To Engineer is Human by Henry Petroski: book review

Before the author wrote his better known work, The Pencil (1990), his first novel was To Engineer is Human: The role of failure in successful design (1985).

The failure analyst writes an interesting novel of learning with the premises that “success may be grand, but disappointment can often teach us more” and “falling down is part of growing up."

Petroski takes the reader from nursery rhymes (Jack and Jill, and Humpty Dumpty) to the design of pyramids, railroads, cathedrals, bridges, the Crystal Palace, and the crack in the Liberty Bell, with his prime focus on structural and mechanical engineering. He discusses failure by fatigue, failure by fracture, instability, buckling, corrosion and erosion as well as overload, understrength and deterioration.

Engineering, described by Petroski, is “a human endeavor that is both creative and analytical” in its phases from design and planning to implementation and construction. The lessons of failure generally pinpoint the weak links. But engineering anticipates failure and all plans are designed to avoid it. Therefore it is not structural success that improves a design, but structural failure.

Petroski presents examples, case studies, comical stories and serious lessons in an easy-to-read non-scientific style that would delight student, engineer, and layperson alike.

In To Engineer is Human, Petroski could be talking about sport, about career, or about writing, for there are certain lessons for life – the greatest being: from cracks, breakthroughs follow.

MARTINA NICOLLSis an international aid and development consultant, and the authorof:- Similar But Different in the Animal Kingdom(2017), The Shortness of Life: A Mongolian Lament (2015), Liberia’s Deadest Ends (2012), Bardot’s Comet (2011), Kashmir on a Knife-Edge (2010) and The Sudan Curse (2009).

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