The forgotten civil engineer with a imaginative and prescient we might all be taught from

You’ve gotten in all probability by no means heard of John “Bud” Benson Wilbur, however he’s a low-key civil engineering legend. Within the mid-Twentieth century, he was chair of the civil and sanitary engineering division on the Massachusetts Institute of Expertise (MIT). He constructed some main bridges in Massachusetts and helped prototype the primary wind energy methods in Vermont. However I first encountered his work in a silly-but-serious essay known as “Whither civil engineering?”, revealed within the March 1952 difficulty of The Expertise Evaluation. In it, Wilbur claimed he and his colleagues had invented a crystal ball…