Hoover Dam Quotes

Hoover Dam," Thalia said. "It's huge." We stood at the river's edge, looking up at a curve of concrete that loomed between the cliffs. People were walking along the top of the dam. They were so tiny they looked like fleas. The naiads had left with a lot of grumbling—not in words I could understand, but it was obvious they hated this dam blocking up their nice river. Our canoes floated back downstream, swirling in the wake from the dam's discharge vents. "Seven hundred feet tall," I said. "Built in the 1930s." "Five million cubic acres of water," Thalia said. Graver sighed. "Largest construction project in the United States." Zoe stared at us. "How do you know all that?" "Annabeth," I said. "She liked architecture." "She was nuts about monuments," Thalia said. "Spouted facts all the time." Grover sniffled. "So annoying." "I wish she were here," I said.

Frankly, I'm guessing that before getting to my house today, Shoshanna had thought the Hoover Dam was some kind of vacuum cleaner attachment.

I went first. The card I drew was "Watergate." "Oh, come on," I said. "This is ridiculous." "Don't whine," said Carter, his grin annoyingly smug. "We all take a random chance here." They started the timer. I drew some remedial waves that immediately got a "Water!" from Cody. That was promising. Then, I drew what I hoped looked like a wall with a door in it. Apparently, I did too good a job. "Wall," said Hugh. "Door," said Cody. I added some vertical lines to the door to emphasize the gate aspect. After a moment's thought, I drew a plus sign between the water and wall to show their connection. "Aqueduct," said Cody. "A bridge over troubled water," guessed Hugh. "Oh my God," I groaned. Unsurprisingly, my time ran out before my teammates could figure it out, though not before they guessed "Hoover Dam" and "Hans Brinker." With a groan, I flounced onto the couch. The other team then got a shot at it. "Watergate," said Carter right away. Hugh turned on me, face incredulous. "Why didn't you just draw a gate?

The beaver told the rabbit as they stared at the Hoover Dam: No, I didn't build it myself, but it's based on an idea of mine

African Americans helped build Hoover Dam but had to commute from Las Vegas to do it, while white workers and their families lived in Boulder City, a sundown town built just for them. African Americans helped build Kentucky Dam, but after they finished, their housing—“Negro Village”—was razed, they were booted out, and Marshall County, Kentucky, resumed being a sundown county.

When I hear that kind of thing,” he responded, “it reminds me of what the beaver told the rabbit as they stood at the base of Hoover Dam: ‘No, I didn’t build it myself, but it’s based on an idea of mine.

Kilby displayed his awshucks humility. “When I hear that kind of thing,” he responded, “it reminds me of what the beaver told the rabbit as they stood at the base of Hoover Dam: ‘No, I didn’t build it myself, but it’s based on an idea of mine.

Omigod,” Valerie said. “Unh!” And her water broke. It was an explosion of water. A tidal wave. We’re talking Hoover Dam quantity water. Water everywhere . . . but mostly on Cal. Cal had been standing at the bottom of the gurney. Cal was totally slimed from the top of his head to his knees. It dripped off the end of his nose and ran in rivulets down his bald head. Valerie drew her legs up, the sheet fell away, and Cal gaped at the sight in front of him. Julie stuck her head around for a look. “Uh-oh,” Julie said, “there’s a foot sticking out. Guess this is going to be a breech baby.” That was when Cal fainted. CRASH. Cal went over like he was a giant redwood cut down by Paul Bunyan. Windows rattled and the building shook. Everyone clustered around Cal.

The whole dam breaks after that. The FBI drops the Federal charge of unlawful flight to avoid prosecution. All of a sudden they don’t seem very interested in the case, despite the salt in J. Edgar Hoover’s wounds and the rest of it. Then back in San Francisco, and Kesey is standing in front of the judge in a faded sport shirt, work pants and boots. The judge has a terrific speech ready, saying this case has been blown up out of proportions in the press and it is only a common dope case as far as he is concerned, and Kesey is no dragon, just an ordinary jackass … and Kesey is starting to say something and Hallinan and Rohan are crouched for the garrote, but again it’s over and Kesey is out on bail in San Francisco, too. It’s unbelievable. He’s out after only five days.

