Rescuing Prometheus: Four Monumental Projects That Changed the Modern World is a book by Thomas P. Hughes

Thomas P. Hughes

Thomas Parke Hughes is an American Historian of Technology. He is an emeritus professor of history at the University of Pennsylvania and is a visiting professor at MIT and Stanford.He received his Ph.D. from the University of Virginia in 1953....

. The book uses four extremely large engineering projects of the late 20th century as examples to explore how the limits of modern system engineering are stressed by real life projects. It also traces the development of the management of large technical system development.

The book documents four massively-cooperative projects:

• Semi Automatic Ground Environment
  Semi Automatic Ground Environment
  The Semi-Automatic Ground Environment was an automated control system for tracking and intercepting enemy bomber aircraft used by NORAD from the late 1950s into the 1980s...
  
   (SAGE), a computer- and radar-based air-defense system
• the Atlas
  Atlas (missile)
  The SM-65 Atlas was the first intercontinental ballistic missile developed and deployed by the United States. It was built for the U.S. Air Force by Convair Division of General Dynamics at the Kearny Mesa assembly plant north of San Diego, California...
  
   project, which produced America's first ICBM
• Boston
  Boston
  Boston is the capital of and largest city in Massachusetts, and is one of the oldest cities in the United States. The largest city in New England, Boston is regarded as the unofficial "Capital of New England" for its economic and cultural impact on the entire New England region. The city proper had...
  
  's Central Artery/Tunnel Project, a traffic-unclogging system of highways, tunnels and bridges originally scheduled for completion in 2004
• ARPANET
  ARPANET
  The Advanced Research Projects Agency Network , was the world's first operational packet switching network and the core network of a set that came to compose the global Internet...
  
  , an interactive computer-based information network that paved the way for the Internet