Henry Petroski (1942–2023)

Petroski takes the history of an everyday tool as a case-study in what engineers actually do in the real world. Some artisan in the sixteenth century noticed the useful properties of Borrowdale graphite and various other people, in multiple steps and by analogy with existing writing tools, found a convenient way to hold thin sticks of this natural material in protective wooden sleeves. Later advances in the design were driven by numerous factors including geopolitical restrictions on the show more supply of the raw materials (cedar and pure graphite), exhaustion of natural resources, shifts from cottage-industry to industrial manufacture, foreign competition, and much more. The people involved in the story of the pencil (Petroski treats them as engineers because of the way they were working, but of course few of them would have been qualified engineers in the modern sense of the term) were never on some ideal trajectory towards the perfect pencil, they were solving specific, local problems to enable them to produce something that was good enough to sell for more than what it cost to make. In the ideal case, marginally better or marginally cheaper than what the competitors were making.

It’s an interesting idea, and it brings out some useful insights into the way technology works, and quite a few interesting little anecdotes as well — I enjoyed learning about Henry David Thoreau’s day-job in his father’s pencil firm, for instance — but I didn’t enjoy this as much as I have some of Petroski‘s more recent books about engineering. He makes it all a little bit too slow and ponderous here, and he seems to be far too convinced that American-style free market capitalism is the way to solve all the world’s problems. show less

I've enjoyed other Petroski books I've read, but this one felt more like a collection of material recycled from newspaper columns than a coherent book project, despite the care Petroski takes to tie everything in with Robert Frost's famous poem about decision-making processes in highway engineering.

About a third of the book is the sort of thing Petroski does best, digging into the technological and design history of everyday items — why do we have kerbstones (or curbstones, if you show more prefer...)? Why are "stop" signs red? Who decided that traffic lights should have the red lamp at the top? Why do American roads have a white line on the nearside and a yellow line in the middle? That's engaging, good fun, and full of interesting anecdotes.

But, after that, Petroski goes on to dig more deeply into the puzzle of why the USA, despite being one of the richest and most technologically-advanced countries in the world, is notorious for its crumbling and inadequate transportation infrastructure. And here he flounders rather. He's an engineer, not a politician or an economist, and his professional courtesy holds him back from stepping too directly into other people's fields of expertise, so all he can do is present us with case studies (mostly from his own special area, bridge-building) and show us the results of poor political decision-making, without ever venturing an opinion on the underlying causes or how they could be corrected.

Reading between the lines we can see the processes generally identified (by Americans) as failures in the US political system operating: conflicts of interest and ideology between Federal and State or local authorities; the short-term thinking built into the election-cycle and the alternation of Democrat and Republican power; the voters' insistence on getting expensive public services whilst refusing to allow the government to pay for these through borrowing or taxation; the prioritisation of glamorous new projects over dull maintenance work; the difficulty of coming up with fair evaluations of economic benefit versus environmental cost; the delusion that public-private partnerships will magically generate free beer for voters, and so on.

Petroski doesn't come up with any suggestions about how these, rather fundamental, issues could be overcome. Nor does he address what outsiders might argue is the really interesting question: how is it that the USA in the 20th and 21st century has always been such a rich, successful and powerful country, despite the crumbling state of its roads, bridges, ports and everything else? Could it be that it is actually a good strategy in the modern world to spend public money exclusively on prisons and the military...? show less

The title is a play on “To err is human, to forgive divine”. In this book, Petroski discusses a range of engineering failures (e.g., bridge collapses, shuttle disasters, oil well explosions) and explores the physical causes and the larger context in which these designs were allowed to reach their failure point. Sometimes it was a case of not fully understanding phenomena such as metal fatigue (in the case of the Tay Bridge collapse) and other times it’s down to the organizational show more culture in which profit or timeliness is put before safety (in the case of Deepwater Horizon or Challenger). And sometimes it’s generational: when a revolutionary design is adopted, there is careful documentation and scrutiny, but once it becomes commonplace, the underlying assumptions are taken for granted and the next generation doesn’t always know the challenges that led to the design’s creation. Above all, even though the things engineers create are not human, the engineers themselves and everyone else working on the designs are human, so the designs are a physical embodiment of the assumptions and biases that everyone carries.

This is not a breezy pop-sci book by any means. Pictures are in short supply, and you really have to be interested in the subject matter to carry on. It took me a while to get into it, but I ended up quite liking it. There were some good analogies going on (I had never thought of the parallel between dentistry and engineering), and I found the summaries of the various disasters interesting.

And I learned that the Iron Ring ceremony for engineers is a Canadian thing only, although the United States has developed its own version. The comparison between the two versions, and the discussion of the Canadian version, was really interesting: the Canadian one has more humility, focusing on how you need to avoid repeating the mistakes of the past, and the American version is more gung-ho about all the amazing things engineers can do.

I would recommend this if you like reading about the history of science and technology, are interested in disasters or accident investigation, or if you’re an engineer. show less

Most of us take for granted that our books are vertical on our shelves with the spines facing out, but Henry Petroski, inveterately curious engineer, didn't. As a result, readers are guided along the astonishing evolution from papyrus scrolls boxed at Alexandria to upright books shelved at the Library of Congress. Unimpeachably researched, enviably written, and charmed with anecdotes from Seneca to Samuel Pepys to a nineteenth-century bibliophile who had to climb over his books to get into show more bed, The Book on the Bookshelf is indispensable for anyone who loves books. show less