The Hidden Engineering That Makes New York Tick
New York City is the perfect place to understand the importance of modern engineering, but the most valuable lessons won’t be found at the Empire State Building or in Central Park. To truly discover what makes modern life tick, you have to look at the unloved, uncelebrated elements of New York: its sewers, bridges, and elevators.
On this episode, host Lisa Margonelli talks to Guru Madhavan, the Norman R. Augustine Senior Scholar and senior director of programs at the National Academy of Engineering. Madhavan wrote about the history of this often-overlooked infrastructure in a trilogy of Issues essays about New York City’s history. He talks about how the invention of the elevator brake enabled the construction of skyscrapers and how the detailed “grind work” of maintenance keeps grand projects like the Bayonne Bridge functioning. He also highlights the public health and sanitation-centered vision of Egbert Viele—the nearly forgotten engineer who made New York City livable.
Resources
Read Guru Madhavan’s New York Trilogy:
- “The Greatest Show on Earth” about the invention of the elevator brake.
- “The Grind Challenges” about the Bayonne Bridge and maintenance grind work.
- “Living in Viele’s World” about the contrast between Egbert Viele’s and Frederick Law Olmsted’s competing visions of New York City.
Learn more about the invisible work that undergirds modern life by checking out Madhavan’s latest book, Wicked Problems: How to Engineer a Better World.
Lisa mentioned riding on a tugboat pushing a barge full of petroleum, but she misremembered! The repairs were occurring on the Goethals Bridge, not the Bayonne. Here’s the whole story of “A Dangerous Move” from the New York Times.
Transcript
Lisa Margonelli: Welcome to The Ongoing Transformation, a podcast from Issues in Science and Technology. Issues is a quarterly journal published by the National Academy of Sciences and Arizona State University.
I’m Lisa Margonelli, editor-in-chief at Issues. In this episode, we are taking a field trip to New York City. Our guest and guide is Guru Madhavan, the Norman R. Augustine senior scholar and senior director of programs at the National Academy of Engineering. On our tour, we’re skipping Times Square and the Empire State Building and looking instead at the undercover, uncelebrated and, actually, totally fantastic history of the infrastructure of modern life: the sewers, bridges and elevators that make life possible in New York City. Guru wrote about this history in a series of three pieces for Issues and I’m delighted to talk to him about this underground history today.
Guru, welcome!
Guru Madhavan: My pleasure.
Margonelli: Guru, we’re here to talk about a series of articles that you wrote for Issues all about the unexpected, underground history of engineering in New York City and we called it Guru Madhavan’s New York Trilogy after, I think, the Paul Auster trilogy. But what I want to talk about today is some of this undercover, unloved, uncelebrated, fantastic history of engineering in New York City. But to get there, I think we need to start with how you actually got interested in engineering. Tell me what attracted you to engineering and how did you start your career?
My entry into engineering had nothing to do with an earlier romance with some chemistry sets or robotic kits or whatever. It was very much like an arranged marriage.
Madhavan: There are two parts to how I got to engineering and how I got to New York City, so I think they’re interlinked as well. I grew up in a family in South India, an orthodox Hindu family and I’m the first engineer in my entire family history and first person to board an airplane to come to the United States. And my entry into engineering had nothing to do with an earlier romance with some chemistry sets or robotic kits or whatever. It was very much like an arranged marriage. Everyone around me was studying engineering so I thought that was the way to go and I just fell in it and it was only years later I fell in love with engineering.
Margonelli: How did you fall in love?
Madhavan: It was during my training as an engineer. I was specializing in instrumentation and control system, so hardcore Newtonian at heart, so efficiency was my goal in everything that I did. And it was through an array of training experiences that I got as a junior engineer in many different areas: medical products and fertilizer factories, power generation, confectionery factories.
Margonelli: Wait, you worked in a candy plant?
Madhavan: Yes, I did work in a candy factory working on the coffee production line, specifically working on controlling the temperature of a cooker that blended together all the ingredients and made sure that the film, the chocolate film, that came out had a specific consistency and texture and all the properties associated with it that ultimately made the candy and the toffee enjoyable.
Margonelli: That is really a hidden engineering job because I think, when you put chocolate into your mouth, you might think that the characteristics that you’re putting in are inherent to the chocolate or inherent to the brand or something like that but it’s actually an engineer who made sure that the chocolate was whipped to the right consistency at the right temperature so that it melts on your tongue.
