Henry Petroski; wrote about engineering
Henry Petroski, who demystified engineering with literary examinations of the designs and failures of large structures like buildings and bridges, as well as everyday items like the pencil and the toothpick, died on June 14 in hospice care in Durham, N.C. He was 81.
His wife, Catherine Petroski, said the cause was cancer.
Mr. Petroski, a longtime professor of civil and environmental engineering at Duke University, adapted the architectural axiom “form follows function” into one of his own — “form follows failure” — and addressed the subject extensively in books, lectures, scholarly journals, The New York Times, and magazines such as Forbes and American Scientist.
“Failure is central to engineering,” he said when the Times profiled him in 2006. “Every single calculation that an engineer makes is a failure calculation. Successful engineering is all about understanding how things break or fail.”
In “To Engineer Is Human: The Role of Failure in Successful Design” (1985), Mr. Petroski examined what happens when design goes terribly wrong — for example, the collapse in 1981 of the two skywalks in the Kansas City Hyatt Regency Hotel, which killed 114 people, and the collapse in 1940 of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge in Washington state just a few months after it opened.
Shortly after the Hyatt Regency calamity, Mr. Petroski wrote, one of his neighbors “asked me how such a thing could happen.”
“He wondered,” he continued, “did engineers not even know how to build so simple a structure as an elevated skywalk?” But, he added, he did not think his explanations about the hotel collapse and other failures satisfied his neighbor.
He wrote the book, he said, to define what an engineer is.
“Even though I had three degrees in engineering, and had been teaching engineering and was registered as a professional engineer,” he told the Times in 2014, “if some neighbor asked me, ‘What is engineering?,’ I said, ‘Duh.’ I couldn’t put together a coherent definition of it.” His best effort, he said, was, that “engineering is achieving function while avoiding failure.”
Pencils proved a prosaic object for his failure analysis.
Spurred on partly by the inferior quality of the pencils he was given at Duke, he used engineering equations in a 1987 paper in the Journal of Applied Mechanics to describe why pencil points break.
“By asking why and how a pencil point breaks in the way it does,” he concluded, “we are not only led to a better understanding of the tools of stress analysis and their limitations, but we are also led to a fuller appreciation of the wonders of technology when we analyze the aptness of such a manufactured product as the common pencil.”
Two years later, he expanded on the journal article with “The Pencil: A History of Design and Circumstance,” a 448-page tour through its invention and evolution that included a chapter about the pencil-making business of Henry David Thoreau’s family in Concord, Mass.
Thoreau, best known for writing about his experience in the woods in “Walden,” was a self-taught pencil engineer.
Nearly 20 years after “The Pencil” was published, Mr. Petroski turned to an even humbler quotidian object with “The Toothpick: Technology and Culture” (2007), which explained its evolution from a form used by early hominids to the creation of the modern toothpick industry in the 19th century.
Mr. Petroski was born on Feb. 6, 1942, in Brooklyn and grew up there and in Queens.
In addition to his wife, Catherine, he leaves their daughter, Karen Petroski; their son, Stephen; a brother, a sister, and two grandsons.