6/18/2012 By Chad Garland
Written by By Chad Garland
In writing his latest book, Henry Petroski (TAM, M.S. ‘64, Ph.D. ‘68) took a walk down memory lane through the halls of Talbot Laboratory in the 1960s.
“My years as a graduate student in Theoretical and Applied Mechanics at the University of Illinois were formative ones for my later thinking about engineering,” Petroski said. “My recollections of Talbot Lab and of TAM faculty and students who were my contemporaries play an important role in my latest book.”
Available from Harvard University Press and Amazon.com on March 30, To Forgive Design: Understanding Failure, Petroski’s 17th book, surveys some of the most well-known engineering failures of our time. His recollections of days as a graduate student in TAM appear in a chapter titled “Mechanics of Failure.” Photos of the Talbot Lab crane bay and a portrait of Professor Don Carlson, along with other photographs Professor Emeritus Jim Phillips provided, will also be featured in the book.
Exploring the interrelationship between success and failure through such well-known catastrophes as the sinking of the Titanic, the 2007 Minneapolis bridge collapse, Boston’s beleaguered Big Dig, BP’s Deep Water Horizon oil spill, and more, Petroski argues that design failure alone is not the culprit in these tragedies. Taking a historic perspective, he articulates the larger context in which these failures occur and suggests that cultural and socioeconomic factors contribute to the complexity of engineering and technology endeavors.
According to Kirkus Reviews (Feb. 1, 2012), “Petroski's most gripping passages are his Sherlockian dissections of engineering fiascos and the importance of learning from the vast archive of forensic analyses.”
Petroski is the Aleksandar S. Vesic Professor of Civil Engineering and a professor of history at Duke University. He also writes columns for the American Society for Engineering Education’s Prism magazine and American Scientist magazine. His other books include To Engineer is Human (1992), The Pencil: A History of Design and Circumstance (1990), Engineers of Dreams: Great Bridge Builders and The Spanning of America (1995), and An Engineer's Alphabet: Gleanings from the Softer Side of a Profession (2011).
Henry Petroski received his M.S. and Ph.D. from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (1964, 1968) after receiving his bachelor's degree from Manhattan College (1963). Before joining Duke University in 1980, he taught at the University of Illinois and the University of Texas at Austin and was a group leader at Argonne National Laboratory. He is also a member of the U.S. Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board.
Petroski’s honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship (1990-1991), numerous honorary degrees, the Ralph Coats Roe Medal from the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (1991), the Civil Engineering History and Heritage Award from the American Society of Civil Engineers (1993), and the Washington Award from the Western Society of Engineers (2006). He is also the recipient of an Alumni Award for Distinguished Service from the College of Engineering of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (1994).