SAM: One Robot, a Dozen Engineers, and the Race to Revolutionize the Way We Build Hardcover – Illustrated, 20 February 2020

To an outsider, bricklaying might seem like the task on a construction site most ready for automated labor. After all, even toddlers can build huge block walls with ease. But the reality is different, and the combination of delicate skills, brawn and endurance that leads to a properly-built brick wall has eluded machine-masons for decades. Waldman introduces us to SAM - Semi-Automated Mason - and his driven but perpetually-frustrated development crew as they strive for the goal of a machine that can lay brick as fast and evenly as any apprentice mason.The result is a worthy addition to the genre of "new tech meets old craft," and blends modern engineering headaches and triumphs with the need to work amid the grit and weather on real construction sites - and with proud and suspicious union masons objecting to every change that slows them down (or, worse, might replace them). Waldman even casts a respectful eye at the long history of modern masonry and its original guru, Frank B. Gilbreth, who developed speed and efficiency techniques for bricklayers at the dawn of the 20th century, turning a slow process into one that could raise buildings in weeks.Waldman takes us through the parallel, a century later, with a machine that at first can barely tell one end of a brick from another to one that can lay a thousand bricks a day and even style a monogram in a brick wall, all the while sulking, pooping and driving both its developers and its co-workers crazy.

A crisply written story about a start-up working to bring robotics to bricklaying. The main character is somewhere between Steve Jobs and Don Quixote. His team of Sancho Panzas are quirky engineers and their trials are a series of construction sites where they try to make their robot work better than last time. What could go wrong on a construction site? Everything from wind and rain, to wifi, the scaffolding, the stuff they smear on the bricks, the bricks themselves, and the surly sometimes hostile bricklayers. The author also throws in a fascinating history of the bricklaying trade. Will they make it? One way to find out.

It was a surprisingly fascinating read. It was inspirational and interesting.