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Engineering Invention: Frank J. Sprague and the U.S. Electrical Industry. By Frederick DaIzell. (Cambridge: mit Press, 2010. xiv, 288 pp. $21.60, isbn 978-0-262-04256-7.)
Biographies of great inventors have been a staple of the history of technology since the Scottish writer Samuel Smiles wrote his celebratory Lives of the Engineers in 1862. Acknowledging this tradition while subtly countering it, Frederick Dalzell gives us a readable, thoughtful life of Frank Julian Sprague, an electrical engineer and entrepreneur largely forgotten today. Dalzell shows the importance of Sprague to the development of electrical technology and of his innovations to twentieth-century American life. Sprague was a pioneer in the design of electric motors and mass cransir systems, and for this reason alone he deserves a larger historical presence.
Dalzell's book has an even higher value, however: it spurs reflection on critical conceptual issues in the history of technology. The majority of historians of technology hold that larger social, economic, and cultural processes shape...