Petroski Henry. To Engineer Is Human: The Role of Failure in Successful Design

NY: Vintage, 1992 — 269 p. — ISBN: 9780679734161.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.Preface.
Being human.
Falling down is part of growing up.
Lessons from play; lessons from life.
Appendix : «The deacon’s masterpiece», by Oliver Wendell Holmes.
Engineering as hypothesis.
Success is foreseeing failure.
Design is getting from here to there.
Design as revision.
Accidents waiting to happen.
Safety in numbers.
When cracks become breakthroughs of bus frames and knife blades.
Interlude: the success story of the crystal palace.
The ups and downs of bridges.
Forensic engineering and engineering fiction.
From slide rule to computer: forgetting how it used to be done.
Connoisseurs of chaos.
The limits of design.
Afterword.
Bibliography.
Index.