Book a companion to PBS series

Author highlights America's 'Great Projects'

By Todd Leopold
CNN

(CNN) -- Think about an average morning in America.

We turn on our lights. We twist our faucets and get clean, drinkable water. We drive on well-paved, well-graded roads, across gargantuan bridges and through deep tunnels, on a highway system the Romans could have only dreamed about. And we flick on our computers at work and join an information superhighway called the Internet, where we get our news, send our e-mail, buy our consumer goods, and take part in worldwide discussions.

And we seldom pause to wonder: What did it take to build all this?

James Tobin can tell you. He's the author of "Great Projects" (The Free Press), a colorful companion book to the forthcoming PBS series of the same name.

"Great Projects" offers the story behind eight innovative American projects, including the creation of cheap electric power, the development of New York's water system, and the invention of the Internet. The film was made by Daniel Polin and Kenneth Mandel, who spent 10 years on the four-part documentary, says Tobin.

"Mandel, who was originally trained as an engineer, always has thought that the contributions of engineers in U.S. history have been generally overlooked," he says in an e-mail interview from his home in Ann Arbor, Michigan. "The idea of the film project was to bring a number of key projects to life ... (and) emphasize the political and social context of these projects and the personal struggles of the engineers and designers."

'All-but-unknown' stories

Tobin, 45, whose credits include the National Book Critics Circle Award for his 1997 work "Ernie Pyle's War," was chosen to write the book for his background as a historian and biographer.

He fleshed out the six topics of the film -- the control of the Mississippi and Colorado rivers, Thomas Edison's Manhattan lighting project and the electrification of the U.S., the building of New York's George Washington Bridge, and the construction of Boston's "Big Dig" Central Artery project -- and added two of his own, New York's water system and the Internet, to complete the book.

"I think the filmmakers and I were interested in telling stories that weren't well known," says Tobin, citing the George Washington Bridge as an example. The trans-Hudson bridge took decades from conception to completion in the early 1930s, and became symbolic of a battle between designers Gustav Lindenthal and Othmar Ammann, a mentor and protégé who had competing visions.

"The stories of the Brooklyn Bridge and the Golden Gate already had been well-told by others, both on film and in books," says Tobin. "But here was this remarkable, all-but-unknown story about Gustav Lindenthal and Othmar Ammann ... and how they fought each other to realize the dream of bridging the Hudson with what would be the longest bridge in the world."

Tobin found the story of Ammann, a Swiss immigrant who became the designer of almost all of New York's great 20th-century bridges, including the Triborough and the Verrazano-Narrows, inspiring.

"I just find Ammann so appealing ... so deliberate, so smart, a walk-the-walk kind of guy who did something he cared about so deeply," says Tobin, who is currently working on a biography of the Wright brothers. "I kind of fell in love with that bridge, too -- in fact, with the whole suspension bridge form. It's just a beautiful, beautiful structure."

Dreaming big dreams

Besides the histories of each project, "Great Projects" includes helpful sidebars on various topics, and illustrations ranging from a drawing of an early light bulb (with a face and hands that makes it look like Reddy Kilowatt) to a flowchart of the early Internet.

James Tobin

However, Tobin and the filmmakers steered away from critical history, a topic Tobin says others have handled well.

"Clearly there's much to be said about the misuse of technology," he says. "But I think that point of view has been covered pretty well already -- to the detriment, in fact, of the full understanding and appreciation of the role that engineering has played in American civilization."

Similarly, he refutes the idea that the U.S. of today isn't capable of dreaming big dreams, to paraphrase the words of the early 20th-century Chicago architect Daniel Burnham.

Boston's Big Dig, an expensive, intricate road-building project that successfully placed the city's primary highway underground while covering the area with new parkland and a new bridge across the Charles River, is an example, he says.

"The cost overruns for the Big Dig look outrageous to us now ... but many big projects of the past have cost much more than the original estimates," Tobin says. "(But) cities really don't have much choice. Americans have chosen to live in cities; we have no choice but to keep them livable. And despite the enormous headaches that Bostonians are experiencing now ... in 20 years they're going to be proud as hell, because they'll have the most beautiful and livable downtown in the country."

And big dreams don't have to be about big things, he adds. This year, Science magazine named "the number one science development of the year as the creation of electrical circuits so small they're constructed out of individual molecules. That may well be the next frontier -- nanotechnology," Tobin says.

Indeed, there are always big dreams, he adds. It's just that, until they're built, they tend to be as ignored as the idea of where our power or water comes from. "A year before the Wright brothers few -- even for several years AFTER they flew -- very few people had the slightest idea what they were up to," says Tobin. Today, of course, the Wright brothers' invention has shaped the way we travel -- and therefore, view the world.

Something to ponder on your next average American morning.