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To engineer is human : the role of failure in successful design /

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How did a simple design error cause one of the great disasters of the 1980s--the collapse of the walkways at the Kansas City Hyatt Regency Hotel? What made the graceful and innovating Tacoma Narrows Bridge twist apart in a mild wind in 1940? How did an oversize waterlily inspire the magnificent Crys...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Petroski, Henry (Author)
Format: Book
Language:English
Language Notes:English.
Published: New York : Vintage Books, 1992.
Edition:1st Vintage books ed.
Subjects:
Engineering design.
System failures (Engineering)
Conception technique.
Pannes.
Engineering design
Architektur
Konstruktionsfehler
Technik
Architektur.
Konstruktionsfehler.
Technik.
Online Access:Table of contents
Table of Contents:
  • Being human
  • Falling down is part of growing up
  • Lessons from play; lessons from life [;] appendix : "The Deacon's masterpiece", by Oliver Wendell Holmes
  • Engineering as hypothesis
  • Success is foreseeing failure
  • Design is getting from here to there
  • Design as revision
  • Accidents waiting to happen
  • Safety in numbers
  • When cracks become breakthroughs
  • Of bus frames and knife blades
  • Interlude: the success story of the Crystal Palace
  • The ups and downs of bridges
  • Forensic engineering and engineering fiction
  • From slide rule to computer: forgetting how it used to be done
  • Connoisseurs of chaos
  • The limits of design
  • Afterword.