Henry Petroski

Henry Petroski

Henry Petroski (born February 6, 1942 in Brooklyn ) is an American civil engineer and technical historian.

Petroski graduated from Manhattan College with a bachelor's degree in 1963 and received his master's degree from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1964 , where he received his doctorate in mechanics in 1968. He was then Assistant Professor at the University of Texas at Austin until 1974 and at the Argonne National Laboratory from 1975 , where he investigated failure of materials and structures, before becoming Associate Professor in 1980 and Professor at Duke University in 1987 . There he is Aleksandar S. Vesic for civil engineering and also professor for history. From 1991 to 2000 he headed the Faculty of Civil Engineering.

Petroski dealt with fracture mechanics and the analysis of damage cases, the subject of his first book (To engineer is human). He is a columnist for American Scientist and prism. He wrote a number of books on industrial design and engineering, some of which were popular science, for example on the history of the pencil (1990), followed by other inventions such as Post it, staples, zippers in a follow-up book (The evolution of useful things, 1992). He also wanted to make the contributions of otherwise little-known engineers clear to the public. He wrote about bridge building (Engineers of Dreams) and large building projects (Remaking the world) as well as about everyday small inventions such as book covers and toothpicks.

In 2004 and 2008 he was selected for the US Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board.

In 2014 he received the John P. McGovern Award for Science. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering , the American Academy of Arts and Sciences , the American Academy of Mechanics, and the American Philosophical Society and a Fellow of the American Society of Civil Engineers . He is a multiple honorary doctor.

He hosted the BBC and PBS series To engineer is human .

He has been married to the writer Catherine Petroski (* 1939) since 1966 , with whom he has a son and a daughter. They live in Durham, North Carolina and have a house on the Maine coast in Arrowsic, the story of which Petroski wrote a book about (The house with sixteen handmade doors).

Fonts

• To Engineer Is Human: the role of failure in successful design, New York, St. Martin's Press 1985, Vintage 1992
• Beyond Engineering: Essays and Other Attempts to Figure without Equation, 1986
• The Pencil: A History of Design and Circumstance, Knopf 1990
  • German translation: The pencil. History of a commodity, Birkhäuser 1995
• The Evolution of Useful Things, Knopf 1992
  • German translation: Knife, fork, zipper: The evolution of everyday objects, Birkhäuser 1994
• Design paradigms: case histories of error and judgment in engineering, Cambridge UP 1994
• Remaking the World: Adventures in Engineering, Vintage Books 1999
• Engineers of Dreams: Great Bridge Builders and the Spanning of America, Vintage 1996
• The Book on the Bookshelf, Vintage 2000
• Small things considered: why there is no perfect design, Vintage 2007
• Invention by design: how engineers get from thought to thing, Harvard UP 1996
• Paperboy: Confessions of a Future Engineer, Knopf 2002
• Pushing the Limits: New Adventures in Engineering, Vintage 2005
• Success through Failure: The Paradox of Design, Princeton UP 2006
• The Toothpick: Technology and Culture, Knopf 2007
• The essential engineer: why science alone will not solve our global problems, Knopf 2010
• An engineer's alphabet: gleanings from the softer side of a profession, Cambridge UP 2010
• To Forgive Design: Understanding Failure, Harvard UP 2012
• The House with Sixteen Handmade Doors: A Tale of Architectural Choice and Craftsmanship, Norton 2014
• The Road Taken: The History and Future of America's Infrastructure, Bloomsbury 2017

Web links

• Entry in Contemporary Authors

Individual evidence

1. ↑ The Ferris Ferris Wheel, the Channel Tunnel, the Panama Canal and the Hoover Dam are described