Dreams of Iron and Steel by Deborah Cadbury, Fourth Estate/HarperCollins, $25.95, ISBN 0007163061 Reviewed by Roy Herbert
THERE has been a recent outburst of appreciation of the striking feats of engineering in the Victorian era that still impress us as they did contemporaries. Most of the examples in Dreams of Iron and Steel, come from the US, like the Brooklyn Bridge, the transcontinental railway and, spilling over into the 20th century, the colossal Hoover dam on the Colorado river. The Panama canal is included, as is Isambard Kingdom Brunel’s gigantic ship, Great Eastern.
The background to all of these achievements…