I’m the guy who builds things. So when this dam is done, it will have Pete Conroy’s name written on it somewhere. Even if nobody else in the world ever finds that place, it doesn’t matter because I’ll know that it was me and my men who did the job. Just as important, my men always come first. I get a lot more work out of men by treating them like decent human beings. I don’t treat them like slaves, as some of the foremen do.

As if she had a fever, her skin burned and crackled with a pinpoint sensitivity. She could feel smoke against her skin. She could feel voice waves. She was beginning to feel color, light intensities, and she imagined that she could be put blindfolded in front of the signs at the Thunderbird and the Flamingo and know which was which. 'Maria', she felt someone whisper one night, but when she turned there was nobody. She began to feel the pressure of Hoover Dam, there on the desert, began to feel the pressure and pull of the water. When the pressure got great enough she drove out there. All that day she felt the power surging through her own body. All day she was faint with vertigo, sunk in a world where great power grids converged, throbbing lines plunged finally into the shallow canyon below the dam's face, elevators like coffins dropped into the bowels of the earth itself.

Though time management seems a problem as old as time itself, the science of scheduling began in the machine shops of the industrial revolution. In 1874, Frederick Taylor, the son of a wealthy lawyer, turned down his acceptance at Harvard to become an apprentice machinist at Enterprise Hydraulic Works in Philadelphia. Four years later, he completed his apprenticeship and began working at the Midvale Steel Works, where he rose through the ranks from lathe operator to machine shop foreman and ultimately to chief engineer. In the process, he came to believe that the time of the machines (and people) he oversaw was not being used very well, leading him to develop a discipline he called “Scientific Management.” Taylor created a planning office, at the heart of which was a bulletin board displaying the shop’s schedule for all to see. The board depicted every machine in the shop, showing the task currently being carried out by that machine and all the tasks waiting for it. This practice would be built upon by Taylor’s colleague Henry Gantt, who in the 1910s developed the Gantt charts that would help organize many of the twentieth century’s most ambitious construction projects, from the Hoover Dam to the Interstate Highway System. A century later, Gantt charts still adorn the walls and screens of project managers at firms like Amazon, IKEA, and SpaceX.

Hey!” I jogged after her. “There were these two empousai,” I tried to explain. “They were cheerleaders, see, and they said camp was going to burn, and—” “You told a mortal girl about half-bloods?” “She can see through the Mist. She saw the monsters before I did.” “So you told her the truth.” “She recognized me from Hoover Dam, so—” “You’ve met her before?” “Um, last winter. But seriously, I barely know her.” “She’s kind of cute.” “I—I never thought about it.

Kaiser was new to shipwork. He began life running a photographer’s shop in New York, moved into the gravel business, and ended up in California running a multi-million dollar construction company that built the Hoover Dam and the Bay Bridge. He had a reputation for tackling the impossible. When the shipbuilding programme started his initial involvement was the construction of four of the new yards on the west coast, but he then began to produce the ships as well. At his Permanente Metals Yards No. 1 and No. 2 at Richmond, on the northern edge of San Francisco Bay, the young Kaiser manager, Clay Bedford, set out literally to mass-produce ships.

The God that holds you over the pit of hell, much as one holds a spider or some other loathsome creature over the fire . . . you hang by a slender thread . . . yet it is nothing but his hand that holds you from falling into the fire every moment.

That’s the way a prejudice works; you come to despise the people you’ve taken advantage of so your conscience doesn’t hurt.

Three generations later, viewed from the standpoint of the digital age, a structure such as Hoover can appear to suffer from a kind of vulgarity of size—a thing so enormous and monolithic as to seem preindustrial, almost primitive. Like fascist architecture, that soaring wall of concrete, for all its Art Deco adornments, can strike the postmodern eye as embarrassingly elephantine and childishly simplistic. Yet one only need page through the dam’s elegant blueprints to realize that this is a machine that, in its own way, is as sophisticated as a Boeing 747—a marvel of engineering, of mathematics, of human thinking, of vision, and, yes, of art. For all these reasons, Hoover is regarded by many civil engineers as one of America’s most impressive achievements. It may not be much of an overstatement to say that, along with splitting the atom and sending the Voyager spacecraft beyond the solar system, Hoover is the most remarkable thing this country has ever pulled off. Unlike

The question: where to build such a dam? An initial survey selected a site in an area known as Boulder Canyon, south of Las Vegas. Twenty-five years later, at the outset of the Great Depression, the proposed dam became a possibility with congressional authorization of the “Boulder Canyon Project.” A more detailed analysis showed that Black Canyon, a few miles downstream from Boulder Canyon, had more stable bedrock to support the estimated 7 million tons of concrete that was to be the single largest structure in human history.

