To Engineer Is Human

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  To Catherine

  PREFACE

  Though ours is an age of high technology, the essence of what engineering is and what engineers do is not common knowledge. Even the most elementary of principles upon which great bridges, jumbo jets, or super computers are built are alien concepts to many. This is so in part because engineering as a human endeavor is not yet integrated into our culture and intellectual tradition. And while educators are currently wrestling with the problem of introducing technology into conventional academic curricula, thus better preparing today’s students for life in a world increasingly technological, there is as yet no consensus as to how technological literacy can best be achieved.

  I believe, and I argue in this essay, that the ideas of engineering are in fact in our bones and part of our human nature and experience. Furthermore, I believe that an understanding and an appreciation of engineers and engineering can be gotten without an engineering or technical education. Thus I hope that the technologically uninitiated will come to read what I have written as an introduction to technology. Indeed, this book is my answer to the questions “What is engineering?” and “What do engineers do?”

  The idea of design—of making something that has not existed before—is central to engineering, and I take design and engineering to be virtually synonymous for the purposes of my development. Examples from structural designs commonly associated with mechanical and civil engineers are most prominent in this book because it is from those fields that I draw my own experiences, but the underlying principles are no less applicable to other branches of engineering.

  I believe that the concept of failure—mechanical and structural failure in the context of this discussion—is central to understanding engineering, for engineering design has as its first and foremost objective the obviation of failure. Thus the colossal disasters that do occur are ultimately failures of design, but the lessons learned from those disasters can do more to advance engineering knowledge than all the successful machines and structures in the world. Indeed, failures appear to be inevitable in the wake of prolonged success, which encourages lower margins of safety. Failures in turn lead to greater safety margins and, hence, new periods of success. To understand what engineering is and what engineers do is to understand how failures can happen and how they can contribute more than successes to advance technology.

  Any failures this book itself may have are surely of my own making, but I must recognize those works and people that gave me food for thought. The ambience of Duke University has been nurturing, and I have thoroughly enjoyed the opportunity it has given me to engage in both engineering research and in interdisciplinary programs with my colleagues in the School of Engineering, in Trinity College of Arts and Sciences, and in the Program in Science, Technology, and Human Values, in which both faculties come together. This broad spectrum of interactions has helped to widen my perspective.

  The bibliography in this book is my implicit acknowledgment of the many places I have found support for my thesis about the role of failure in engineering design. Many of the more obscure documents I used were tracked down for me by Eric Smith, Duke’s indefatigable engineering librarian. I have also benefitted from the term papers on case studies of structural failures that students prepared for the course in fracture mechanics and fatigue that I teach in the School of Engineering at Duke. My brother, William Petroski, a civil engineer, has been a continual source of information and opinion on structural failures, and on my visits with him, he has shown me many practical examples.

  Certain physical arrangements enabled me to work on my manuscript without distractions and with modern tools. Albert Nelius has continued to understand my need for a carrel in Perkins Library, and for it I am grateful. My wife, Catherine Petroski, first encouraged me to use her word processor and has continued to make it available to me. I am fortunate that she is a day- and I a night-writer, and that this machine works wonderfully for both her fiction and my nonfiction and does not tire of either of our visions and revisions.

  Several editors have encouraged me to write more and more ambitious pieces over the years, and I shall be forever grateful for their interest in my work. All the editors I have worked with at Technology Review have been a constant source of energy for me, and I am especially indebted to John Mattill, Tom Burroughs, and Steve Marcus, now at High Technology, for welcoming my contributions. Indeed, it was principally from the articles that Steve Marcus encouraged me to write for Technology Review that the present book has grown. And I am grateful to Tom Dunne of St. Martin’s Press for giving me the opportunity to expand my ideas into a book.

  My children, Karen and Stephen, with their questions and play, have enabled me to see the engineer in all of us, as their presence in this book will testify. And Catherine, who has from the very first demonstrated to me that no engineering concept is inaccessible to the English major, has shown me by example what it means to be a writer.

  —Henry Petroski

  Durham, North Carolina

  September 1984

  1

  BEING HUMAN

  Shortly after the Kansas City Hyatt Regency Hotel skywalks collapsed in 1981, one of my neighbors asked me how such a thing could happen. He wondered, did engineers not even know enough to build so simple a structure as an elevated walkway? He also recited to me the Tacoma Narrows Bridge collapse, the American Airlines DC–10 crash in Chicago, and other famous failures, throwing in a few things he had heard about hypothetical nuclear power plant accidents that were sure to exceed Three Mile Island in radiation release, as if to present an open-and-shut case that engineers did not quite have the world of their making under control.