Madhavan: And my job was to bring the chocolate out of the wrapper. And so, that’s in a way, what I’m trying to do with engineering. What’s underneath the glossy wrapper here.
Margonelli: So, I distracted you a little bit. You were talking about you were working in control systems and this was how you came to fall in love with engineering. So, how was it that you went from these Newtonian control systems to love?
Madhavan: The order and the rigor and the pursuit of precision and perfection was inspiring for me and I can say this only years later because such experiences involved deeply technical mathematics. And in fact, I wasn’t a particularly good student in control theory. I barely passed it in my finals. However, that experience motivated me to work harder, to improve my worldview as a controlled systems engineer which now I think has become a primary aspect of my professionalism as a systems engineer. But control theory only gets you so far. It works extremely well in a boundable environment but, of course, the world we live in is very different. And my transformation as a systems engineer from a controlled systems engineer to, let’s say, a complex systems engineer happened in the United States.
So, after I finished my undergraduate degree in India, I had multiple offers to work in software companies, however, I reserved my passions to pursue medical device development and the state university of New York gave me a wonderful scholarship and that flew me to New York City, went to Stony Brook University where I got my master’s in biomedical engineering. And after that I worked in the medical device industry in the Bay Area and that reinforced some additional fundamentals that weren’t evident in the earlier professional experiences I gained as an engineer. And those concepts deeply relate to accountability, conducting safety critical work that have enormous consequences from individual health to population health.
That showcased the true and unforgiving nature of engineering.
There are aspects of control theory, the well-ordered phenomena, processes made sense even in the medical device industry. You just cannot mess around. These are extremely consequential technologies. And if I moved my microwave analyzer three inches from the desired location, I had to get it recertified again and the paperwork was enormous. And this is a deeply conservative industry yet you have to work at the boundaries of innovation. So, there was this interesting paradox coming up while maintaining astonishing amounts of accountability.
So, the stuff that I signed off, when it left the clean room, oftentimes went straight into the patient. That showcased the true and unforgiving nature of engineering. And you can see the story is building up here where I’m trained in ordered, tame systems and now we are getting to the levels of broader effects of engineering. But ultimately it all made sense when one thing led to another and my path led me to Binghamton, another campus in the state university of New York system. And there we didn’t have a medical school, instead a nursing school, and that enabled me to think about the concepts of care and how do you design and maintain systems for durability and I think nurses and physicians have a completely different worldview on that subject.
Margonelli: Stop for a second and tell me how nurses and doctors have a completely different perspective on that subject.
Madhavan: I had enormous fun when I was in Binghamton because, as it turned out, I was not inhibited in any form. I basically took courses in liberal arts. I took courses in evolutionary biology and nursing and so forth so I really got broadened in perspective as a systems engineer at Binghamton. But I think the real positive effects happened when I was in an independent study with a nurse who was trained as a mechanical engineer and the perspective started to blend there. How do you design systems for long-term value? And you don’t build a bridge for three months, you build it for at least 30 years and I think the nurses that I was working with who were doing work in rural health or preventive diagnostics and so forth really taught me a great deal in how do we bring in the preventive philosophy into the world of engineering.
I found myself gravitating toward this unseen elements of engineering that undergird not just our civil life, but our civilizational life.
So, this ties in well with the pieces that we are going to be discussing. Maintenance is not just about fixing, it’s about foreseeing, forecasting and I think nurses have a really good instinct about that which was quite different than the surgeons I worked with. They had a volume to fulfill and they had, of course, precise targets to address and there are aspects of that that is deeply resonant with engineering as well. So, there are aspects of engineering that are applicable in both realms, one looking at the long-term, the invisible thankless work versus the heroic godlike accomplishment that you see in an operating theater and so forth. So, I was able to pick up those threads simultaneously. Yet, increasingly, I found myself gravitating toward this unseen elements of engineering that undergird not just our civil life, but our civilizational life.
And I think engineers, much like nurses, are professional caretakers and care providers in that regard. Sounds very philosophical here but, now, how do you articulate that in a way that is immediately appreciable which is not always the case because people love the novel, nifty, flashy stuff compared to the kinds of things I’ve gotten interested in over the years.
