Challenges and Opportunities for Innovation in the Public Works ...

There has been another change in the last century, life has become more
valuable in the literal sense, which has changed how we build things. Because
diseases and then-dangerous conditions regularly killed the young 5, society in general
was less concerned about the sanctity of individual lives. For many people, particularly
in the laboring class, life was, and as Hobbs put it, "poor, nasty, brutish and short." 6
In the first half of the 20th century, there was a burst of discovery that changed the
face of medicine; discovery of antiseptic agents, antibiotics, and medicines, coupled
with improvements in surgery and public health, combined to raise the life expectancy
of the average American male from 46.3 years in 1900, to almost 75 years in 1986.7
As mankind was subduing most of the causes of early death, there was a progressive
surge that sought to improve the lot of the common man. These forces combined to
elevate concern over the social cost of industrial death and injury; this led in turn to
workmen's compensation laws, which allocated the cost of such death and injury to the
iiý istrial process itself through insurance premiums, to be passed on to consumers in
the cost of goods. In later years the expansion of tort law has further added cost to
my construction practice which injured people.
This change in attitudes militated against taking chances, including
innovations in construction design and technique, which might involve risk to human
life and limb. Technical innovation without regard to human safety on any large scale
is over.
An additional legal problem for innovation is that science and technology
are, to some extent, victims of their own good publicity. In the late 19th century years
of effort to apply the discoveries of empirical science in a systematic way culminated
5 When the Brooklyn Bridge was finished in 1883, the world had just begun to accept
the notion that infection could be prevented by cleanliness and antiseptic agents.
Semmelweiss' discovery and publication of his findings occurred in the 1840's and
50's, but wx re not widely known in America until after our Civil War. The concept
of surgical sterility as we now think of it was not known during the American Civil
War. It would be another fifteen years before Walter Reed and others established
that insects were vectors for the communicable diseases which seriously shortened
the average life span. And so on.
6 Thomas Hobbs' Leviathan Part 1, Chapter 13.
7 Life Insurance Fact Book, 1976, American Council on Life Insurance, page 89. The
World Almanac.
145