Design Paradigms: Case Histones of Error and Judgment in Engineering by Henry Petroski

Abstract

696 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE archives in Europe and America, and contemporary technical litera­ ture, as well as correspondence and interviews with many surviving participants in diesel development. This mass of information is really the raw material for a book rather than the finished product. It needs more editing and proof­ reading. But the index is quite helpful. And in this mass of data one can see general truths about the origin of technological species. It shows, for example, a surprisingly wide variety of solutions to the designer’s component problems, such as how to inject a liquid into a gas under high pressure, or how to make an engine reversible, as it has to be for a vehicle. There seems to be no way of telling in advance which is the best way. You have to try them all. Another visible truth is that it takes more than brilliant ideas to make a practical engine. It takes craft skill, experience, and good management. Lynwood Bryant Mr. Bryant is a retired professor of history at Massachusetts Institute of Technol­ ogy. His latest publication is The Transmission of Power, the third volume of Louis C. Hunter’s A History ofIndustrial Power in the United States, 1780—1930. Design Paradigms: Case Histones of Error and Judgment in Engineering. By Henry Petroski. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Pp. xii + 209; illustrations, bibliography, index. $42.95 (cloth); $17.95 (paper). Ten years ago, Henry Petroski, an engineering teacher at Duke University (now chairman of the Department of Civil and Environ­ mental Engineering), published his first book, To Engineer Is Human. The book was reviewed favorably and perceptively by Emory Kemp, also a teacher of engineering, in Technology and Culture (October 1986). Its subtitle is “The Role of Failure in Successful Design,” and its message is that if engineering designers—those who decide in great detail how new structures, machines, and other engineering devices will be shaped and built—will study engineering failures as well as successes, they can improve greatly the reliability of the things they design. When an engineer studies failure, she or he enters the domain of history, which many academic engineers assume has nothing at all to say to the “state-of-the-art” engineering that they are teaching. In his present book, Petroski describes state-of-the-art as “often only a superficial manifestation, arrived at principally through analytical and calculational tools, of what is understood about the substance and behavior of the products of engineering. Anyone who doubts this assertion need only look to the design errors and failures that occur in the climate of confidence, if not hubris, known as the state of the art” (p. ix). Rather than simply complain (as some of us have) about the dam­ TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 697 age already done and being perpetuated by government money for scientific-type research by engineering teachers, Design Paradigms pro­ vides nine historical chapters on engineering failures, from the haul­ ing of heavy monolithic components of ancient Greek temples to the possible future failure of one or more of the currently popular cable-stayed suspension bridges. The chapter on “The Design Climate for the Tacoma Narrows Bridge” explains how the success of the George Washington Bridge across the Hudson at New York (whose design represented a radical departure from the designs of several American suspension bridges in the tradition of Roebling’s 1883 Brooklyn Bridge) led to a series of long, narrow, and inadequately stiffened suspension bridges that culminated in 1940 in the ill-fated Tacoma Narrows Bridge. The story of that bridge, Petroski writes, “reveals the myopia that can occur in the wake of prolonged and remarkable success and that is endemic to the design process itself.” Teachers can supplement the book by exploring its bibliography of more than 200 titles, all in English, and by making use of the American Society for Engineering Education’s “Engineering Case Li­ brary” (described in MechanicalEngineering [March 1983], pp. 68—71); the Institution of Mechanical Engineers’ (London) Engineering Prog­ ress through Trouble, ed. R. R. Whyte (1975); and other engineers’ commentaries on design experience. Finally, Petroski suggests the possibilities of undergraduate courses in engineering...