Monthly Archives: March 2010

http://blog.cleveland.com/architecture/2010/03/henry_petroski_of_duke_univers.html

Henry Petroski of Duke University to lecture Wednesday about engineering in Case Western Reserve University series
By Steven Litt, The Plain Dealer
March 23, 2010, 10:33AM

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Fair or not, architects always get more glory than engineers.

Most people would find it far easier to identify Frank Lloyd Wright, the designer of Fallingwater, than Joseph B. Strauss, who led the team that designed the Golden Gate Bridge.

It bugs Henry Petroski, a professor of civil engineering at Duke University.

Petroski, who will give a free public lecture at 5:30 p.m. Wednesday at Severance Hall (11001 Euclid Ave., Cleveland), has made it his mission to change the image of engineering. He’s written more than a dozen highly readable books aimed at giving the field higher cultural status.

His lecture, “Engineering and Civilization: Bridges, Infrastructure and Sources of Success and Failure,” is Case Western Reserve University’s Distinguished Lecture for 2010.

By virtue of his writing, Petroski has made himself an ambassador for a profession that has had a huge impact on everyday life, albeit without creating a star system, at least in the United States.

It’s different in other countries. In Scotland, for example, every schoolchild knows that the A5, a major highway, was designed by the great civil engineer Thomas Telford (1757-1834).

“It’s Telford’s road,” Petroski said Wednesday in a telephone interview. “People know all this stuff as part of their history. It gives them an identity and a pride. We don’t see that in the U.S. as much.”

Petroski has written about Telford and scores of other great engineers in books including “Remaking the World: Adventures in Engineering” (1997), “Engineers of Dreams: Great Bridge Builders and the Spanning of America” (1995) and “Pushing the Limits: New Adventures in Engineering” (2004).

He’s also written entertaining micro-histories such as “The Pencil: A History of Design and Circumstance” (1989) and “The Toothpick: Technology and Culture” (2007).

His most recent title, “The Essential Engineer,” argues that engineering is the bridge between hard science and the solution of practical problems.

“Science is about knowing,” he writes, “engineering is about doing.”

Petroski’s work has made him a crossover phenomenon in contemporary culture.

Like Paul Krugman, the Princeton economist who writes op-ed columns for The New York Times, Petroski has built a large following outside academia with clear prose that makes highly specialized information accessible to a large, popular audience.

In his research, he’s unearthed gems such as the definition of engineering proposed by the 19th-century American railroad engineer Arthur Mellen Wellington.

Engineering is, Wellington wrote, “the art of doing well with one dollar, which any bungler can do with two after a fashion.”

Petroski was in high school in Queens, N.Y., in 1957 when he was electrified by the news that the Soviet Union had launched the Sputnik satellite into outer space.

Because he was good at math and science, he found it natural to follow advice from teachers and guidance counselors that he should pursue a career in engineering.

But as an undergraduate at Manhattan College in New York, he also took classes in philosophy, literature and history — which left a deep mark and later propelled him toward writing.

As a master’s degree student in engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Petroski helped pay his tuition by working as a teaching assistant. He loved teaching and found his way to Duke University, where he’s been on the faculty for 30 years.

It was also at Duke that he honed his skills as a writer, first by writing poetry, then by submitting articles to newspapers and magazines. Eventually, he started writing books.

Colleagues greeted his efforts skeptically at first. Magazines and books were not peer-reviewed journals; articles and popular books did not count toward tenure.

Now, however, Petroski finds himself approached by other academics who want to follow his example. They don’t ask directly for Petroski’s secrets, but he knows what they’re after.

“Read and write with a sensitive ear,” he tells them. “The craft of writing is very important. Practice the craft.”

Petroski said that “scientists already know the technical stuff. The challenge is trying to put it into a framework whereby it’s accessible, not full of jargon; something people can not only follow, but in which they can see the excitement and challenge.”

He said he finds writing for popular audiences enormously rewarding, “but, no, you don’t get tenure for this stuff.”

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Petroski, Henry [MC1963]

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