World’s Roads and of the Vehicles that Used Them is still a classic. Although most historians today are no friends of histories of inventions and master narratives about inventors, the present book intrigued me, as with his first book in transport history Lay had presented a very modern and progressive perspective that some of h
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