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    To Engineer Is Human: The Role of Failure in Successful Design
    To Engineer Is Human: The Role of Failure in Successful Design
    To Engineer Is Human: The Role of Failure in Successful Design
    Audiobook8 hours

    To Engineer Is Human: The Role of Failure in Successful Design

    Written by Henry Petroski

    Narrated by Matthew Boston

    4/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    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.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTantor Media, Inc
    Release dateMar 27, 2018
    ISBN9781541488304
    To Engineer Is Human: The Role of Failure in Successful Design

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    Reviews for To Engineer Is Human

    4/5

    137 ratings11 reviews

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    • 5/5
      Great piece of research, enjoyable and sophisticated use of language and suiting voice of the reader.
    • 5/5
      A layman's primer on the purpose of engineering and design, slightly dated reference-wise but still relevant 30 years after its initial publication.
    • 3/5
      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 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
    • 4/5
      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 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.
    • 4/5
      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 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.
    • 5/5
      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 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.

    • 5/5
      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 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.
    • 2/5
      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 it was something about breaking points and beam alignment. Oh well back to having a life.
    • 3/5
      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 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.
    • 5/5
      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. 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....
    • 4/5
      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 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.