We live in a world of systems and networks, and most of the time we take them for granted. Yet when we step back and consider them as human artifacts in their own right, we're awed by their scale and complexity. Thomas P. Hughes seeks to turn that awe into insight with his new book Rescuing Prometheus. And for the most part, he succeeds.
Rescuing Prometheus is a history of four mammoth postwar projects in the United States: Sage, a computerized radar defense that was the first use of computers as real-time controllers; the Atlas missile project, which gave rise to the management discipline of systems engineering; Arpanet; Boston's Central Artery/Tunnel, possibly the world's most expensive public-works project.
The book focuses on the organizational challenges involved in completing these massive jobs. Project Atlas, for instance, involved 17 contractors, 200 subcontractors, and 200,000 suppliers. In Boston, planners were faced with a seemingly irreconcilable set of budgetary, environmental, and political constraints.
Hughes, who is Mellon Professor of the History and Sociology of Science at the University of Pennsylvania, paints vivid pictures of each project's central personalities, technical challenges, and collective energy. Many of the innovations we tend to identify with Net culture - decentralization, technical meritocracy, productive chaos - Hughes traces to the Sage, Atlas, and Arpanet projects. In this way, his book attempts to redeem the military-industrial-university complex of the '50s and '60s.
While Hughes does an impressive job of bringing the titanic projects down to size, the book feels incomplete. A chapter titled "The Spread of the Systems Approach" is largely a catalog of failed attempts to create scientific solutions to the prominent urban crises of the '60s. The book's brief epilog feels tacked on, leaving one hungry for more analysis.
In the end, though, Rescuing Prometheus's strength is in the assiduously researched stories of individual projects, and is worth reading for those alone.
Rescuing Prometheus, by Thomas P. Hughes: $28.50. Pantheon: (800) 793 2665.
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