SOURCE: "Looking Backward, Looking Forward," in Shifting Gears: Technology, Literature, Culture in Modernist America, The University of North Carolina Press, 1987, pp. 97-117.

In the excerpt that follows, Tichi discusses the figure of the engineer in late nineteenth-century American culture and literature, focusing on works by Edward Bellamy, Thorstein Veblen, and Henry Adams.

It is a great profession. There is the fascination of watching a figment of the imagination emerge through the aid of science to a plan on paper. Then it moves to realization in stone or metal or energy. Then it brings jobs and homes to men. Then it elevates the standards of living and adds to the comforts of life. That is the engineer's high privilege.

Herbert Hoover, Memoirs, 1951

In Sinclair Lewis's novel Dodsworth (1929) young Sam Dodsworth, a graduate of Yale and "Massachusetts Tech," peers over Long Island Sound to reflect on his post-college plans to...