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.... ( )

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 "...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 editionFor 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.

I included this book in my book: The 100 Best Business Books of All Time. www.100bestbiz.com. ( )

http://nhw.livejournal.com/802767.htm...

Lots of interesting stuff about why mistakes happen - the Tacoma Narrows bridge, the Kansas City Hyatt Regency, etc. Unfortunately the style is a bit repetitive and some of the most interesting nuggets - about Nevil Shute, for instance, or the Crystal Palace - felt rather shoved in at the end. ( )

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 very entertaining read.