  I told my neighbor that predicting the strength and behavior of engineering structures is not always so simple and well-defined an undertaking as it might at first seem, but I do not think that I changed his mind about anything with my abstract generalizations and vague apologies. As I left him tending his vegetable garden and continued my walk toward home, I admitted to myself that I had not answered his question because I had not conveyed to him what engineering is. Without doing that I could not hope to explain what could go wrong with the products of engineering. In the years since the Hyatt Regency disaster I have thought a great deal about how I might explain the next technological embarrassment to an inquiring layman, and I have looked for examples not in the esoteric but in the commonplace. But I have also learned that collections of examples, no matter how vivid, no more make an explanation than do piles of beams and girders make a bridge.

  Engineering has as its principal object not the given world but the world that engineers themselves create. And that world does not have the constancy of a honeycomb’s design, changeless through countless generations of honeybees, for human structures involve constant and rapid evolution. It is not simply that we like change for the sake of change, though some may say that is reason enough. It is that human tastes, resources, and ambitions do not
stay constant. We humans like our structures to be as fashionable as our art; we like extravagance when we are well off, and we grudgingly economize when times are not so good. And we like bigger, taller, longer things in ways that honeybees do not or cannot. All of these extra-engineering considerations make the task of the engineer perhaps more exciting and certainly less routine than that of an insect. But this constant change also introduces many more aspects to the design and analysis of engineering structures than there are in the structures of unimproved nature, and constant change means that there are many more ways in which something can go wrong.

  Engineering is a human endeavor and thus it is subject to error. Some engineering errors are merely annoying, as when a new concrete building develops cracks that blemish it as it settles; some errors seem humanly unforgivable, as when a bridge collapses and causes the death of those who had taken its soundness for granted. Each age has had its share of technological annoyances and structural disasters, and one would think engineers might have learned by now from their mistakes how to avoid them. But recent years have seen some of the most costly structural accidents in terms of human life, misery, and anxiety, so that the record presents a confusing image of technological advancement that may cause some to ask, “Where is our progress?”

  Any popular list of technological horror stories usually comprises the latest examples of accidents, failures, and flawed products. This catalog changes constantly as new disasters displace the old, but almost any list is representative of how varied the list itself can be. In 1979, when accidents seemed to be occurring left and right, anyone could rattle off a number of technological embarrassments that were fresh in everyone’s mind, and there was no need to refer to old examples like the Tacoma Narrows Bridge to make the point. It seemed technology was running amok, and editorial pages across the country were anticipating the damage that might occur as the orbiting eighty-five-ton Skylab made its unplanned reentry. Many of the same newspapers also carried the cartoonist Tony Auth’s solution to the problem. His cartoon shows the falling Skylab striking a flying DC–10, itself loaded with Ford Pintos fitted with Firestone 500 tires, with the entire wreckage falling on Three Mile Island, where the fire would be extinguished with asbestos hair dryers.

  While such a variety may be unique to our times, the failure of the products of engineering is not. Almost four thousand years ago a number of Babylonian legal decisions were collected in what has come to be known as the Code of Hammurabi, after the sixth ruler of the First Dynasty of Babylon. There among nearly three hundred ancient cuneiform inscriptions governing matters like the status of women and drinking-house regulations are several that relate directly to the construction of dwellings and the responsibility for their safety:

  If a builder build a house for a man and do not make its construction firm, and the house which he has built collapse and cause the death of the owner of the house, that builder shall be put to death.

  If it cause the death of the son of the owner of the house, they shall put to death a son of that builder.

  If it cause the death of a slave of the owner of the house, he shall give to the owner of the house a slave of equal value.

  If it destroy property, he shall restore whatever it destroyed, and because he did not make the house which he built firm and it collapsed, he shall rebuild the house which collapsed from his own property.

  If a builder build a house for a man and do not make its construction meet the requirements and a wall fall in, that builder shall strengthen the wall at his own expense.

  This is a far cry from what happened in the wake of the collapse of the Hyatt Regency walkways, subsequently found to be far weaker than the Kansas City Building Code required. Amid a tangle of expert opinions, $3 billion in lawsuits were filed in the months after the collapse of the skywalks. Persons in the hotel the night of the accident were later offered $1,000 to sign on the dotted line, waiving all subsequent claims against the builder, the hotel, or anyone else they might have sued. And today opinions as to guilt or innocence in the Hyatt accident remain far from unanimous. After twenty months of investigation, the U. S. attorney and the Jackson County, Missouri, prosecutor jointly announced that they had found no evidence that a crime had been committed in connection with the accident. The attorney general of Missouri saw it differently, however, and he charged the engineers with “gross negligence.” The engineers involved stand to lose their professional licenses but not their lives, but the verdict is still not in as I write three years after the accident.

