Welcome to The Worthy House, where we offer
reality-focused writings on a variety of topics,
but often on history, politics, and, in general,
on human flourishing in a post-liberal future.
I am Charles, the Maximum Leader of The Worthy
House.
Today we are reviewing Built: The Hidden Stories
Behind our Structures, by Roma Agrawal
I have always found structural engineering
fascinating, though I'm a consumer of the
results, not a producer like Roma Agrawal.
No doubt the life of a structural engineer
is number crunching, not glamour. But the
result is something useful to mankind, and
even sometimes beautiful, so it must be satisfying
for an engineer to see what he creates. Both
facets of the engineering life come through
in Agrawal's book, Built, an upbeat look at
engineering through the lens of her career,
though the book is marred by some ideologically
driven fictions.
Agrawal is based in London, but grew up in
India, and spent a few years in her childhood
in New York. This has given her a breadth
of vision that informs her book. Her claim
to fame, if she makes one, is that she worked
as part of the team that did the engineering
for the Shard, a London landmark completed
in 2012, which is still the tallest building
in the United Kingdom. Built weaves together
engineering principles well explained to the
layman, Agrawal's personal experiences, and
examples of implementation of engineering,
all to create an interesting, readable package.
You may like it more if your interests run
to How It's Made rather than Jane Austen,
but you'd have to be pretty dull yourself
to find it totally uninteresting.
We cover ancient times and modern times. We
cover construction and collapse. We cover
solutions for earthquake zones and for tall
buildings in wind. We cover bricks and concrete,
steel and glass. We cover force and torsion,
underground and aboveground, bridges and tunnels.
The book offers a judicious combination of
history and science, and comparing and contrasting
along both axes. Scattered throughout are
many very well done drawings (apparently done
by the author), along with some black-and-white
photographs, which are unfortunately mostly
terrible, since you can't see the details
that are being highlighted.
The piece I found most interesting was on
the stabilization of the Cathedral of the
Assumption in Mexico City, built by the conquistadors
on the site of a leveled Aztec human sacrifice
pyramid, using stones from the destroyed temple
of the Aztec god of war Huitzilopochtli (that's
awesome). Mexico City's soil is a soup, since
much of it was formed by dumping dirt into
the lake on which the Aztec capital, Tenochtitlan,
was built. The Spanish were perfectly well
aware of the engineering challenges, and cleverly
built a raft foundation, with an overlaying
raised foundation floor designed to sink.
But it sank unevenly, so four hundred years
later, one corner was eight feet higher than
the other. Basically, this was like fixing
the Leaning Tower of Pisa, on a far grander
scale. The solution was digging large cylindrical
access shafts down through the foundation,
thirty-two of them, and then digging at right
angles 1,500 holes, removing the dirt in a
pattern calculated to gradually lower the
high points. The work was finished in 1998,
but the system remains in place, covered up,
so it can be reactivated if future problems
(carefully monitored by lasers) show up.
To her credit, Agrawal does not spend any
relevant time in the text trying to make political
points about women in engineering. That's
not how the book is sold, however-the blurb
in the book is full of cant about "underrepresented
groups such as women" and Agrawal's supposed
"tireless efforts" on their behalf. There
are very good, indisputable, and insurmountable
reasons both why there are few women in science
and engineering, and why the top accomplishments
in those fields are almost always those of
men. But aside from that, two sections of
this book shows how falsehoods become embedded
in the public consciousness, because they
are useful lies to advance an ideological
agenda, in this case a tale of supposed oppression
of women (and implicit denial of the real
reasons why there are few women in science
and engineering). This type of ideologically-driven
falsehood spreads like an oil slick because
nobody dares to contradict such untruths,
knowing if they speak truth they will be attacked
without mercy as sexist, racist, and so forth.
As a result, more and more lies become embedded
in the public mind as truth. The most egregious
example in recent years is the fantasy that
Ada Lovelace was the first computer programmer,
which you hear everywhere, even though it's
equivalent in truth to saying she was the
first Egyptian pharaoh. But there are many,
many, others, being piled up to the sky.
