Petrosky

To Engineer is Human Reaction Essay

Facts:

Through out history, man has been faced with constant failures, some more spectacular than others. Henry Petroski, author of To Engineer is Human: The Role of Failure in Successful Design, discusses some of the more recent major engineering failures of his time. Some of Petroski main examples include the Hyatt Regency's Sky Walk disaster of 1981, which killed 114 people and injured over 200 others, and the Tacoma Narrows Bridge, which fortunately didn't kill or injure anyone, but twisted itself apart in a wind storm after several months of use.

Issue:

As the knowledge of engineering becomes more advanced and more common place in the world today, do we learn more from our great strides in successful projects or do we learn more from our grand failures in engineering?

Arguments:

Petroski opens his novel with the statement:

"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".

This set the theme and argument of Petroski's whole novel, which was that the engineering industry learns more and faster through failure than success. Petroski uses the Hyatt Regency's Sky Walk collapse as a prime example of how engineering advanced through tragedy. After the disaster, the first thing that engineers did was analyze how and why the skywalk had fallen. Through careful analysis of the wreckage and the blueprints the investigating engineers were able to pinpoint exactly where the flaw in the design was. With this information future engineers gained the knowledge and the experience to never repeat the same mistake as those before them had.

Even with the convincing evidence Petroski delivers, others still argue that advancement is not derived through failure. Gary Mellor the Chief Executive of Radii says:

"We learn by success, not by failure."

Others believe that advancement is driven from looking and learning from past successful forms of engineering rather than looking at faults. By looking at functioning ventures engineers are able to create other working products without a large fear of disappointment because they are almost guaranteed that it will perform.

Analysis:

Do engineers learn lessons through past failures? It would be ignorant to say that the field of engineering doesn't learn through their faults. If engineers didn't learn from past deficiencies we would still be driving Ford Pintos with old Firestone tires. Petroski argues throughout his novel that engineers learn mostly from failures because when a malfunction occurs the engineering community is forced to view and understand why it happened. Because of this the