The forgotten civil engineer with a vision we could all learn from

You’ve probably never heard of John “Bud” Benson Wilbur, but he’s a minor civil engineering legend. In the middle of the 20th century, he headed the department of civil and sanitary engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He built several important bridges in Massachusetts and helped prototype the first wind energy systems in Vermont. But his work published in the March 1952 issue of “Whither civil engineering?” I found it in a silly but serious essay called The Technology Review. In it, Wilbur said that he and his colleagues had invented a crystal ball…