  The Kansas City tragedy was front-page news because it represented the largest loss of life from a building collapse in the history of the United States. The fact that it was news attests to the fact that countless buildings and structures, many with designs no less unique or daring than that of the hotel, are unremarkably safe. Estimates of the probability that a particular reinforced concrete or steel building in a technologically advanced country like the United States or England will fail in a given year range from one in a million to one in a hundred trillion, and the probability of death from a structural failure is approximately one in ten million per year. This is equivalent to a total of about twenty-five deaths per year in the United States, so that 114 persons killed in one accident in Kansas City was indeed news.

  Automobile accidents claim on the order of fifty thousand American lives per year, but so many of these fatalities occur one or two at a time that they fail to create a sensational impact on the public. It seems to be only over holiday weekends, when the cumulative number of individual auto deaths reaches into the hundreds, that we acknowledge the severity of this chronic risk in our society. Otherwise, if an auto accident makes the front page or the evening news it is generally because an unusually large number of people or a person of note is involved. While there may be an exception if the dog is famous, the old saying that “dog bites man” is not news but that “man bites dog” is, applies.

  We are both fascinated by and uncomfortable with the unfamiliar. When it was a relatively new technology, many people eschewed air travel for fear of a crash. Even now, when aviation relies on a well-established technology, many adults who do not think twice about the risks of driving an automobile are apprehensive about flying. They tell each other old jokes about white-knuckle air travelers, but younger generations who have come to use the airplane as naturally as their parents used the railroad and the automobile do not get the joke. Theirs is the rational attitude, for air travel is safe, the 1979 DC–10 crash in Chicago notwithstanding. Two years after that accident, the Federal Aviation Administration was able to announce that in the period covering 1980 and 1981, domestic airlines operated without a single fatal accident involving a large passenger jet. During the period of record, over half a billion passengers flew on ten million flights. Experience has proven that the risks of technology are very controllable.

  However, as wars make clear, government administrations value their fiscal and political health as well as the lives of their citizens, and sometimes these objectives can be in conflict. The risks that engineered structures pose to human life and environments pose to society often conflict with the risks to the economy that striving for absolute and perfect safety would bring. We all know and daily make the trade-offs between our own lives and our pocketbooks, such as when we drive economy-sized automobiles that are incontrovertibly less safe than heavier-built ones. The introduction of seat belts, impact-absorbing bumpers, and emission-control devices have contributed to reducing risks, but gains like these have been achieved at a price to the consumer. Further improvements will take more time to perfect and will add still more to the price of a car, as the development of the air bag system has demonstrated. Thus there is a constant tension between manufacturers and consumer advocates to produce safe cars at reasonable prices.

  So it is with engineering and public safety. All bridges and buildings could be built ten times as strong as they presently are, but at a tremendous increase in cost, whether financed
by taxes or private investment. And, it would be argued, why ten times stronger? Since so few bridges and buildings collapse now, surely ten times stronger would be structural overkill. Such ultraconservatism would strain our economy and make our built environment so bulky and massive that architecture and style as we know them would have to undergo radical change. No, it would be argued, ten times is too much stronger. How about five? But five might also arguably be considered too strong, and a haggling over numbers representing no change from the present specifications and those representing five- or a thousand-percent improvement in strength might go on for as long as Zeno imagined it would take him to get from here to there. But less-developed countries may not have the luxury to argue about risk or debate paradoxes, and thus their buildings and boilers can be expected to collapse and explode with what appears to us to be uncommon frequency.

  Callous though it may seem, the effects of structural reliability can be measured not only in terms of cost in human lives but also in material terms. This was done in a recent study conducted by the National Bureau of Standards with the assistance of Battelle Columbus Laboratories. The study found that fracture, which included such diverse phenomena as the breaking of eyeglasses, the cracking of highway pavement, the collapse of bridges, and the breakdown of machinery, costs well over $100 billion annually, not only for actual but also for anticipated replacement of broken parts and for structural insurance against parts breaking in the first place. Primarily associated with the transportation and construction industries, many of these expenses arise through the prevention of fracture by overdesign (making things heavier than otherwise necessary) and maintenance (watching for cracks to develop), and through the capital equipment investment costs involved in keeping spare parts on hand in anticipation of failures. The 1983 report further concludes that the costs associated with fracture could be reduced by one half by our better utilizing available technology and by improved techniques of fracture control expected from future research and development.