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In the peace-damaged country where I grew up, there was a shortage of heroes. We did not have strong leaders or courageous resistance fighters serving the country. A couple of somewhat embarrassing old kings at the time, some famous scouts, and a handful of exporter soccer players didn’t get far enough.
But we had our engineers. Gustaf Dalén, for example, who invented the ingenious lighthouse that, with the help of the sun’s radiation, could automatically turn on at night and turn off during the day, and who had even sacrificed his eyesight in an unfortunate experiment. But also Alfred Nobel with his dynamite and his prize, Christopher Polhem with his mechanical alphabet and John Ericsson with his ship propeller.
1950s technique progress, which, so to speak, was based on their deeds, also eliminated our need for more traditional heroes. Cars and washing machines, gramophones and televisions made life easier and more exciting, roads became wider, and speeds increased. Technology, not war, would solve all problems and what adventure didn’t feel completely modern yet, it soon would.
In other words, it was not just politics and peace that laid the foundations for Sweden’s success and well-being. They were both the arrangers, the planners, and the inventors. Those who discovered how life could be better, richer and more comfortable.
The engineers.
Historian and author Gunnar Wetterberg calls them the “saviors of modernity” with a quasi-religious tone in his new book “The Engineers,” based on the tantalizing idea of highlighting this both central and overlooked professional group. Of course, everyone knows that they have been a key part of the Swedish miracle of progress, industrialization and urbanization, but what have they really achieved and who were they?
But the driving forces behind the really wide impact on Swedish industrial engineering were less heroic.
As a researcher, expert in With the Swedish administration and himself a member of the Academy of Engineering Sciences, Wetterberg has an almost perfect vision of the field in which the country’s technological know-how has been developed. In short: in the classic Swedish game between the state and the capital.
It is true that a handful of ingenious inventors laid the foundations for a number of hugely successful Swedish companies, such as Gustaf de Laval with the spacer or Sven Wingquist with the ball bearing, not to mention Alexander Lagerman, whose innovative match machines were became the nucleus of Ivar Kreugers. corporate empire. He would be the host of his own book.
But the driving forces behind the really wide impact on Swedish industrial engineering were less heroic. The king’s military force had long required architects and shipbuilders, the mining industry had to have chemists and technicians, and later it was the state that built both railways and telecommunications networks. The country’s planned need for trained technical cadres increased continuously from the 18th century onward.
And the solution was, of course, education; Stockholm University of Technology was founded as early as 1827, Chalmers in Gothenburg two years later, and today more than a million Swedes have some form of technical education at the upper secondary or higher school level.
On social policy Beside this story, Gunnar Wetterberg seems to know practically everything. Perhaps too much, because all the great development with companies, schools and academies occupies such a place in its history that the engineers themselves tend to disappear into the background. The most notable ones are listed and given a few name and invention lines, then the author quickly rushes to the next important step in the story.
Has there been a distinctive professional culture in the industry and what has it looked like?
And this doesn’t just apply to individual actors, I would have liked to have read a lot more about the engineers as a group and also about the social strata, who chose the profession and what drove them. Were they most tech nerds or rather idealists? Has there been a distinctive professional culture in the industry and what has it looked like?
I am even more curious about how engineering thinking has affected the surrounding society: was the “social engineering” generally attributed to the popular household a direct consequence of the technicals taking place in state and municipal planning or was it primarily a general expression of rational zeal for the progress of the twentieth century?
And one issue Wetterberg only touches on is the body’s opinion and how it has changed. When the eternal progress began to be questioned, the halo of the engineers also slipped somewhat at an angle. Cars clogged cities, chemical inventions poisoned nature, clever time studies turned people into machines on the assembly line, haunting nuclear power darkened into threats to the future, and suddenly the recently admired savior. Dr. Strangelove received disturbing characteristics.
The book is more like a somewhat softened Swedish industrial history than an exciting voyage of discovery in the lives of engineers.
Gunnar Wetterberg has therefore an interesting story, but it hovers far above its subject and is a bit too benevolent in general for one to really see the people and the tensions in it. The book feels more like a somewhat softened Swedish industrial history than an exciting voyage of discovery into the lives, art and works of engineers, both fact-packed and surprisingly pale.
A fun piece of information that I still carry with me is about the slightly out of the ordinary contributions that Swedish engineers made to people’s homes during the barriers of WWII. When the shortage of raw materials and energy became notorious, they frenziedly and creatively developed everything from new materials and industrial processes to substitute foods and gengas operations. A heroic effort as good as any other.
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