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How did a simple design error cause one of the great disasters of the 1980s-the collapse of the walkways at the Kansas City Hyatt Regency Hotel? What made the graceful and innovative Tacoma Narrows Bridge twist apart in a mild wind in 1940? How did an oversized waterlily inspire the magnificent Crystal Palace, the crowning achievement of Victorian architecture and engineering? These are some of the failures and successes that Henry Petroski, author of the acclaimed The Pencil, examines in this engaging, wonderfully literate book. More than a series of fascinating case studies, To Engineer Is Human is a work that looks at our deepest notions of progress and perfection, tracing the fine connection between the quantifiable realm of science and the chaotic realities of everyday life.… (more)
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This book documents how successful engineering is a process of predicting and preventing failure. Several chapters
There are several good angles here, particularly where Petroski likens engineering design to the way in which children learn. For non-engineers, there is also useful material on factors of safety, failure by cracking and other basics.
Petroski's use of language is excellent, but as an engineer, I do find a lot of the book disappointing. Non-engineers might come away thinking they know why Tacoma Narrows collapsed, or what fatigue cracking is, but the technical reasons are at best alluded to, never properly explained. Petroski's paper-clip example for fatigue cracking is particularly poor, as it mixes in two generally unrelated issues (brittle failure and plastic strain hardening). For technical matters, "Why buildings fall down" by Levy and Salvadori is far superior, and much better illustrated with simple and easy-to-follow diagrams.
Where Petroski succeeds is in the human processes of design engineering, but even here he is somewhat weak. He's good on the philosophy but not the reality - you couldn't read this and get any grasp on how a design engineer actually spends their day, for example.
Worth reading, but let down by its fear of the technicalities.
For me, the whole book was worth the single sentence "designed objects change the future into which they will age"; in other words new technology leads to ...new ways of doing things which leads to ...new possibilities of failure which ...were not covered in the design because people didn't do things that way then.
Not a brilliant book, and some pretty basic gaffes which are difficult to understand - but worth reading as a whole.
On the 50th anniversary of the Golden Gate Bridge, May 27, 1987, almost 1,000,000 people showed up to celebrate and to walk across a bridge that was designed
Henry Petroski, in To Engineer is Human: The Role of Failure in Successful Design, is interested in engineering failures. He suggests these are terribly important to study, for they provide the clues to resolving the inherent paradox in engineering, which is that "...successful structural concepts devolve into failures, while the colossal failures contributed to the evolution of innovative and inspiring structures."
Structures that never fail -- actually they all will eventually, if one takes them beyond their intended life -- are assumed to be over-designed, i.e., they are much stronger than need be. Engineers, in order to be more economical and aesthetic, will make changes in the design that may ultimately lead to sensational failures like that of the Tacoma Narrows bridge. It's designers ignored considerable evidence that was readily available on the effect of wind on non-stiffened structures.
Petroski is concerned that the current atmosphere of liability and law suits will lead to a suppression of free discussion of the reasons behind structural (and now computer program) failures. "Engineering is a human endeavor and thus subject to error." Catastrophes are rare, but Petroski discusses why failures may be impossible to avoid and also why, paradoxically, we may not want to make them impossible.
The subtitle of this 1985 book--The Role of Failure in Successful Design--establishes the theme of the book.
In his introduction, Petroski, a professor of civil engineering at Duke, writes:
I believe that the concept of failure…is central to understanding
To elaborate on this statement, the author cites several famous engineering failures as case studies. What happened? What was learned? How is that new knowledge applied by engineers?
One example is the collapse of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge.
This suspension bridge linked the mainland of Washington State to its Olympic Peninsula and was built in 1940, a year after a bridge of similar design, the Bronx-Whitestone, was completed and opened to traffic. Both bridges used an unconventional stiffened-girder design that reduced the thickness of the roadway structure, giving it a slender silhouette. But even during construction, the Narrows bridge displayed frightening instability in crosswinds, even relatively mild ones. Its two-lane, half-mile-long deck would undulate and twist, quickly earning the bridge the sobriquet "Galloping Gerty." After only a few months of use, its imminent failure being obvious, it was closed and soon thereafter the deck tore completely apart. The only casualty was the bridge itself.
Petroski points out that the Bronx-Whitestone Bridge has a wider, six-lane roadway, but that it too displayed unsettling flexibility. Even as the Narrows bridge was going up, the Bronx-Whitestone was being altered with extra cables and stiffening devices. Alterations to the bridge continued into the 1980s.
The fault in the design of these bridges, writes Petroski, was that "the bridge span acted much like an airplane wing subjected to uncontrolled turbulence." At the time, the aerodynamic aspect of bridge design was not considered. It is now, of course, with designs being "tested in wind tunnels much the way new airplace designs are."
Other examples cited include the mid-flight explosions in the early 1950s that destroyed several DeHavilland Comets, the world's first commercial jet passenger aircraft (killing all on board each time); the collapse of pedestrian bridges spanning the vast lobby of the Kansas City Hyatt Regency Hotel at second, third, and fourth floor levels (killing and injuring hundreds).
The shortcoming of the book is its age. "From Slide Rule to Computer: Forgetting How It Used to Be Done" is a chapter near the book's end in which Petroski frets about problems that may stem from the computers supplanting manual computations, and in the process, lulling engineers into complacency. "{T}he engineer who employs the computer in design must still ask the crucial questions…" The lessons the book teaches are timeless, but a host of new case studies have presented themselves in the last twenty+ years.
Failure has, obviously, a tight relation with engineering. A great part of engineering is making sure that something works within certain bounds of acceptable (ab)use in the most efficient manner possible. In this book Petroski describes some well-known catastrophic failures of engineering structures like the Tacoma Narrows Bridge and the Kansas City Hyatt Regency Hotel walkways and how they came to happen and how they served as example to improve subsequent structures.
These two books also remind me that scientific research is also much about finding failure and trying to develop a way to mitigate it....
The thesis is interesting, well explained and illustrated with appropriate and varied examples. On the down side, it becomes bit repetitive at the end when the point has been made clear and some times the writing is dense.
I liked how he used a Poet crafting a poetry with
When railways were introduced; Writers and Poets were concerned about how it was impacting society. They made fun of failures of engineering. This seems to run parallel with our own lives in our age.
Something that I can take away from the book is looking into a lot of failures and learning from it.
Overall, I would recommend this book to any layman who is interested in Engineering, failures.
Deus Vult,
Gottfried