The Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan Pipeline: School of Modernity
Article from: OGEL 4 (2006), in Pipelines
More Than Engineering
Amidst the backlash caused by the Jacobins' brutality during the French Revolution, a heretofore little noticed aristocrat, the Comte Henri de Saint-Simon (1760-1825), made a breathtakingly visionary announcement. Henceforth, he declared, it would be engineers, not politicians, who would change the world. His disciples quickly proved him right. One of them, the great engineer Ferdinand de Lessups, designed and built the Suez Canal, which brought far more change to the Middle East than Napoleon's vaunted expedition to Egypt and the Holy Land. Others transformed the world from the ...