Henry Petroski

You are currently browsing articles tagged Henry Petroski.

“When It Comes To Infrastructure, I Am Constantly Wishing I Were Elsewhere”

February 15, 2016 in Books, Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

subway-door

Following up on yesterday’s post about America’s foundering infrastructure, here’s a section from a New Republic piece by Tom Vanderbilt, who, in this segment, directs his ire at NYC’s woeful highways and information superhighway, overwhelmed by population density, poor planning and lack of resources. I could say that the city’s success has come with a heavy price, drawing more transplants and tourists than it could handle, except that I’ve live here my whole life and the infrastructure has always been an ordeal, in good times as well as bad.

Vanderbilt riffs off of the American Society of Civil Engineers’ harsh grades for our bridges and tunnels and Henry Petroski’s new book, The Road Taken. The excerpt:

As an interest group, we might expect a certain amount of grade inflation—or, in this case, deflation—from the ASCE; proclaiming the country’s infrastructure to be in decent working order is not likely, after all, to generate much work for engineers. But it does not take a vested interest to sense that America, whose roads and rails were once the envy of the developed world, has somehow gone astray.

To take New York City—where I live and where Petroski grew up—as an example, despite being constantly told I live in the center of the world, when it comes to infrastructure, I am constantly wishing I were elsewhere. When the subway comes screeching along, tinnitus on braking metal, I long for the silent rubber tires used by trains in Mexico City or Montreal. When I salmon against the crushing stream of pedestrian and bicycle traffic on the stingy walkway of the Brooklyn Bridge, I long for Brisbane’s capacious, car-free Kurilpa Bridge. Flying into any Gotham airport, the convenient, legible urban transport links one finds in Amsterdam or Geneva are absent. There are cities in Kansas, thanks to Google Fiber, that currently have better bandwidth than the nation’s media capital. Growing up in Brooklyn, many decades ago, Petroski notes that he and his childhood friends would occasionally go down the hill, from Park Slope, until they ran into the Gowanus Canal, “stagnant and odorous.” In 2016, the canal is still stagnant and odorous, an EPA Superfund site, even as glassy luxury condos rise on its fetid banks.

“America,” argues Petroski, gleaning a hoary image from Robert Frost, “is now at a fork in the road representing choices that must be made regarding the nation’s infrastructure.”•

Tags: ,

“When It Comes To Providing The Essentials Of A Modern Society, It Has To Be Said That We’re A Backward Country”

February 14, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

tacomabridge5

It certainly wouldn’t benefit the American Society of Civil Engineers to slap an “A” grade on every bridge in the U.S., but I don’t think many doubt the organization’s dismal grades for our infrastructure. In a NYRB piece, Elizabeth Drew reviews a raft of books on the topic, including Henry Petroski’s The Road Taken: The History and Future of America’s Infrastructure.

Drew shares small, interesting details (there are still wooden pipes working beneath the White House) and big-picture fears (only calamity may force us to catch up to much of the rest of the world). On the latter topic, she surmises that “it may require even more widespread paralyzed traffic, the collapse of numerous bridges, and perhaps a revolt in parts of the country that have inadequate broadband.” Well, let’s hope not. She also surveys the current Presidential candidates’ plans for remaking our roads and airports, uncovering a lot of fuzzy math.

An excerpt:

The water pipes underneath the White House are said to still be made of wood, as are some others in the nation’s capital and some cities across the country. We admire Japan’s and France’s “bullet trains” that get people to their destination with remarkable efficiency, but many other nations have them as well, including Russia, Turkey, and Uzbekistan. A friend of mine recently rode on the Turkish bullet train and noted that the coffee in his full cup didn’t spill. Last year, Japan demonstrated its new maglev train, which, using electromagnets, levitates above the tracks, and can go about an amazing 375 miles per hour, making it the fastest train in the world. The fastest commercially used maglev, in Shanghai, goes up to 288 miles per hour. But the United States hasn’t a single system that meets all the criteria of high-speed rail. President Obama has proposed a system of high-speed railroads, which has gone nowhere in Congress.

When it comes to providing the essentials of a modern society, it has to be said that we’re a backward country. California Governor Jerry Brown, a longtime visionary, has initiated the building of a high-speed rail system between Los Angeles and San Francisco; one high-speed rail system scheduled to come into service soon to carry people between the wealthy cities of Dallas and Houston will be privately financed. (Shopping and business made easier.) But not many communities have the means to build their own train.

Every four years, the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) conducts a study of where the United States stands in providing needed infrastructure in various sectors. Though the organization obviously has an interest in the creation of more construction jobs, its analyses, based as they are on information from other studies, are taken seriously by nonpartisan experts in the field. In the ASCE’s most recent report card, issued in 2013, the combined sectors received an overall grade of D+. In the various sectors, the grades were: aviation, D; bridges, C+; inland waterways, D–; ports, C; rail, C+; roads, D; mass transit, D; schools, D; hazardous waste, D; drinking water, D. No sector received an A. That none of the infrastructure categories received an F is hardly grounds for celebration.•

Tags: ,

“It Is Future Failure That Is At Issue”

June 24, 2013 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

I’ve posted before about Henry Petroski’s first book, To Engineer Is Human, which I love. It’s the one that made crystal for a non-engineer like myself that building bridges and buildings is not only a matter of science but also of best guesses. All these years after that 1985 volume–and with many books in between–Petroski has published a sequel of sorts, To Forgive Design, which examines, among other things, how the lessons of the past are no match for climate change of today and tomorrow. From “Collapse and Crash,” by Bill McKibben, in the New York Review of Books:

“But what if, in fact, the old war stories are becoming obsolete? The engineer, like the insurance agent, is hampered by the fact that his skill depends on the earth behaving in the future as it has in the past. As Petroski writes,

Since it is future failure that is at issue, the only sure way to test our hypotheses about its nature and magnitude is to look backward at failures that have occurred historically. Indeed, we predict that the probability of occurrence for a certain event, such as a hundred-year storm, is such and such a percentage, because all other things being equal, that has been the actual experience contained in the historical meteorological record.