Margonelli: So, I want to just stop here and just switch gears a little bit to talk about how the struggle that engineering has between being flashy and getting the attention and doing the work which is something that you write about a lot. So, one of the pieces that you wrote is about Elisha Graves Otis and the piece starts in 1853 at a World’s Fair. Elisha Graves Otis has designed a way to keep elevators from falling dramatically which lots of people at the time, there were elevators, but if they lost control of the cable or something, they would fall and people were crushed. So, he’s having a really hard time getting people to pay attention to his brake so he climbs up 50 feet in the air at the World’s Fair and he has his assistant cut the cable with an axe so that everyone can see the demonstration of his brake. So, tell me, first of all, what did that then kick off? What did that enable? That flashy showmanship?
We live in a period where “demo or die” has become as important as “publish or perish” in some fields.
Madhavan: He almost killed himself to get his technology accepted as we have seen again and again, time and again, in the history of technological innovation. Just because technology is meritorious doesn’t mean it’s publicly accepted. So, this is just a continuing theme in the history of engineering. So, Otis finds himself in a similar situation and in a very entertaining episode that you just beautifully described. He comes up with this dramatic demo in front of people and they’re just gasping, they’re thinking that this was an act of lunacy, even suicide, to demonstrate the safety brake in the elevator system. That was extremely crucial because even the elevators, as a technology, were useless without the safety brake and that’s what Otis was trying to demonstrate. And of course, the inspiration, P.T. Barnum comes into the picture, he commissions Otis to do this act, and that takes us into the whole substance of showmanship and its value.
We live in a period where “demo or die” has become as important as “publish or perish” in some fields. So, now we are getting to the first tension… I think the trilogy as such is a work of tensions and I think we just need to look at the tension here between showmanship and substance and technical excellence alone doesn’t guarantee adoption and I think that’s what Otis was trying to do. But importantly, the Barnum’s philosophy of showmanship here is you have to create a meaningful connection to purpose and the people who would eventually use those technology. So, that’s why this balance between flash and function is crucial but it’s not often discussed in engineering. And that’s what I was trying to do with Otis’s story to explicate the innovation and maintenance dynamic where innovation gets the spotlight, maintenance stays invisible. Again, the visibility, invisibility trade-offs that we have. Both are essential for progress.
Margonelli: I think what’s interesting about the Otis story is that we wouldn’t have any skyscrapers in New York, nothing would look the way it does today, if we hadn’t had that invention of the elevator brake. But it wasn’t just the invention of the elevator brake, it was that he had to create a story or a narrative for people, as you talk about with P.T. Barnum, that got them to accept it, to want a brake, because what they wanted was other things. They didn’t really want to think about the safety.
How do we position, promote, promulgate maintenance as a source of progress? It is important to note that maintenance is not just about static preservation, it is a dynamic enabler of innovation.
Madhavan: I think there are episodes in engineering that also give a good example or demonstration of how we need to marry rhetoric to mobilize technological achievement or adoption here. Edison did that with his electric display, Steve Jobs famously in his turtleneck theatrics and, of course, Kennedy’s moon speech just was a rousing example of such that. But can we use the potential to motivate action through showmanship but for promoting maintenance and infrastructure upkeep? So, the piece really centers on not the sexy but the vexy and how do we go about thinking through that. And also, importantly, how do we position, promote, promulgate maintenance as a source of progress? It is important to note that maintenance is not just about static preservation, it is a dynamic enabler of innovation. Without maintenance, you’re basically going to have a collapse of everyday expectations.
Monday morning is going to look very different if you don’t have maintenance and I think it makes life better and it sustains, shall we say, the necessary continuities of history and I think that’s where the maintainers are in a much more crucial position than innovators here. So, how do we rebalance that cultural attention between innovation and maintenance and how do we suggest new or even old forms of successful showmanship that’s typically reserved for new technologies to highlight the crucial importance of the unthanked care work.
Margonelli: So, in a sense, you are the P.T. Barnum of maintenance. In the sense that you are telling these stories and trying to bring them to our attention.
We celebrate Ferris wheels but it’s the suitcase wheels that have actually truly changed how we move through this world.