In Built, we can observe the creation of such
a new myth from whole cloth, and the extension
of another. Marc Brunel and his son, the famous
Isambard Kingdom Brunel, built the Thames
Tunnel in the early nineteenth century, a
fantastic engineering marvel using many techniques
created by the father-son team. Agrawal describes
their accomplishments in great detail. But
then we are treated to this parenthetical:
"Sophia, [Marc] Brunel's elder daughter, was
nicknamed 'Brunel in petticoats' by the industrialist
Lord Armstrong because Marc Brunel, unconventionally,
taught his daughter about engineering. When
they were children, Sophia showed more aptitude
than her brother [Isambard] in all things
mathematical and technical-and in engineering-but
it was her misfortune to be born at a time
when women had no such career possibilities.
She is the great engineer we never had."
Now, this sounded interesting, but also forced
and reaching. No source was offered, so I
went looking. Sophia appears to be totally
obscure; she doesn't even have a Wikipedia
squib about her, much less a biography. (Her
mother, also Sophia, gets considerably more
mention.) No mention other than one noting
her existence is made in the Wikipedia article
about Marc Brunel, or the one of Isambard
Brunel, and you can be certain that if it
were commonly held that Sophia was a proto-feminist
genius/martyr she would have a large section
devoted to her in both articles, as well as
her own article. However, I did manage to
find the phrase attributed to Lord Armstrong,
"Brunel in petticoats." It comes from a 1937
biography of the father and son, by Celia
Noble, and is quoted in Angus Buchanan's 2003
biography of Isambard, where the context is
clear. Namely, that Sophia "understood her
father's and brother's plans." No mention
is made of her aptitude, much less her superior
aptitude, or her supposed education, in either
book, and Buchanan is somewhat mystified about
the claim, since Armstrong only knew Sophia
when she was in middle age. Buchanan makes
no other mention of Sophia in his lengthy
book.
The logical next question is whether some
other source fills in the gap. The only relevant
mention online of the phrase "Brunel in petticoats,"
out of a total of ten results in Google (including
two to this book), is a pamphlet from the
Brunel Museum, which looks like an intern
wrote it, and which attributes the quote,
without sourcing, to Lord North. Nothing is
said about aptitude or training. I could find
no other mention of any such thing, or any
mention of the younger Sophia Brunel at all,
anywhere, other than of her existence in the
context of her father and brother. I ordered
two books on the Brunel family, along with
what could be found on Google Books, and found
nothing inside any them.
What appears to have happened is that Agrawal
heard an urban legend circulated among female
engineers, told to each other to further the
myth of persecuted talent, probably based
on the Armstrong quote taken out of context,
and on her own initiative embellished it with
falsehoods that sounded good. But I can assure
you, that in ten years we will frequently,
in the engineering context, hear as fact that
Marc Brunel and Isambard Brunel were decent
engineers, if toxically masculine, but the
real hero was their oppressed daughter and
sister, who would have been certain to spin
straw into gold, if the patriarchy had not
put its boot on her. Probably new falsehoods
will be added: I predict one will be that
much of Isambard's work was actually done
by Sophia. Any academic or engineer who points
out none of this is true will find his career
immediately over. Thus, as in Communist societies,
are lies woven into the fabric of reality.
Once might be an accident, but twice is a
pattern. We can prove definitively that Agrawal
modifies the truth by examining her discussion
of the Brooklyn Bridge. She discusses the
Bridge, built by Washington Roebling, at length.
The giant supporting towers were built using
caissons, excavated reinforced holes, held
under high air pressure. As a result, the
men doing the work, including Roebling, got
"caisson disease"-i.e., the bends. Since her
husband was debilitated, Emily took over as
the frontman, dealing with the press, politicians,
and the investors, shielding her husband from
having to have direct contact, and acting
as his intermediary and and, to a degree,
project manager. Such a central role is not
uncommon for strong women married to strong
men, even when they are not debilitated; it
is true that behind every great man is usually
a great woman. But Agrawal strongly implies,
and clearly believes, that Emily replaced
Washington entirely. "With unwavering focus,
she started to study complex mathematics and
material engineering, learning about steel
strength, cable analysis and construction;
calculating catenary curves, and gaining a
thorough grasp of the technical aspects of
the project." She concludes that everyone
knew that Emily was really doing the engineering,
from such evidence as occasional addressing
of letters to her instead of her husband.
We are meant to conclude this is another example
of a woman whose true contributions have been
ignored; the bridge did not demonstrate the
power of man, as contemporaneous speeches
said, but "the power of woman." She "excelled
and triumphed" "even [though] she was not
a qualified engineer." In some, accurate sources
(not specified) "she is highlighted as the
true force behind the project. In other sources,
there is absolutely no mention of her at all."
