Online Catalogue last updated 17th of September 2023
Compiled by Martin Jensen.
This work was compiled to give an account of the building techniques used about the year 1700, intelligible to a structural engineer born after 1900. To do so, the author drew upon actual texts and illustrations used by engineers in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. (Surprisingly, a large number of ancient construction techniques are still in use today.)
Introductory chapters deal with such preliminary details as estimates and contracts, surveying, necessary equipment for field work, levelling, and materials. Encompassing a broad range of engineering projects, the remaining text and illustrations go on to deal with hand tools; lifting equipment; transport and erection; piling; bailing; machines; water supply; excavation; blasting; removal of tree stumps; regulating watercourses; the use of diving equipment; underwater concreting; building roads through marshes, swamps, and on mountain slopes; paving highways and streets, and much else.
Some specific projects outlined include transporting a 50-ton stone to the Louvre, erecting an obelisk and a bascule bridge (a counterweighted drawbridge), transporting earth with machinery, building timber locks, dredging canals, and constructing a diving bell. More than 200 wonderful contemporary drawings, diagrams, cross-sections, and detailed engravings illustrate this extraordinary large format volume, which also includes an informative new Introduction by Brett D. Steel of the RAND Corporation.
Code No. 010112, 202 pages, ISBN 0486422321, $51.00