Up the Infinite Corridor: Mit and the Technical Imagination

A beautifully written, often poignant description of life at "the 'Tute." Hapgood is very effective at creating the atmosphere of life at MIT: it is, above all, intense. But it is also quirky, has people who are very bright doing things that are sometimes incomprehensible, and who are headstrong. Fortunately, he explains why this must be so, and he does it well. Parts are comical, parts bring a lump to my throat every time I read them. All of it's good. A friend said that he thought it a bit "gushy" about the place, but I, of course, disagree. A particularly good example: "Engineers in those days [fairly long ago] moved almost always through atmospheres of doubt and controversy. And it did not help very much that the thing that was said to be impossible while they were building was taken, when they had finished, to be a wonder. It is not surprising, therefore, that, having to trust their own private calculations of natural forces amid the incalculable noise of the crowd, they developed in time into independent, austere, and utterly self-confident men." He continues: "In their letters, anecdotes, and memoirs, there is not much humor, less wit, and very little hail-fellow-well-met. What does come through is respect for certain oft-mentioned abstract virtues...honesty, accuracy, fidelity. One of the type had carved on his tombstone only the word "Veritas," and truth in structure is what they all learned to live by. Here and there in their memoirs the members of the elite revealed the name of the power that allowed them to empty themselves into the moment, to pick out the flow of changes that counted, to read the meaning of a shift in temperature or intuit a pool of stress building in a shaft or rope; the power that set them apart and touched their small number with success. They called it a sense for 'the fitness of things.' " And finally: "A sense for the fitness of things was a gift, like any other extraordinary sense. It could not be taught; the old engineers were quite explicit on this point. Those who had it were engineers in their soul, even if they chose to throw away their legacy by going into law, whereas 30 years in the profession could not make those lacking the gift into engineers." The author, Fred Hapgood quotes much of the above from Elting Morison, a historian of engineering, but a lot is his alone. The stuff is uncommonly beautifully written; I'd love to have been able to say any of the above. But more to the point, if you change the word "engineer" to "surgeon," the meaning is still preserved. The book is great. I can't believe it's out of print.