The real, amazing story

If you want to know all about building the Hoover Dam there is only one book: this one. Amazon has several titles about the Dam but I bet that many authors cut and pasted facts and details from this book. The chapters originally appeared in Compressed Air Magazine during the construction and they were reprinted as five booklets and these form the basis for this title but without the ads in the originals (though there is one, on page fifty-four, for Ingersoll-Rand).

It's worth saying that the copy was written for professional folk and a lot of it is quite technical but not too the point that the average reader couldn't follow the story. Actually the pouring of the 3,200, 000 cubic yards of concrete for the Dam doesn't take too many pages, the first hundred or so look in detail at the surveys of the Colorado River, building Boulder City, constructing the tunnels to divert the river while the Dam was being built, aerial cable ways, a railroad, fixed to the canyon side, to carry the concrete to the site, building the generating plant and more. What fascinated me about pouring the concrete, over twenty-three months, was installing a hundred and fifty miles of pipes that carried refrigerated water to cool the huge heat build-up as the concrete set.

Fortunately more than a third of the book are photos and technical drawings that back up the copy and they all have very comprehensive captions. The Hoover Dam story comes alive in these pages and it can be picked up at an incredibly low price.