Madhavan: Well, Barnum was a colorful character. So, in researching for this piece, I went into his life history. The Otis story on its own didn’t make too much sense for me, it was not completing. But then, when I started reading Barnum’s piece, that’s when the connection became apparent. Otis and Barnum really came together. But it’s the idea of glamour, right? We celebrate Ferris wheels but it’s the suitcase wheels that have actually truly changed how we move through this world. Now, suitcase wheels are not Instagram ready photos but, without suitcase wheels, none of those Instagram photos exist, quite frankly.
Margonelli: Well, I think some of us who are a little bit older can remember when suitcase wheels were terrible and they would always get stuck and then they’d replace them at some point with more efficient wheels that made running through the airport better. I want to back up a little bit and just talk about magnificent acts of maintenance which is the focus of one of your other stories. So, there was a bridge that was built in the 1920s, I think, in New York, the Bayonne Bridge. And when it was released, it was a big show. It’s the kind of engineering that gets a lot of attention. It was beautiful, it was soaring, but then come the ’80s and it needed to be hiked up so that the really big ships could get underneath it. It needed to be entirely remodeled. This is going back to this idea of the care work that you’re talking about with nurses of anticipating all the things that can happen. So, tell me about what went into this and then how this became a hidden wonder of the world.
Madhavan: Yeah. We called our second piece The Grind Challenges which is to illustrate, again, a tension between the costly, complex Grand Challenges and how they are not attainable if you don’t consider the numerous constraints on in the ground that enable them in the first place. So, I just changed one letter, one vowel and it completely changes the entire meaning of the Grand Challenges framework. So, Grind Challenges which is, again, relates to the unseen, undiscussed work that is seldom a subject of mainstream conversation. They only show the splashy result but not the work that precedes it. So, how do we think about upgrading existing infrastructure? And the Bayonne Bridge offered me a great case study. It also introduced me to profound work of another forgotten engineer, Othmar Ammann, who built numerous bridges which is almost inhuman achievement.
So, the fundamental point there was to emphasize how Grind Challenges are crucial for ensuring the functionality and safety of our deeply engineered environments. So, the contrast between the Grand and the Grind engineering, I think, deserves a little bit of attention here. The Grand Challenges are the bold frontier pushing achievements that capture public imagination but Grind Challenges, as I mentioned, are the essential upgrades and detailed work that keeps the world functioning.
Margonelli: When it came time to remodel the Bayonne Bridge, the ultimate cost was $1.3 billion, a huge, huge undertaking, far larger than the first bridge. Tell me what the Grind Challenges were that were involved in pulling this off.
Madhavan: Here’s a little bit of a historical context. So, the Bayonne Bridge was built by Othmar Ammann, the distinguished engineer, and it was opened in 1931 over the Kill Van Kull strait and it was the world’s longest through arch bridge at that time connecting New Jersey and Staten Island. But it was in the early 2010s when the Panama Canal was widened and that enabled larger ships, what’s called the Post-Panamax ships, to go through that. Those ships couldn’t fit under the Bayonne Bridge’s 151-foot vertical clearance which means the bridge had to be modified for the bigger ships to fit in and serve the ports and so forth. So, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey had three options.
First was remove the bridge and replace with a tunnel and that was going to be about $3 billion or something over the next 15 years. Second, they could retain the original arch but rebuild it with the higher cable state model. So, also an expensive option but the result would be a very awkward looking bridge. So, the third option was the most complicated, and that was what was worked out, which was to install a new road deck closer to the apex of the bridge. And it was clear that it would compromise the bridge’s beauty but it would provide the necessary vertical clearance that the ships needed. I think it was about 215-foot or so.
Unlike the Grand Challenges that pushes to new frontiers, the Grind Challenges are about the myriad, fine-tuned interlocked tasks that keep our world functioning.
So, how do you raise a roadway on a bridge while keeping it open to traffic? This is real life engineering, these are the kinds of challenges engineers do day in and day out. So, someone naturally compared it to doing an open heart surgery on a running patient, that was the basic gist here. But building a bridge within a bridge required, as you can imagine, safe transit and crane operations and the project also needed to minimize disruption to the local resident life which Ammann didn’t have back in the 1930s. In fact, the project was delivered under budget, ahead of schedule and he didn’t even have to go through the environmental reviews or seismic requirements back then. But for the modification project, I think over 300 organizations were consulted and they all have to sign off on this. And the environmental review was 5,000 pages, cost $5 million to produce that alone, then came another sensitive aspect that needed to be addressed. The strait was actually a possible nesting location for some rare species, the peregrine falcon. So, all of these considerations needed to really go in.