Grand Canyon tours from Las Vegas come in a variety of forms, but by far the most common way to visit is by bus. Busing into the Canyon takes longer than the other types of tour, but is certainly more affordable and is probably a better option for family vacations. This allows you to get right up to the edge of the canyon itself, ensuring that you can appreciate the incredible depth. If you want to save some money on your trip, and have an extra day to spend traveling to and from the Canyon, then taking the tour by Big Horn Tours is a great way to do so.

WHILE HOOVER DAM was under construction, California began building the Colorado River Aqueduct and Parker Dam. Arizona’s governor, Benjamin B. Moeur, viewed the dam as an act of theft. Like many Arizonans, he worried that Southern California would suck the river dry before Arizona was in a position to divert almost any of its own share, whatever that turned out to be, so he sent a small National Guard detachment to the construction site to make sure that neither the workers nor the dam touched land on the Arizona side of the river—a challenge for a dam builder, you would think. The National Guardsmen borrowed a small ferryboat from Nellie Trent Bush, a state legislator who lived in the town of Parker, a few miles downstream. As the boat approached the site, it became entangled in a cable attached to a construction barge, and the National Guardsmen had to be rescued by their putative enemies, the people working on the dam. Moeur later sent a message to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt in which he said that he had “found it necessary to issue a proclamation establishing martial law on the Arizona side of the river at that point and directing the National Guard to use such means as may be necessary to prevent an invasion of the sovereignty and territory of the State of Arizona.” By that time, his National Guard detachment had grown to include many more soldiers, as well as a number of trucks with machine guns mounted on them. Moeur also made Nellie Bush “Admiral of the Arizona Navy.” Nellie

since it is the experience that gives traveling its value and not the traveling unto itself, you may want to focus on having adventures instead of just merely travel.  For example, I have individually “traveled” to: The Wind River mountain range in Lander, Wyoming. Dinosaur National Monument in Vernal, Utah. Canyonlands National Park in Moab, Utah. The Grand Canyon outside Williams, Arizona. And The Hoover Dam outside Las Vegas, Nevada. And each individual visit was fun and enjoyable in its own regard. But what I really want to do is raft the Green and Colorado Rivers, which connect all those locations above.  This will not only send me through the Flaming Gorge of Utah, but the confluence of the Green and Yampa Rivers in the canyons of Dinosaur Park, the heart of Canyonlands National Park, Lake Powell, the Grand Canyon, and inevitably a long paddle across Lake Meade to the Hoover Dam.  It will be a genuine, epic, Indiana Jones adventure that very few, if any people, have ever done.  And instead of a mere picture of the Hoover Dam or the Grand Canyon comfortably taken from a paved road, when my little nieces ask me, “What did you do, Uncle Aaron” I won't say, “I went to Paris and sat at a cafe.” I will say, “Uncle Aaron kayaked the whole damn Green and Colorado rivers from Wyoming to the Hoover Dam!”  This doesn't mean we all have to become Larry Ellison, sailing around the world or racing in regattas.  But having adventures as opposed to mere site seeing will add an inordinate amount of purpose and meaning to your life, not to mention a lot of fun.

this is the company that first figured out how to mill I-beams. There’d be no Golden Gate or George Washington Bridges without them. Or the Empire State or Chrysler Buildings. Or the Hoover Dam. The steel for all of those projects came out of these five furnaces.

