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A Review of 3 Engineering Books

  • Artigo

I’ve recently read a few books on engineering and thought it might be worth sharing what I thought of some of them with our community. So here are my reviews of three books; hopefully you’ll find the reviews useful.

The Pencil by Henry Petroski is commonly found on suggested reading lists for engineers, but I feel it is not his best work. I enjoyed much more the other two books I’ve read by Petroski – The Evolution of Useful Things and Success through Failure, the Paradox of Design.

In The Pencil, Petroski attempts a detailed study of the history of the design and manufacturing of what was an essential tool for engineers. His purpose is to illustrate that even with a mundane object like a pencil there are genuine and significant engineering problems in its production. He succeeds in making his point. However, an underlying theme is revealed in this effort, but left to the other two books to be explored in greater detail.

In The Evolution of Useful Things, Petroski examines the history and development of several ordinary objects to convincingly make the point that the “evolution of form begins with the perception of failure”. By tracing the history of objects like the paper clip, Petroski is able to show how each successive design was an attempt to remedy failings of its own antecedents. This process has culminated in the modern paper clip which, while certainly not the perfect design, has not been supplanted for more than 100 years.

In the third book, Success through Failure, Petroski studies both successful and failed designs of large and small objects. By defining failure as an “unacceptable difference between expected and observed performance”, he proceeds to make the case that the most successful designs are ones which are “based on the best and most complete assumptions about failure.” Later, Petroski goes even further to say that:

There are two approaches to any engineering or design problem: success-based or failure-based. Paradoxically, the latter is far more likely to succeed.

Perhaps it’s because I’ve spent much of my career thinking about how things can fail, but Success through Failure is my favorite of the three books. I particularly liked the discussion of how an unanticipated, shall we say, use case scenario embarrassed a security device company.

Read and enjoy.

-Jim

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