Most of what Agrawal says about Emily Roebling
is obviously cribbed from David McCullough,
in his comprehensive 2012 edition of The Great
Bridge (the only book on the topic listed
in the bibliography, and all the other facts
Agrawal adduces are taken directly from there).
But McCullough directly contradicts Agrawal.
It is evident, reading the source, that Agrawal
deliberately distorted the truth. What McCullough
actually says is that while Emily Roebling
necessarily acquired "a thorough grasp of
the engineering involved," as she needed in
order to speak competently to her various
audiences she expertly juggled, "She did not,
however, secretly take over as engineer of
the bridge, as some accounts suggest and as
was the gossip at the time." "Some accounts,"
of course, mean modern ideological distortions
like Agrawal, which embellishes the truth
nearly beyond recognition. Still, again, I
am sure that any mention you hear of this
topic in the future, or any future history
of the bridge itself, will embed a fictional
treatment of Emily Roebling, even more embellished,
and thus will another folktale turn into historical
fact.
Why should we care? Aren't these tales just
nice, feel-good stories that make everyone
happy? Don't I need to prove I'm not a misogynist?
(No, I don't.) We should care because it is
a corruption of reality, and there is far
too much corruption of reality in the modern
world. Sex differences, their immutability
and their very existence, are regularly denied
as equivalent to believing in the Little People,
only with supposedly worse consequences. A
toxic blend of demands for emancipation from
fictitious oppression, past and present, with
the modern Left vision of all human relations
as power relations, means that we are force
fed lies, day and night. The goal is not just
the destruction of reality, but the inversion
of the masculine and feminine, with women
adopting masculine traits, and men becoming
unnecessary, often buffoons, such that the
feminine traits are lost entirely. (This pattern
of propaganda is ubiquitous in modern movies,
as Jonathan Pageau has shown, from the recent
Star Wars movies to Incredibles 2). Destroying
those who would destroy human flourishing,
that is, those pushing these ideological lies
(of which those about sex differences are
only one manifestation) begins with declaring
that Reality Is, and shattering our enemies
is made possible by forging an axe from that
Reality. Like Truth, Reality will always out,
but let's help it along. Live not by lies,
as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn said.
Aside from false history, we are treated by
Agrawal to occasional carping about how women
are treated differently in her profession.
Here more unreality crops up. "I've heard
stories from other women in the industry about
how they've been (illegally) asked in job
interviews when they plan to get married and
have children." Illegally, perhaps, but totally
rationally. The reality is that women, far
more than men, choose to leave their careers,
or not achieve maximum competence in them,
in order to have children. They always have,
and they always will. That's a good thing,
as it happens, and wholly natural given the
biological differences between men and women.
A society that deludes itself into thinking
that men and women should both share equally
in providing and caregiving is a society going
nowhere but down. (Along these same lines,
I increasingly think that some men, such as
those with families, should be formally privileged
over women by employers and society in certain
jobs. That doesn't mean women shouldn't work
in some circumstances, but the baseline assumption
should be that men should be, whenever possible,
the main providers for a family, both because
it is economically rational for companies,
and, far more importantly, probably critical
to a decent society. But that is a longer
discussion.)
For example, in my former profession, law,
you often hear whining that while a majority
of new associate hires are women, relatively
few big firm partners are, and this is necessarily
attributed to some kind of discrimination,
though what that is nobody can seem to determine,
or bothers to guess. In fact, it is men who
are massively discriminated against at law
firms. Law firms are slaveringly desperate
to keep female lawyers, both because of their
own ideology and because of (illegal) demands
placed on them by woke corporate clients.
No law firm would ever criticize, much less
discipline, or (horrors!) fire, a woman for
failings that would instantly get a male associate
instantly bounced. For the same reason, law
firms offer many months of paid leave to pregnant
associates, hoping they will return when they
have a child, sweetening the pot by promising
reduced work loads and no movement off the
partner track (that is, illegally discriminating
against those who produce more, mostly men,
by shifting the competition in favor of women).
In the majority, perhaps the great majority,
of cases, the woman takes the money, has the
child, and says sayonara. The exceptions are
women who need the money, and a handful of
women who really like the job (which is rare-almost
nobody, male or female, really likes the job,
so certainly the woman's choice to leave is
wholly rational). But that professional firms
should ignore these truths is asking them
to stick their head in the sand-again, with
the denials of reality. We should not permit
it.
Oh, none of this means you shouldn't read
this book. But forewarned is forearmed; don't
let the lies sink into your brain.
