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4 Episodes 2002 - 2002
Episode 1
Wed, Jul 3, 2002 60 mins
Part 1 of this four-part series on major American public works projects, looks at efforts to tame the Mississippi and Colorado, rivers with opposite challenges. With the Mississippi, it's flood control; with the Colorado, it's providing water for the arid West. The Hoover Dam, construction of which is followed here, took care of that, and provided electricity as well. In the Midwest, flood-control efforts began in earnest after disastrous 1927 flooding. Coordinating relief efforts: Herbert Hoover, "the great engineer." Stacy Keach narrates.
Episode 2
Wed, Jul 10, 2002 60 mins
This installment illuminates the process by which "America got wired," says narrator Stacy Keach. The first wirer, of course, was Thomas Edison. He invented the lightbulb in 1879, then went about figuring out how to distribute electricity (and build his business). One of his lieutenants, Samuel Insull, went to Chicago, and figured out ways to make electricity "something you couldn't do without," says University of Alabama historian Forrest McDonald. And the Tennessee Valley Authority's David Lilienthal wired the rural South. FDR called the TVA "the wildest experiment ever conducted by a government." Part 2 of four.
Episode 3
Wed, Jul 17, 2002 60 mins
A profile of two engineers who designed eight bridges in the city and its environs between 1904 and 1964. While Gustav Lindenthal, whose Williamsburg Bridge across the East River opened in 1904, dreamed of spanning the Hudson, it was his protégé Othmar Ammann who did, in 1931, with the George Washington Bridge. Three years later, The New Yorker rhapsodized: "It's a pity he can't live for another 100 years because then he could build a bridge across the ocean." That didn't happen, but his final bridge, the Verrazano Narrows, is 60 feet longer than the Golden Gate. Stacy Keach narrates.
Episode 4
Wed, Jul 24, 2002 60 mins
This installment charts Boston's Central Artery project, described by narrator Stacy Keach as "the largest, most technically complicated urban highway proposal in U.S. history." Work began in 1991 (and isn't slated for completion until 2005), and this hour explores some of its intricacies and the nearly 20-year battle to get the highway built, which was spearheaded by former Massachusetts Transportation Secretary Fred Salvucci. Says former Gov. Michael Dukakis: "Fred was just relentless."