To engineer is human: The role of failure in successful design - Hardcover

Petroski, Henry

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1566195020 ISBN 13: 9781566195027

Publisher: Barnes & Noble Books, 1994

Synopsis

Used. Very Good conditions. May have soft reading marks and name of the previous owner.

About this title

Review:

The moral of this book is that behind every great engineering success is a trail of often ignored (but frequently spectacular) engineering failures. Petroski covers many of the best known examples of well-intentioned but ultimately failed design in action -- the galloping Tacoma Narrows Bridge (which you've probably seen tossing cars willy-nilly in the famous black-and-white footage), the collapse of the Kansas City Hyatt Regency Hotel walkways -- and many lesser known but equally informative examples. The line of reasoning Petroski develops in this book were later formalized into his quasi-Darwinian model of technological evolution in The Evolution of Useful Things, but this book is arguably the more illuminating -- and defintely the more enjoyable -- of these two titles. Highly recommended.

About the Author:

Henry Petroski is the Aleksandar S. Vesic Professor of Civil Engineering and a professor of history at Duke University. The author of more than a dozen previous books, he lives in Durham, North Carolina, and Arrowsic, Maine.

About this edition

• Publisher: Barnes & Noble Books
• Publication date: 1994
• ISBN 10: 1566195020
• ISBN 13: 9781566195027
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 247