One of the most notable reporting trips by an ENR editor took place in 1962 when ENR Editor-in-Chief Waldo G. Bowman attended the 29th Executive Meeting of the International Commission on Large Dams—held in Moscow—as a member of the U.S. delegation.
During the 1950s and 60s, engineers and scientists sought ways to use nuclear weapons for major construction projects such as harbors, roads and even alternative routes for the Panama Canal.
Forensic engineering has come a long way since Wiss Janney Elstner Associates was featured on the cover of ENR in 1972. For its 150th anniversary, ENR looks back at how problem-solving and investigations by that forensics firm and others have better informed the engineering knowledge base.
A 1972 ENR cover story said of Wiss Janney Elstner Associates in Northbrook, Ill., “It exists largely by looking for trouble, both before and after the fact of structural distress and failure.”
The Center for Oral History at Columbia University, founded in 1948, is an archive of thousands of recordings of interviews with a wide range of public figures.
On a Saturday morning in the summer of 1966, Vinton Bacon, general superintendent of the Metropolitan Sanitary District of Chicago, pulled his car into a service station near his suburban home for gas and an oil check. The attendant found four sticks of dynamite wired to the car’s engine. Only a faulty connection prevented them from exploding.