But of course, add to this, you have the classic issues of NIMBY, not in my backyard opposition, or BANANA engineering, build absolutely nothing anywhere near anything. And I think these are valid social pressures but they affect in the way engineering needs to be thought through. So, I think this re-engineering project illustrates something utterly common to all projects involving infrastructure maintenance and I think that’s why that concept of Grind Challenges makes enormous sense. Because unlike the Grand Challenges that pushes to new frontiers, the Grind Challenges are about the myriad, fine-tuned interlocked tasks that keep our world functioning.
Margonelli: Yeah, I wanted to interrupt you here and say that, actually, while that redoing or some redoing of the Bayonne Bridge was going on, I actually was riding on a tugboat that was pushing a barge full of oil underneath the Bayonne Bridge and we radioed ahead and told them to stop their hot work which they were welding on the bridge and they didn’t want sparks to fall down on top of us in our tugboat with the barge full of oil. And that is just one of these tiny interactions every day that is part of these engineering grind challenges of making sure that you don’t drop a spark from your engineering project.
(Note: Lisa misremembered! The repairs were occurring on the Goethals Bridge, not the Bayonne. Here’s the whole story of “A Dangerous Move” from the New York Times.)
Madhavan: As a sidebar, this is for your first book? Your oil book?
Margonelli: Yes. Yes, yes, yes. (laughs) But actually, I thought it was so interesting. It woke me up to the levels of complexity in engineering in a big city. I wanted to return to a quote from your article that I just thought was really beautiful and encapsulated a lot of what you were getting at which is: “All the grind challenges associated with care and conservation are at the core of the bargain between engineering and society—they distill the essence of accountability, values, and humility into professional practice and ethics.”
And it’s a really interesting view and, to go back to what you were talking about earlier. In some way, it shows engineers as nurses, the nurses for complexity in a way.
Madhavan: That’s well put. There’s a related story here which is about addressing these Grind Challenges which is a practical philosophy that Ammann favored. I mean he wanted to build an efficient bridge. But it also relates to his conflict with his mentor, Gustav Lindenthal, who favored more monumental grand visions. So, the difference between a practical and the monumental approaches, and I think that’s… I am of the practical side, most engineers are that way and I think we need to recognize that. Why do we need a rebranding exercise to say engineering is altogether another thing when it is actually doing far more profound work? And I think we need to recognize that with daily diligence and duty rather than say that the engineering is about disruptive innovation when very few engineers are actually involved in that.
And if you look at the value engineering provides to society, and there was a 2019 paper on the subject which beautifully captures it all, innovation through research and development is just one of the 14 things engineers are engaged in in service to society. Yet that becomes a dominant theme in how we articulate and promote engineering in society. Of course, it’s exciting, we are all captured by that, captivated by that. But if we are not showcasing what true engineering is and how it should work and how it does work, then we are not doing the work properly and I think there are the aspects of showmanship that need to be applied to these dull, diligent work that keeps the world running.
The current incentive systems often driven by capitalism and corporate priorities don’t properly value this work.
Margonelli: So, in a sense, at the core of the New York trilogy is a vision of how we kind of “P.T. Barnum” the care aspects of engineering and use that as a way to affirm engineering’s responsibilities to society.
Madhavan: Correct. And unfortunately, the current incentive systems often driven by capitalism and corporate priorities don’t properly value this work. Even companies that pride themselves as disruptive innovators and everything invest a vast fraction, about 60% of their investments goes into maintenance to enable their disruptive tendencies even.
Margonelli: So, the third in the trilogy really looks at a guy named Egbert Viele and he came to New York and he made this amazing map. Tell me about Viele’s map.
Madhavan: So, Egbert “vee-el-y” or “veel”, I don’t know how to pronounce it so let’s just go with the Viele (“veel”) for this purpose here. A 19th century engineer who played a significant role in shaping New York City’s infrastructure. Again, had not encountered him before this piece. And I think that’s another feature of the three pieces because I knew nothing about the individuals I ended up writing about and pulling out the deeper messages from them. But despite his contributions, Viele is largely unknown outside of urban planning circles.
