The same aspirations to celebrate and uplift the spirit that drove the Egyptians to build the pyramids are still driving us. The things we’re doing differ only in magnitude. – Henry Petroski
Many of the familiar little things that we use every day have typically evolved over a period of time to a state of familiarity. They balance form and function, elegance and economy, success and failure in ways that are not only acceptable, but also admirable. – Henry Petroski
I was always told that I was good in mathematics, and I guess my grades and standardized test scores supported that. My worst subjects were those that generally involved a lot of reading – English and history. So, having good test scores in math and mediocre ones in reading, I was naturally advised to major in engineering in college. – Henry Petroski
Because they are so humbled by their creations, engineers are naturally conservative in their expectations of technology. They know that the perfect system is the stuff of science fiction, not of engineering fact, and so everything must be treated with respect. – Henry Petroski
There’s so much written about the Titanic, and it’s hard to separate what’s fact and what’s fiction. My understanding is that the way the Titanic was designed, the emphasis was placed on surviving a head-on collision. – Henry Petroski
It seems to be a law of design that for every advantage introduced through redesign, there is an accompanying unintended disadvantage. – Henry Petroski
You can almost say that a design error is a human error because, after all, it’s we humans who do the designing. – Henry Petroski
Failure is central to engineering. Every single calculation that an engineer makes is a failure calculation. Successful engineering is all about understanding how things break or fail. – Henry Petroski
It has been said, by engineers themselves, that given enough money, they can accomplish virtually anything: send men to the moon, dig a tunnel under the English Channel. There’s no reason they couldn’t likewise devise ways to protect infrastructure from the worst hurricanes, earthquakes and other calamities, natural and manmade. – Henry Petroski
All conventional wisdom has an element of truth to it, but good design requires more than an element of truth – it requires an ensemble of correct assumptions and valid calculations. – Henry Petroski
Too much redesign has to do more with fad and fashion than with fitness and function. It is change for the sake of change. Such redesign is not only unnecessary, it is all too often also retrogressive, leading to things that work less effectively than those they were designed to replace. – Henry Petroski
The paradox is that when we model future designs on past successes, we are inviting failure down the line; when we take into account past failures and anticipate potential new ways in which failure can occur, we are more likely to produce successful designs. – Henry Petroski
Betting on the success of innovative technologies in the marketplace can carry all the uncertainty and risk that betting on the next card in the deck does at a blackjack table in Las Vegas. There is a factor of randomness that must be factored in, but precisely how to do so is anyone’s guess. – Henry Petroski
We call the fates of the Titanic and the Concordia – as well as those of the space shuttles Challenger and Columbia – ‘accidents.’ Foreseeing such undesirable events is what engineers are expected to do. However, design trade-offs leave technological systems open to failings once predicted, but later forgotten. – Henry Petroski
Everything we do is designed, whether we’re producing a magazine, a website, or a bridge. Design is really the creative invention that designs everything. – Henry Petroski
We can’t simply blame the engineers when things go wrong because, no matter how well they plan, things don’t always go according to plan. – Henry Petroski
Relying on nothing but scientific knowledge to produce an engineering solution is to invite frustration at best and failure at worst. – Henry Petroski
Case studies of failure should be made a part of the vocabulary of every engineer so that he or she can recall or recite them when something in a new design or design process is suggestive of what went wrong in the case study. – Henry Petroski
Any design, whether it’s for a ship or an airplane, must be done in anticipation of potential failures. – Henry Petroski
Successful design is not the achievement of perfection but the minimization and accommodation of imperfection. – Henry Petroski
Many new technologies come with a promise to change the world, but the world refuses to cooperate. – Henry Petroski
As engineers, we were going to be in a position to change the world – not just study it. – Henry Petroski