That record, however, is now shattered. In the course of Petroski’s lifetime, and all of ours, we’ve left behind the Holocene, the ten-thousand-year period of benign climatic stability that marked the rise of human civilization. We’ve raised the global temperature about a degree so far, but a better way of thinking about it is: we’ve amped up the amount of energy trapped in our narrow envelope of atmosphere, and hence every process that feeds off that energy is now accelerating. For instance, this piece of simple physics: warm air holds more water vapor than cold. Already we’ve increased moisture in the atmosphere by about 4 percent on average, thus increasing the danger both of drought, because heat is evaporating more surface water, and of flood, because evaporated water must eventually come down as rain. And those loaded dice are doing great damage. The federal government spent more money last year repairing the damage from extreme weather than it did on education.”

Tags: ,

The Ferris Wheel vs. The Eiffel Tower

December 28, 2010 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

The first Ferris Wheel, at the Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893. It was 264 ft. high.

Guy de Maupassant is said to have lunched at the Eiffel Tower every day so that he could avoid looking at the edifice he so despised, and he wasn’t the only Parisian intellectual to hate on Gustave Eiffel’s “bridge to the sky.” French artists and thinkers railed against the tower even as it was in its planning stages as part of the Universal Exposition of 1889, claiming that it was a blight on the city.

But the Eiffel Tower was a huge hit during the fair, so much so that the planners of the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago felt that they needed to do something dramatic to compete with it. Daniel H. Burnham, Chief of Construction for the Columbian, searched futilely for an answer for a long time before George Ferris supplied him with one. An excerpt from Henry Petroski’s Remaking the World:

Burnham found himself at a banquet addressing architects and engineers, he praised the former but excoriated the latter for not having met the expectations of the people. Nothing had been proposed that displayed the originality or novelty to rival the Eiffel Tower. He wanted something new in engineering science, but felt the engineers were giving him only towers.

George Washington Gale Ferris, Jr.

Among the engineers at the banquet was the youngish George Washington Gale Ferris, Jr. He was born in Galesburg, Illinois, in 1859, and at the age of five moved with his family to western Nevada. There, while living on a ranch, he became fascinated with a large undershot water wheel, which raised buckets out of the Carson River to supply a trough for the horses. Ferris would later recall his fascination with the wheel’s action, but, according to some accounts, as a youngster he was not equally fascinated with formal education. … When Ferris would later be asked where the idea for his great wheel came from, he recalled that, a while after hearing Burnham’s challenge, he found himself at a Saturday afternoon dinner club made up mainly of world’s fair engineers.

According to Ferris, “I had been turning over every proposition I could think of. On four or five of these I had spent considerable time. What were they? Well, perhaps I’d better not say. Any way none of them were very satisfactory… It was at one of these dinners, down at a Chicago chop house, that I hit on the idea. I remember remarking that I would build a wheel, a monster. I got some paper and began sketching it out. I fixed the size, determined the construction, the number of cars we would run, the number of people it would hold, what we would charge, the plan of stopping six times in its first revolution and loading, and then making a complete turn–in short, before the dinner was over I had sketched out almost the entire detail, and my plan has never varied an item from that day. The wheel stands at the Plaissance at this moment as it stood before me then.”•

Tags: , , ,

“The Story Of The Crystal Palace Is A Fascinating One That Bears Repeating”

April 13, 2010 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

The Crystal Palace was built in under six months.

Engineer Henry Petroski, always a provocative thinker and writer, did some of his best work in the 1985 collection known as To Engineer Is Human: The Role of Failure in Successful Design. Petroski examined a wide array of design disasters and explained how engineering is more of an educated guess than an exact science. And to add context, he singled out some daring engineering feats that succeeded despite their high degree of difficulty.

One such example is the 750,000-square-foot cast iron, wood and glass Crystal Palace in Hyde Park that Joseph Paxton built quickly in the mid-nineteenth century. The edifice was used to house the Great Exhibition, the first World’s Fair. Paxton was a gardener who used innovations in the Crystal Palace that had worked in his greenhouse designs. There were plenty of naysayers who didn’t think it would work, but the building outlived them all. An excerpt:

“One of the most ambitious and innovative structures of the Victorian era was not a bridge or a tower but the vast building constructed to house the Great Exhibition of London in 1851. The story of the Crystal Palace is a fascinating one that bears repeating, for it shows that no matter how innovative an engineering structure might be and no matter how many opponents it may have, the proof is in the putting up and in the testing of it….

Although the true skyscraper did not come into its own until the twentieth century, the Crystal Palace prefigured it in many important ways. The way the light, modular construction ingeniously stiffened against the wind is the essence of modern tall buildings. And the innovative means by which the walls of the Crystal Palace hung like curtains from discrete fastenings, rather than functioning as integral load-bearing parts of the structure, is the principle behind the so-called curtain wall of many modern facades.”

Tags: ,