Margonelli: You know, everybody knows his archrival.
Madhavan: Frederick Law Olmsted, yes. The difference there was Viele was a strong advocate for sanitation and public health, again, the boring parts of society and engineering. And he was appointed as Central Park’s first chief engineer and he sketched out designs for the city in a brilliant way by emphasizing drainage and practicality with the goal of creating a healthy and functional city which is deliverable and maintainable under budget. Now, that showcases the classic engineering problem. However, Olmsted, the celebrity here with his political connections and charisma, eventually took over the project and he ended up advancing a more picturesque, a naturalistic park system which eventually prevailed and we now enjoy. But a lot of people argue and my piece argues that Viele’s focus on sanitation and drainage actually laid the foundation for a healthy and functional park and the city that contains it.
So, here comes another tension. You got Viele’s practical and forward thinking but utterly boring, unsexy approach and then you got Olmsted’s idealistic, aesthetically driven vision here. Now, how do you consolidate those viewpoints? But it was Viele’s contribution, although less celebrated, was ultimately more impactful for the long-term development of New York City that we now take for granted. So, I wanted to pull out this point of how do we go about recognizing and valuing the work of engineers like Viele whose contributions to public health and welfare are overlooked time and again. So, again, the tension carries across these pieces.
Margonelli: Yeah. So, I just wanted to mention about Viele, he created this map of every little swamp and stream and pigsty all across the island of Manhattan and people still use it. When people have a damp cellar in New York, they still go and find this map that I guess is as long as a Buick—back when Buicks were long—and you can find where the streams might be running through your own basement. So, people are still consulting it and it’s an interesting thing because he created a document that enabled the city to grow, whereas, Olmsted stopped time in Central Park. Whenever you enter Central Park, you’re in the time of Olmsted and those visions and you’re in the bucolic sheep meadow.
Madhavan: Viele understood the connection between topography, drainage and public health. And now, that was revolutionary for that period and that enabled them to emphasize practical solutions, unlike Olmsted, to drive urban health improvements and also setting the foundation for a dynamic, evolving, dense city that could enable modern infrastructure which is great, which is better. These are political questions that we need to wrestle with in engineering and in society so, of course we get down to, again, the politics of recognition. And as you noted, the Viele’s Map is still actively used by New York’s urban planners and engineers. And I think, in a way, it was far more comprehensive as an urban planning tool than Olmsted’s vision for a bucolic scenery in the middle of Manhattan. And I think the modern New York that we can now experience, we can engage with more closely resembles Viele’s version than Olmsted’s.
If we want a better world, we actually need to change some of those stories that we tell about engineers, about the world around us, about how we envision this better world and what kind of care we need for it.
Margonelli: Yeah. I think that’s interesting. And then, as you talk about the politics of prestige, that’s also a really important question for those of us who tell stories about engineering, for journalists, for people who run academic programs, for everyone to reconsider. I think one of the things that you wrote that I found impressive and interesting was, in engineering, the status accrued by high prestige may end up depriving society of visionaries who see the potential in building sewers and draining swamps to create better lives for all. And that, if we want a better world, we actually need to change some of those stories that we tell about engineers, about the world around us, about how we envision this better world and what kind of care we need for it.
Madhavan: Not only was Egbert Viele’s map was colorful, his personality was colorful too. He was bitter and his rivalry with Olmsted was just evident. It’s a fascinating story that made itself available to me. And so, Viele just was unhappy, I think, most of his life that he didn’t get the recognition that he deserved. So, what does he do? He builds himself an elaborate tomb, the largest in the West Point Cemetery to make his presence known and what a character. And I think the desire and the necessity to be recognized in society is such a human thing and I think this story brings it out clearly in an engineering sense.
Margonelli: If this conversation has inspired you to learn more about the underappreciated elements of engineering, check out our show notes to find links to Guru Madhavan’s New York Trilogy and more of his work.
Please subscribe to The Ongoing Transformation wherever you get your podcasts and write to us at [email protected]. Thanks to our podcast producer, Kimberly Quach and our audio engineer Shannon Lynch. I’m Lisa Margonelli, editor in chief at Issues. Join us on December 3rd for an interview with Natalie Aviles about scientific breakthroughs at the National Cancer Institute and how bureaucratic organizations can nurture innovation.