Today, we visit a secret place that you've never
seen. The University of Houston's College of
Engineering presents this series about the machines
that make our civilization run, and the people
whose ingenuity created them.
You've probably seen David
Macaulay's picture books on technology. The books,
Castle and Cathedral,
take us through the two great glories of medieval
architecture. How Things Work uses
wonderful pictures to explain everything from pumps
The magic of Macaulay's work is its specificity.
Castle tells how they built just one
castle. It is fictitious, but representative.
Cathedral tells how they made the real
Chutreaux Cathedral in 13th-century France.
A less familiar, but even more ingenious, Macaulay
book is called Underground. In it he
invents a typical urban street corner. Then he
asks, "What's underneath it?" To find out, we go
down a hundred feet into the earth and gaze upward
through transparent dirt at every man-made thing
above us. What we see echoes the witch's song from
the opera Dido and Aeneas:
In our deep vaulted cell, the charm we'll
Just under the surface run telephone
conduits and electric power ducts. Further down are
gas lines, low-pressure domestic water, and
high-pressure water for fire-fighting. The manholes
in the street let us get at valves in the water
Further down yet are sewage lines, then storm
drains. Macaulay shows us the ideal layout of all
those lines. Then he shows the ugly tangle that
usually builds up as real cities grow.
Most dramatic of all, and deeper still, are the
foundations of big buildings. He shows us floating
foundations and piling. The floating concrete slabs
look like huge Belgian waffles viewed from below --
with squares 30 feet across.
Below foundations, mains, piling, and all else run
subway tunnels, linked to the surface only by long
So to create a shining city above ground, we had to
shape a second invisible city below. Without the
city below, the city above simply could not be.
This second city under the earth is astonishing.
And most of us don't even know it's there.
Macaulay shows us the "charm we've prepared" in
this deep vaulted cell of the second city. And the
crowning irony of his book is that it hides in the
children's section of the bookstore. Maybe this
really is the secret world of children and witches
-- not meant for our grownup eyes to see.
I'm John Lienhard, at the University of Houston,
where we're interested in the way inventive minds
Macaulay, D., Underground. Boston:
Houghton Mifflin Co. 1976.
Macaulay, D, Cathedral: The Story of Its
Construction. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co.
Macaulay, D., Castle, Boston: Houghton
Mifflin Company, 1977.
Macaulay, D., The Way Things Work.
Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co. 1988.
Macaulay, D., City: A Story of Roman Planning
and Construction. Boston: Houghton Mifflin
Macaulay, D., Mill. Boston: Houghton
Mifflin Company, 1983.
Macaulay, D., Pyramid. Boston:
Houghton Mifflin Company, 1975.
I'm grateful to friends at Brentano's Bookstore,
Houston, for allowing me to do detailed browsing
through the works of Macaulay.
The Engines of Our Ingenuity is
Copyright © 1988-1997 by John H.
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