Other than showing up in white tie and tails for the lavish awards ceremonies—the event is so fancy that even the traffic cops outside wear tuxedos, and the sterling silver laid out for the ensuing banquet is never used for any other function—a Nobel laureate’s only unavoidable duty during prize week is to deliver a lecture. Jack Kilby’s Nobel lecture in physics took place in a classically Scandinavian lecture hall, all blond wood and sleek modern furniture, on the campus of Stockholm University. Jack was introduced by a Swedish physicist who noted that “Dr. Kilby’s” invention had launched the global digital revolution, making possible calculators, computers, digital cameras, pacemakers, the Internet, etc., etc. Naturally, Jack wasn’t going to let that go unanswered. “When I hear that kind of thing,” he said, “it reminds me of what the beaver told the rabbit as they stood at the base of Hoover Dam: ‘No, I didn’t build it myself, but it’s based on an idea of mine.’” Everybody liked that joke, so Jack quickly added that he had borrowed the story from Charles H. Townes, an American who won the physics prize in 1964.

Out of tradition and habit, the effort to dam the Colorado would continue to be known as the Boulder Canyon Project and its legislative mandate as the Boulder Canyon Project Act. But its location would be Black Canyon.

The states could be divided roughly into two basins. The upper basin comprised Wyoming, Utah, Colorado, and New Mexico—all rural, agrarian, and underdeveloped. The lower basin states were Arizona and California—agriculturally more productive, increasingly industrial, and voraciously thirsty—and Nevada, which fit geographically with its two neighbors, but which constituted a category all its own, unpopulated, arid, and seemingly devoid of prospects for development of any kind. (That impression would be dramatically contradicted in coming decades.)

single consistent legal principle of water rights might have resolved their conflicts. In the West, however, there was not one principle in use, but two that were mutually incompatible. These were riparian law and the rule of prior appropriation. Unless the delegates to the compact commission could reach an agreement superseding both, the harvest would be not economic progress, but Hoover’s nightmare of endless litigation. The riparian doctrine had originated in temperate regions, where water was abundant and arable land almost always situated adjacent to a river. The rule granted the owner of land abutting a stream the right to use the water flowing past his property, on condition that his use did not interfere with the same right of landowners downstream. The river and its waters were inviolate, belonging as property to no one.

the phenomenon known as the “cutback.” In simple terms, the river was carving itself a new gorge. Rather than flowing into the Salton Sink as though down an unbroken incline, the current hurtled over a precipice at the point where the New River entered the Salton Sea. This miniature Niagara proceeded to claw its way upstream at a pace of a mile a day, leaving in its wake a canyon eighty feet deep. For a time, the display of nature ruthlessly at work attracted curiosity seekers to the brink of the new gorge. But no one could ignore the awful consequences that would ensue if the cutback continued working its way upstream. If it managed to cleave through the main canal at the Alamo River, all the Imperial Valley’s irrigation channels would drain into the gorge like unstoppered bathtubs, leaving almost all the valley’s arable land sitting eighty feet above the water level. Irrigation would cease forever.

the principle of prior appropriation, which held that water belonged to whoever first put it to use, regardless of the user’s proximity to the source, and that the priority remained in force as long as the use continued. The rule of prior appropriation, in its simplest formulation, was “first in time, first in right.

Crossing the bridge high over Hoover Dam, Jenny was appalled by the low water level in Lake Mead.

A convenient measure of energy generation is the gigawatt: a billion watts. A large coal-fired plant generates a gigawatt of electricity; so does Hoover Dam; so does a nuclear reactor. Multiply that times a thousand, and you have the terawatt—a trillion watts. Humanity currently runs on about 16 terawatts of power, most of it from the burning of fossil fuels. It’s like leaving 160 billion 100-watt lightbulbs on all the time. That’s what is loading the atmosphere with lethal quantities of carbon dioxide.

When archaeologists from some other planet sift through the bleached bones of our civilization, they may well conclude that our temples were dams. Imponderably massive, constructed with exquisite care, our dams will outlast anything else we have built — skyscrapers, cathedrals, bridges, even nuclear power plants. When forests push through the rotting streets of New York and the Empire State Building is a crumbling hulk, Hoover Dam will sit astride the Colorado River much as it does today — intact, formidable, serene.

The people of Mexicali, a city that had expanded organically over the low alluvial plain at the river’s edge, waged a futile battle to protect themselves from the advancing cataract. In the end there was nothing for them to do but watch stoically as the flood chewed away at the riverbanks and coursed through their streets, devouring the town house by adobe house. On June 30 the main business district collapsed into the water, a dozen brick buildings swept away in a matter of hours while the townspeople stood transfixed under clouds of spray towering forty feet in the air. Before the flood was over, four-fifths of the town would be wiped out.

