Book Review

Canada and the United States

You don't have to be Canadian or a historian of engineering to like this book. Richard White has done more than give historians of engineering professionalism something to think about. He has written an informative, well-written account of a once-landed but far from uneducated or destitute Irish family that emigrated to Upper Canada in 1836, hoping to climb back into the ranks of the properly landed gentry. Things didn't work out exactly as planned. Even though the father had been a progressive estate manager in Ireland, none of the children stayed on the physically and financially punishing land. Two of the sons took the gentlemanly attributes of a good education, a desire for independence, and a familiarity with things physical taught them by their father and embarked on engineering careers.

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Frank, the younger of the two, found some well-paid jobs, and anything he built was good. Unfortunately, much-needed performance bonuses eluded him, because he rarely finished on time. But money in hand or not, Frank spent lavishly, as he felt a gentleman should. He died suddenly in 1882 at age sixty-one and left his brother Walter to deal with a life insurance policy with a lien against it, a wife, nine children—perhaps ten, but young Frank had left the United States and a teenaged girl too quickly to learn the full story—and an estate $143,000 in the red. In 1899, the dutiful, more successful, unmarried brother Walter died a bitter, lonely old man. Much of his fortune had been spent after four decades of bailing out various family members. He considered his life a failure. However, his papers were in order.

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