To engineer is human : the role of failure in successful design

by Henry Petroski

Hardcover, 1985

Status

Available

Publication

New York, N.Y. : St. Martin's Press, 1985.

Description

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)

User reviews

LibraryThing member bduguid
Henry Petroski is an author of "popular engineering" books, the cousin to "popular science", which attempt to explain the process of engineering design to a non-specialist audience.

This book documents how successful engineering is a process of predicting and preventing failure. Several chapters
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offer a variety of viewpoints on the philosophy of design: engineering as hypothesis (this building will stand up) which is tested analytically or empirically; design as revision (if we change this bit it will stand up); success as foreseeing failure etc.

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.
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LibraryThing member iayork
First half poor, second half thought-provoking: I nearly gave up around page 21 where there is, considering the author's credentials, an astonishing error. The author explains how he demonstrates metal fatigue to his classes: by bending a paper clip back and forth until it breaks. He concludes
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"...that, I tell the class, is failure by fatigue". Well no actually, its work hardening. In chapter 4, the author appears to confuse hypothesis and presupposition. At another point, he uses the term "stresses and strains of modern life". This is not wrong in itself but it further shakes ones confidence. Engineers tend not to use the phrase in this commonplace way because "stress" and "strain" have quite specific (and totally different) meanings in engineering. It is a bit like those war films where the radio operator says "over and out". It jars because a professional would say "over" or "out" but not both. There is more. The English is pretty bad at times ("ingeniousness" instead of "ingenuity" on page 16 and "fail-proofness" on page 44). Much of the first half came over to me as a poorly structured stream of consciousness.The second half, for me, made it worth wading through all this; although the author still did not always follow through the thoughts that he fired off. The section on the crystal palace was fascinating, as was the story of the 50th anniversary of the Golden Gate bridge in the Afterword to the Vintage edition
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.
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LibraryThing member ecw0647
Perhaps I rate this too highly. Problem is I love technology and its issues and Petroski is one of my favorite writers on civil engineering.

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
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using the same basic technology as the infamous Tacoma Narrows bridge. Only about 250,000 were able to squeeze on the bridge, and fortunately no panic occurred as the Golden Gate Bridge began to sway gently from side to side. Hangar cables became slack -- something that was not supposed to happen, and the main span's arch flattened out to a "noticeable degree." The bridge had been over-designed with an ample margin of safety, unlike the walkways at the Hyatt in Kansas City, which were essentially small bridges. Over 100 people were killed when the walkways collapsed. Engineers determined quickly that a change made to make installation of the walkways simpler reduced the ability of the walkways to handle even their own weight let alone that of several hundred people.
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.
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LibraryThing member weird_O
To Engineer Is Human by Henry Petroski

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
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engineering, for engineering design has as its first and foremost objective the obviation of failure. Thus, colossal disasters that do occur are ultimately failures of design, but the lessons learned from those disasters can do more to advance engineering knowledge than all the successful machines and structures in the world…To understand what engineering is and what engineers do is to understand how failures can happen and how they can contribute more than successes to advance technology.

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.
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LibraryThing member lorin
Petroski describes the role of failure in advancing the field of engineering. Most of the examples are from civil and mechanical engineering, but the lesson is still quite relevant for those of us working in other areas of engineering: we can learn more from our failures than our successes. It's a
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very entertaining read.
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LibraryThing member jorgecardoso
The last post about "The Evolution of Useful Things" reminded me about another of Petroski's books that I read some years ago: "To Engineer is Human: The Role of Failure in Successful Design". It's also about failure but in a different perspective: how failure makes the engineering activity evolve.
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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....
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LibraryThing member Newmans2001
When I found this book I could not wait to read it. And it had some very interesting and enlightening information, but I felt the attempt at making a literary masterpiece out of engineering did not succeed very well. His thoughts as an Engineer should be very logical, creative and systematic, but
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he got lost in his own thoughts and his concept got very tiring and simplistic. Maybe I should not rate the book as I did not finish it.
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LibraryThing member ablueidol
Read. well tried to read this last week. Clearly I'm no engineer waiting to astound the world so abandoned it after skimming to find the interesting bits - there weren't any. But just know my bookshelves sighed and committed suicide - lots of broken bricks and gouged wood. We isn't it good to know
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it was something about breaking points and beam alignment. Oh well back to having a life.
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LibraryThing member katekf
Whenever I see a book of Petroski's I pick them up as they're always fascinating reads with his sharp eye on engineering and how he knows how to explain the concerns behind engineering. The focus of the essays in this book is on how failure is one of the best ways to learn how to improve and the
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mistakes of predecessors help improve in the future. He looks at well known engineering failures such as the Tacoma-Narrows and lesser known ones. As someone who hasn't studied engineering but is fascinated by how the world is put together, I recommend his books, they're always quick and satisfying reads.
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LibraryThing member SomeGuyInVirginia
Pop sci book and to me most interesting when discussing the use of computers in design (computers perform so many calculations so quickly that engineers often can't validate the output and their evals are sometimes limited and prone to error by not asking the correct questions) or when he describes
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what he did to validate a Santayana quote. Worth reading, not core.
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LibraryThing member ivan.frade
What is the place of engineering in the world? What is it "to engineer" from a humanistic point of view? This book explains well the challenges of the profession and how progress happens in a delicate equilibrium of innovation and safety. Building a structure must avoid failure but is failure what
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makes us learn to build better structures.

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.
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LibraryThing member MartinBodek
I can read about engineering failures and successes over and over and over. It never seems to bore me. It's gravy when the problems and solutions in literature are attacked from different angles, but even coming at it the same way still holds my interest. The author does a great job explaining the
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poetry and art of the trade, and does a fantastic job of explaining certain complexities with apt metaphors. Then he gets into some excellent nitty-gritty, and covers the morality and responsibility of the field as well. I suspect I'll be reading more of his works, and more on engineering in general. What an excellent choice to whet the appetite.
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LibraryThing member gottfried_leibniz
I took this book on understanding about engineering. Petroski explains engineering failures with stories from the previous century. He says failure helps to advance engineering knowledge. He stresses on learning from them especially in engineering.

I liked how he used a Poet crafting a poetry with
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an Engineer. Both conceive in their mind and perfect it, yet they know they cannot make it perfect. His example of, "Failure by fatigue" by using paper clip was thought-provoking. A Great book and quick read. Absolute certainty is not possible in structural or any types of engineering.

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
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