The river instantly resumed its thundering way toward the Salton Sea. Cory brought the river back under control on November 4 “by exhausting the capacities of every quarry between Los Angeles and Nogales, four hundred and eighty-five miles to the east.” Yet one month later, the river busted loose again. For Harry Cory, the sixth failed attempt to close the breach was the last straw. The Southern Pacific had poured more than a million dollars “into that hole” and the river had swept it all away. A sustainable repair required not only a dam, but the construction and permanent maintenance of fifteen miles of levees along the west bank, reinforced with concrete and steel to keep the river corralled even at its most violent. These would be the most expensive levees ever built over such a distance—not a job for the Southern Pacific, in his weary judgment. The railroad was the most resourceful, rich, and powerful enterprise in the Southwest, yet the river had brought it to its knees.

Crowe accepted a job with Morrison-Knudsen at some point in April or May 1925. He would build three dams in five years for the partnership. After Guernsey came Van Giesen Dam outside Sacramento, finished in 1928 for the state of California, and Deadwood Dam in Idaho, another Reclamation project, in 1930. As always, he worked at breakneck speed, poring over the blueprints of the next dam even before he was finished with the present one.

In early 1924, Weymouth offered him the post of regional engineer in Denver, a desk from which Crowe would oversee all construction in seventeen Western states. As this was the region where Reclamation was spending most of its budget, the job was tantamount to the bureau’s chief of construction.

Crowe had first encountered Harry Winford Morrison in 1909, on the muddy bank of a canal outside Boise, where they were foremen of separate crews lining the ditch with concrete.

Utah boasted experience of dam building on a grand scale, having completed the O’Shaughnessy Dam in Yosemite National Park’s Hetch Hetchy Valley in 1923 for a San Francisco municipal water project. That $7 million project had had enough peculiarities to toughen the hide of any construction man. For one thing, it was the subject of one of the most explosive environmental battles in American history,

In the teeming crowd gathered for a ceremony outside Las Vegas on the afternoon of September 17, 1930, there must have been quite a few people hoping to see the guest of honor look ridiculous. They were not disappointed. Interior Secretary Ray Lyman Wilbur had come west for the formal launch of the Boulder Canyon Project. His role in the ritual was to drive a spike of Nevada-mined silver into a tie at the spot where the Union Pacific’s Salt Lake-Los Angeles trunk line was to branch off toward the future site of Boulder City, which was to be the staging point for the project and the hometown for its workers and their families.

at the dawn of the 1930s, state and local budgets dwarfed federal outlays by a factor of ten. Limited largely to the keeping of a standing army and navy and the payment of obligations incurred in wartime (including interest on war debt and the upkeep of veterans), the federal budget amounted to a negligible 3 percent of gross national product. By the end of the twentieth century, that figure would be closer to 20 percent.

Leaving aside the impossibility of funding all this activity from the public purse, the main problem with these programs was the dearth of construction plans to absorb even a fraction of the phantom billions—there were almost no surveys, no feasibility studies, no blueprints, and no prospect for drafting

The lone exception was the Bureau of Reclamation, which had one enormous project already mapped out, with years of engineering and architectural studies behind it, all tied up neatly with the ribbon of congressional approval and bow of a presidential signature. This was, of course, the Boulder Canyon Project.

Across that time span “Hoover Dam” and “Boulder Dam” were used interchangeably, the preference often depending on the political leanings of the speaker. The matter generated so much confusion and acrimony that in the Las Vegas Review-Journal in 1947 a letter writer named Frank Romano Sr. was provoked to propose that the structure in Black Canyon be named “Hoogivza Dam.

