Explore the story behind several historic engineering feats in Dreams of Iron and Steel: Seven Wonders of the Nineteenth Century, from the Building of the London Sewers to the Panama Canal.

Hardcover, 320pp

HarperCollins Publishers, January 2004

ISBN-13: 0007163061

Barnes & Noble online price: $20.76

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SYNOPSIS

From the Publisher
From the London sewers that banished cholera to the Panama Canal that shaved thousands of miles off a dangerous sea passage, from the Hoover Dam that diverted the world’s most unpredictable river to give power to over half of the country to the transcontinental railroad that fulfilled the dream of manifest destiny, Dreams of Iron and Steel reveals the epic struggles and personal stories of the most brilliant pioneers of the industrial age, and the financiers and politicians who hung on for the ride as fortunes and reputations were lost and won.

From the Critics

The Washington Post
Beginning with the construction of the gigantic ship the Great Eastern in the 1850s and ending with the completion of the Hoover Dam eight decades later, Deborah Cadbury provides in Dreams of Iron and Steel a smoothly written and informative if once-over-lightly look at seven heroic projects during a period that left the world “transformed in almost every way possible.” — Jonathan Yardley

Publisher’s Weekly
British historian and Emmy Award-winning BBC producer Cadbury (The Last King of France, etc.) chronicles seven great engineering feats of the 19th and early 20th centuries: the Great Eastern, the largest ocean-going vessel of the mid-19th century; the London sewer system; the U.S. transcontinental railroad; the Brooklyn Bridge; the Panama Canal; the Hoover Dam; and, least known, Scotland’s Bell Rock Lighthouse. Cadbury pays special attention to the visionary, sometimes almost delusional men who were the human catalysts for these breakthrough accomplishments. Her choices are good ones, as the fascinating personalities at the center of these endeavors include corrupt manipulators, selfless crusaders and arrogant self-promoters, all of whom share a preternatural single-mindedness, which is at the core of their successes. Cadbury also describes the human costs that success required, often of the founders of these enterprises and invariably of those who moved the steel, dug the holes and poured the concrete. The cumulative loss of lives on these projects was in the thousands, and Cadbury is unsparing in her descriptions of the ways death occurred. Men were boiled alive in a boiler malfunction on the Great Eastern; blown up, scalped or mutilated while working on the transcontinental railroad; and entombed in concrete while building Hoover Dam. But the book is not a social commentary about the reckless disregard of 19th-century industrialists; it is, rather, dedicated to the human ingenuity displayed in these battles with a stubborn and capricious natural world. Readers who enjoyed the challenge of building the 1893 World’s Fair in The Devil and the White City will find much to revel in here. (Jan. 9) Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

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