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

You could have most likely 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 Know-how (MIT). He constructed some main bridges in Massachusetts and helped prototype the primary wind energy programs in Vermont. However I first encountered his work in a silly-but-serious essay referred to as “Whither civil engineering?”, printed within the March 1952 challenge of The Know-how Evaluate. In it, Wilbur claimed he and his colleagues had invented a crystal ball…