Book just finished...

A couple of weeks ago on our local PBS channel, I caught the second hour of a program about Thomas Edison's wiring of New York City, something that I had no idea he'd ever done. I knew he'd invinted the electric lightbulb and tons of other things, but I didn't know he went on to create and manage the first electrical utility company to promote his discovery.

Turns out that the episode I saw was just one of many in the series, the companion book to which I just finished up. I especially enjoyed the chapters on the Big Dig in Boston and the semi-taming of the Mississippi River. There are also tales of the Hoover Dam, the TVA, and numerous other projects. The book focuses as much on the people engineering the projects as on the scopes of the projects themselves. Near the end, the book lost some steam for me as it began to focus on the creation of the internet - a creation I admit to being every bit as significant as the others but that just lacks the excitement of great men taming rivers and crossing gorges.