But this gargantuan dam in Glen Canyon, authorized in April 1956, and begun just five months later with appropriate presidential fanfare and a pig-tailed string of blasting sticks, wasn’t the first audacious impoundment of the Colorado. Twenty-five years before, in 1931, work had gotten under way in Black Canyon, 400 miles downstream, on an enormous dam that would ultimately be named for Herbert Hoover—the largest dam in the world at that time, and the first time engineers had been able to test their convictions that a high concave wedge of concrete could successfully stop a river. Often called Boulder Dam during the desperate Depression years of its construction, Hoover Dam claimed the lives of 110 men before a swarm of workers topped it out, but it also captured the wonder and pride of the nation at a time when there were few palpable symbols of America’s continuing might. It was a public work on the grandest scale imaginable, and its sweeping walls of concrete crowned by fluted, Deco-inspired intake towers attested to the fact that we as a nation knew we would be great again, signaled the certainty that our natural resources remained our secure and fundamental wealth.

In California history, the death toll of the St. Francis Dam disaster remains second only to that of the San Francisco earthquake of 1906. It still reigns as the worst failure of American civil engineering in the twentieth century. Annihilated in the catastrophe, along with $15 million in property and hundreds of lives, was William Mulholland’s reputation.

He knew every man who worked for him by his first name, it was said, but his daughters could not recall ever seeing him give their mother a kiss.

Hurry-Up Crowe. Yet there was something more, something intangible, that endowed Crowe with the ability to drive his crews at a clip that bowed to almost no obstacle, not a killing cold spell nor suffocating desert heat nor the boundaries of human endurance. Perhaps the secret was his ability to communicate a shared goal. Men choking on gasoline fumes in an underground tunnel nearly a mile long, or suspended on ropes two thousand feet in the air from the rim of a gorge, drills in hand, or sunk to their ankles in wet concrete under a remorseless desert sun might well question from time to time whether the work was worth the four or five dollars they earned for a punishing eight-hour shift. Frank Crowe made them understand the honor of participating in the creation of something eternal. “I’m proud that I had a hand in it,” said Tex Nunley, whose myriad jobs in Boulder Canyon included painting white crosses on solid rock walls to mark the center line of the tunnels the drillers were to drive through them. “Yes I am. I think it was a marvelous piece of work.

I had spent my life in the river bottoms and Boulder meant a wonderful climax,” Crowe recalled in 1943. “I was wild to build this dam.” So, too, were the founders of Six Companies, Inc., the unwieldy contracting consortium assembled in 1931 to make a bid on the dam project.

By 1930, when the Department of the Interior put the Boulder Canyon Project out for bid, Frank Crowe had been involved in the construction of fourteen dams, five of them as superintendent. He was widely recognized as a gifted deployer of men and materials and an audacious problem solver. When

many features of the dam construction camp of 1905 would still be very much in existence on the Colorado River in 1931—including racial and ethnic discrimination, profiteering at the company store, and the flouting of health and safety regulations in the name of efficient and speedy construction. At Black Canyon, the threat of a Wobbly rebellion would still cast a shadow.

Attached to the survey was William Phipps Blake, a young geologist from a prominent Eastern family. Blake’s party failed to discern a suitable railroad route, but he did stumble upon a remarkable geologic feature in the trackless desert.

The desert was in fact a deposit of rich soil eroded by the Colorado River from the basin upstream and transported south at the rate of 160 million tons a year.

thirty-four-year-old Ohio-born physician, Oliver Meredith Wozencraft had contracted an acute case of wanderlust from the Argonauts passing through his hometown of New Orleans. Early in 1849 he left behind

the federal government pondered the river’s greater virtues. Davis’s railroad survey had whetted the War Department’s thirst for geographic knowledge. The task of achieving the next great leap in understanding was assigned to a young officer of the Army Corps of Topographical Engineers bearing the evocative name of Joseph Christmas Ives.

When Franklin Roosevelt came out to dedicate Hoover Dam on September 30, 1935, the one important dignitary who refused to attend the ceremony, which drew some ten thousand people, was the governor of Arizona, B. B. Moeur.

