Presents an account of the engineering behind eight breakthrough innovations that transformed American life from 1876 to 1939 - the telephone, electric power, oil refining, the automobile, the airplane, radio, the long-span steel bridge, and building with reinforced concrete. "Power, Speed, and Form is physically an extraordinary volume...chock full of the most extraordinary photos.... Yet this is not a picture book. It is a serious history of the development of American technology in the period between the year 1876...and 1939.... [W]hat is unique, and what, along with the illustrations, makes this book something of a treasure, is the inclusion of more than forty sidebars, each a full-page explication in words, numerical formulas, and splendidly clear diagrams, of the historic innovations discussed in the text."---Samuel C. Florman, Technology and Culture