Inventing Modern: Growing up with X-Rays, Skyscrapers, and Tailfins

by John H. Lienhard

Modern is a word much used, but hard to pin down. In Inventing Modern , John H. Lienhard uses that word to capture the furious rush of newness in the first half of 20th-century America. An unexpected world emerges from under the more familiar Modern . Beyond the airplanes, radios, art deco, skyscrapers, Fritz Lang's Metropolis , Buck Rogers, the culture of the open road--Burma Shave, Kerouac, and White Castles--lie driving forces that set this account of Modern apart.
One force, says Lienhard, was a new concept of boyhood--the risk-taking, hands-on savage inventor. Driven by an admiration of recklessness, America developed its technological empire with stunning speed. Bringing the airplane to fruition in so short a time, for example, were people such as Katherine Stinson, Lincoln Beachey, Amelia Earhart, and Charles Lindbergh. The rediscovery of mystery powerfully drove Modern as well. X-Rays, quantum mechanics, and relativity theory had followed electricity and radium. Here we read how, with reality seemingly altered, hope seemed limitless.
Lienhard blends these forces with his childhood in the brave new world. The result is perceptive, engaging, and filled with surprise. Whether he talks about Alexander Calder (an engineer whose sculptures were exercises in materials science) or that wacky paean to flight, Flying Down to Rio , unexpected detail emerges from every tile of this large mosaic.
Inventing Modern is a personal book that displays, rather than defines, an age that ended before most of us were born. It is an engineer's homage to a time before the bomb and our terrible loss of confidence--a time that might yet rise again out of its own postmodern ashes.

Genres: Nonfiction

292 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2003

About the author

John Henry Lienhard IV is Professor Emeritus of mechanical engineering and history at The University of Houston. He worked in heat transfer and thermodynamics for many years prior to creating the radio program The Engines of Our Ingenuity. Lienhard is a member of the US National Academy of Engineering.

Reviews

[Ralphz · Rating 3 out of 5]

I don't know what I was expecting, but this plainly wasn't it.

Well, maybe I trusted the title and thought we would be talking about the rapidly changing technology of the 20th century. But the author starts halfway through the 19th. A quarter of the way into the book and we still hadn't really gotten to "modern," at least as most of us define it.

Instead, the author does a slow, and sometimes not super interesting, walk through the times. I kept waiting for the payoff at the end of the first few chapters, but there was none.

He also oddly surfaces "racist" accusations, as if that had any bearing on the story. L. Frank Baum, of Wizard of Oz fame, was racist, he says - "a great deal more racist than even the racist world he lived in." And? That impacts the story of modernism how? It doesn't, apparently. So why bring it up?

A solid DNF.

[James Kubecki · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting read. Very much like James Burke's "Connections" series of books, in that it shows the relationship between various inventions and cultural trends that manifested themselves in unexpected ways.
Side note: The book description mentions Buck Rogers, but the book itself does not. Strange.

[Heidi · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very interesting and informative. It discusses the people who contributed to inventions but did not become famous as well as the famous ones, the important inventions that shaped the modern era, and the social trends that supported and resulted from events in this time.