Dr. Henry Petroski
Henry Petroski is the Aleksandar S. Vesic Professor of Civil Engineering and a professor of history at Duke University. He has written broadly on the topics of design, success and failure, and the history of engineering and technology. His 18 books on these subjects include To Engineer Is Human, Design Paradigms, and Engineers of Dreams, which deal principally with large structures like bridges. He has also written about small, common things in his books The Pencil, The Toothpick, The Evolution of Useful Things, and Small Things Considered. His memoir about delivering newspapers in the 1950s and about what predisposed him to become an engineer is entitled Paperboy. His most recently published books include An Engineer’s Alphabet: Gleanings from the Softer Side of a Profession, which is a collection of serious and not-so-serious observations, lists, reflections, and speculations relating to the engineering profession; To Forgive Design: Understanding Failure, which is about why ships sink, bridges collapse, and engineered systems of all kinds can misbehave; and The House with Sixteen Handmade Doors: A Tale of Architectural Choice and Craftsmanship, which deconstructs a sixty-year-old home. A forthcoming book, The Road Taken, treats the history and future of America’s infrastructure.
The largest, most numerous, and most visible components of our physical infrastructure—roads and bridges—are but parts of a single complex integrated system that evolved in the century or so following the development of the automobile. Like all technological systems, infrastructure has advanced in fits and starts, with physical failures and failed experiments providing valuable lessons for making corrections in future hardware and software. Still, America’s infrastructure today is often described as inadequate, crumbling, and mediocre at best. The most recent report card issued by the American Society of Civil Engineers, in 2013, gives our roads a grade of D, our bridges a C+, and our infrastructure overall a D+.
In this talk, the history, status, and future of selected aspects of our infrastructure—highways, traffic control devices, bridges, and the funding for such things—will be discussed in the context of technology, finance, and politics, all of which are interrelated. Current public policy issues and dilemmas faced by engineers, financiers, and politicians will be shown to be but variations on decades-old debates over how to design, maintain, and fund our essential infrastructure.
This talk is adapted from Petroski’s forthcoming book, The Road Taken: The History and Future of America’s Infrastructure.
