As a kid I loved the BBC’s “Seven Wonders of the Industrial World”. As an adult, I also love it, just like I love The Phantom Menace! In my under 10s Rugby League annual I said I wanted to be a “pro rugby league player and an engineer”. I’ve most likely failed at the first one – check out my video about trying to become a pro athlete – but there’s still time for me to become an engineer. In fact, I’m a handyman who manufactures boxes to keep your belongings secure. That engineering is on a smaller scale than that depicted in this BBC series, but the spirit of envisioning a solution to a problem and battling adversity to achieve it is a sentiment that the series has inspired myself to follow.
What is striking about this series is how the most efficiently completed projects tended to have the big boss actually present. The Panama Canal was initially a disaster because the French engineer who parlayed his success in building the Suez Canal into getting the Panama Canal contract spent almost the entire build 8600 kilometres away in France, that saw 22,000 workers die, mostly from mosquito-borne yellow fever and malaria, which William Gorgas helped prevent when the Americans took over the build 15 years after the French gave up. Contrast that with Washington Roebling, who probably overdid his hands-on approach to the point of suffering a debilitating nervous condition from being in the underground “casons” of his Brooklyn Bridge build – that project had under 30 deaths despite taking 14 years to build. I tend to find that lacklustre businesses have key decision makers far away from the “coal face” – no pun intended – so stories like Roebling’s and Robert Stevenson on the Bell Rock Lighthouse show that you’re a true G if you’re in the trenches with your workers.
This series was made with around one million pounds, or almost three million Australian dollars in today’s money. It garnered over 25 million viewers on BBC2 across its six weeks of being broadcast – it was released on DVD in 2005, which is how I watched it recently, because the BBC are terrible at allowing access to its content. No matter where I set my internet home from through a VPN I can’t access it online, unless I watch a grainy contraband version. You’d think the BBC would want to capitalize on all of its content no matter when it was made, but hey, it’s a government entity, which I’ve seen to be highly inefficient – check out my live music gatekeeper video to see evidence of this.
Technically the series is brilliant – its early CGI is a tad dated but still awe inspiring as far as the scale of the projects which were usually shot on locations that atleast shared the same geography as its real-life counterparts. It combines documentary style narration with actors playing lines mentioned by their characters in real life. The music is stirring.
Another aspect of the engineer’s efforts in achieving their dreams is that a proven track record goes a long way to convincing financiers to back you. Also, tracks are built on “The Line” linking eastern USA and western USA. There’s another pun. Lol. Anyway, Kingdom Brunel was considered a great engineer and got funding to build the Great Eastern ship, which ended up being scrapped within 30 years as there was little demand for a passenger vessel of that unprecedented size. In the same era, Joseph Bazalgette was a relatively unproven employee in the London’s Board of Works who spent seven years campaigning for his London sewers concept to be built – during that time thousands of people died of cholera as common folk drank from contaminated wells that were fed by dated infrastructure. The government only gave Bazalgette the money for his sewer scheme after “the Great Stink”, when London’s temperature rose that brought the inefficient sewerage system’s smells to the aristocracy. Bazalgette got his Sewer done and it’s been dandy since – the legend even showed off his engineering abilities to the previously sneering press by having them present when two sewer lines met without any deviation from his measurements. The lesson here is to listen to smart people.
By the way, check out how cool looking the pumping station was for the sewerage – where did our lust for beauty architecturally go?
Another tunnel builder in Frank Crowe spearheaded the Hoover Dam build, that saw workers suffering from monoxide poisoning from working in water diversion tunnels with combustion engine equipment for too long. The workers protested and striked – Crowe managed to prove a suing worker was lying by planting a prostitute with the worker after he testified his libido was gone after his monoxide poisoning. Wages were low, exploiting a Depression-era workforce who lived in shanty towns for much of the build until Crowe finally built for them what was initially promised in “Boulder City.” Crowe seemed to prefer to get the Dam build done before schedule so that he could get his bonuses instead of making sure his workers were ok. 70 years earlier, American businessman like the founder of Stanford University let Chinese immigrants suffer on their build of the transcontinental railway. I’m raising these issues to emphasise that your boss isn’t necessarily your friend.
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