The plan was majestic. It contemplated two huge new dams on the Colorado River in Marble Gorge and Bridge Canyon, at opposite ends of Grand Canyon National Park. Both had been carefully situated so as not to flood the park itself—except for what the Bureau called “minor” flooding that would drown lower Havasu Creek, the canyon’s most beautiful side stream, and submerge Lava Falls, the river’s most thunderous rapid. But the park would sit inside a dam sandwich: Bridge Canyon Dam would back up water for ninety-three miles below it, entirely flooding the bottom of Grand Canyon National Monument, and Marble Gorge Dam would create a reservoir more than forty miles long right above it. The dams had one purpose—hydroelectric power—and a single objective: lots and lots of cash. They would not conserve any water, because there was none left to conserve; in some years, they would cause a net loss to the river through evaporation. They were there only to take advantage of the thousand feet of elevation loss between Glen Canyon and Hoover dams. Together, they would generate 2.1 million kilowatts of peaking power, marketable at premium rates. Later, the power revenues would finance an artificial river of rescue; for now it would pay for the other features of the plan. One of those features—actually, it was the centerpiece of the plan—was a pair of big dams on the Trinity River, in far-northern California, and a long hard-rock tunnel that would turn their water into the Sacramento River, where it would begin its journey to Los Angeles.

The transformation of America that took place during the post-World War II period really began a decade earlier, with the completion of Hoover Dam. The story of America in the last half of the twentieth century is the story not of the postwar era, but the post-dam era.

The United States became in that post-dam era a country very different from the United States that built it. It was transformed from a society that glorified individualism into one that cherished shared enterprise and communal social support. To be sure, that change was not all the making of the dam itself; Social Security, the Works Progress Administration, and other New Deal programs forged in the crucible of the Depression played their essential role, as did the years of war. But the dam was the physical embodiment of the initial transformation, a remote regional construction project reconfigured into a symbol of national pride.

Taylor created a planning office, at the heart of which was a bulletin board displaying the shop's schedule for all to see. The board depicted every machine in the shop. showing the task currently being carried out by that machine and all the task waiting for it. This practice would be built upon by Taylor's colleague Henry Gantt, who in the 1910s developed the Gantt charts that would help organize many of the twentieth century's most ambitious construction projects, from the Hoover Dam to the Interstate Highway System.

This practice would be built upon by Taylor’s colleague Henry Gantt, who in the 1910s developed the Gantt charts that would help organize many of the twentieth century’s most ambitious construction projects, from the Hoover Dam to the Interstate Highway System. A century later, Gantt charts still adorn the walls and screens of project managers at firms like Amazon, IKEA, and SpaceX.

She drove downtown and turned left off Fifth Street into East Fremont Street. Up ahead was what most people think of when Las Vegas is mentioned. It was a blaze of lights and color and neon: gambling halls jammed up against each other on both sides of Fremont from Second on up to Main, for two solid blocks. Overshadowing all the rest was the big sign above the Golden Nugget on the left and, beyond that, the huge mechanical cowboy pointed the way to the Pioneer Club with his animated hand and thumb. And the Las Vegas Club, the Monte Carlo, the Frontier Club, and all the rest. Colleen drove through slowly because the place was full of men and women and cowboys. A guy blew a bugle at us as we crossed First Street and we had to wait a few seconds for a man on a horse to get out of our way at Main where Colleen turned right and then swung back to head out of town. Then she drove like the wind all the way to Hoover Dam.

Did a few poor souls die because of the Big Dig? Son, a hundred men died building the Hoover Dam. A thousand men died building the Erie Canal. Four hundred Chinamen died building the transcontinental railroad. How about the Panama Canal? One of the greatest engineering feats in history? Thirty thousand men died building it. Ambitious projects always cost lives, son. That’s the truth. Have you ever visited the great pyramids of Giza?

writer Robert Heinlein put it shortly after the Moon landing, Apollo’s success was “the greatest event in all the history of the human race up to this time.” 203 The symbolic meaning of the program’s end shouldn’t be underestimated. Apollo was nothing less than an instance of the technological sublime. The Apollo 11 mission, and the technological mastery a successful Moon landing represented, elicited a cross-cultural spiritual reaction. Images from the mission were “surrounded with the aura of religion,” 204 from the silvery Saturn V rocket, which towered against the darkness of space before it lifted off and sent the first humans to another world, to the Apollo 8 crew’s reading from the Book of Genesis on Christmas Eve 1968, to Armstrong’s footprints on the lunar surface. In the 20th century, the experience of the technological sublime was a recurrent phenomenon in America—think of the interstate highway system, the Hoover Dam, the Manhattan skyline, the atomic bomb, the jet airplane, or the Golden Gate Bridge.