SUCCESS IS FORESEEING FAILURE

Egyptian pyramid builders are not unique in their encounters with the limits of structures and their desire to do what had not been done before. Medieval cathedrals were certainly much more complex structurally than the pyramids, yet there is still considerable evidence that the cathedrals evolved through a process of experimentation and trial and error not unlike that of the Egyptian megaliths. Even the layman Henry Adams, in his avuncular Baedeker to the cathedrals of France, had to remark on how the architects of churches erected only forty or fifty miles apart around Paris in the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries must have watched and been influenced almost from day to day by each other s experiments. One builder s structural and aesthetic successes and failures were challenges and lessons to the others. 

In the year 1284 the cathedral at Beauvais suffered a major collapse, and this incident has been regarded as a turning point in 

With the growth of the railroads came new demands on engi- 

Hear Ye that Whistle As her long-linked Train Swept onwards, did the vision cross your view Yes. ye were startled —and in balance true, 

Weighing the mischief with the promised gain. Mountains, and Vales, and Floods, I call on you To share the passion of a just disdain. 

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