In the summer of 1978, the engineer who designed a brand-new Manhattan skyscraper sat down to do a piece of arithmetic nobody had asked him to do. The building was finished. It was occupied. And the answer said it could be brought down by a storm New York could expect roughly every sixteen years.
Everything he had done was legal. Much of it wasn’t even his own hand. Nobody on Earth knew but him.
He picked up the telephone.
The Magnanimous Doctor Warthan opens the file on the Citicorp Center crisis: the church that wouldn’t move, the columns placed where columns don’t go, the welds quietly changed to bolts through entirely proper channels — and three months of welders working through the night behind the walls while people worked in the building by day and a hurricane came up the coast.
Including the part the legend leaves out: modern engineers think he may have been wrong. This film argues that makes him greater, not smaller.
The Doctor’s voice and the Society’s imagery are synthesized.