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SUCCESS THROUGH FAILURE
 other books by henry petroski

Pushing the Limits: New Adventures in Engineering

Small Things Considered: Why There Is No Perfect Design
Paperboy: Confessions of a Future Engineer
The Book on the Bookshelf
Remaking the World: Adventures in Engineering
Invention by Design: How Engineers Get from Thought to Thing
Engineers of Dreams: Great Bridge Builders
and the Spanning of America
Design Paradigms: Case Histories of Error and Judgment
in Engineering
The Evolution of Useful Things
The Pencil: A History of Design and Circumstance
Beyond Engineering: Essays and Other Attempts to Figure
without Equations
To Engineer Is Human: The Role of Failure in Successful Design
SUCCESS THROUGH FAILURE
The Paradox of Design

Henry Petroski

princeton university press s Princeton and Oxford

 Copyright © 2006 by Henry Petroski
Requests for permission to reproduce material from this work should be sent
to Permissions, Princeton University Press
Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street,
Princeton, New Jersey 08540
In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, 3 Market Place,
Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1SY
All Rights Reserved
British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Petroski, Henry.
Success through failure : the paradox of design / Henry Petroski.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN-13: 978-0-691-12225-0 ((hardcover) : alk. paper)
ISBN-10: 0-691-12225-3 ((hardcover) : alk. paper)
1. Engineering design—Case studies. 2. System failures
(Engineering)—Case studies. I. Title.
TA174.P4739 2006
620'.0042—dc22 2005034126
Small portions of this material appeared first in American Scientist,
Harvard Business Review, and the Washington Post Book World
This book has been composed in Adobe Caslon and Helvetica Neue
Printed on acid-free paper. ∞
pup.princeton.edu
Printed in the United States of America
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
To Karen
 CONTENTS

Preface ix

Introduction 1

1. From Plato’s Cave to PowerPoint 10

2. Success and Failure in Design 44

3. Intangible Things 81

4. Things Small and Large 97

5. Building on Success 116

6. Stepping-stones to Super-spans 139

7. The Historical Future 163

Notes 195

Index 219
 PREFACE

This book was written in conjunction with my preparation

of a sequence of three public lectures on the topic of engi-
neering and design to be delivered at Princeton University.
The text incorporates the subject of those Louis Clark Van-
uxem Lectures, given in Princeton on December 7, 8, and 9,
2004, but is in no way a manuscript of the talks, whose titles
were:

1. From Plato’s Cave to PowerPoint: An Illustrated

Lecture on the Illustrated Lecture
2. Good, Better, Better: The Evolution of Imperfect
Things
3. The Historical Future: The Persistence of Failure

The written format has allowed me to expand the range of

things and systems covered and to include more examples and
detail than did the spoken word. Unfortunately, space in a
book does not allow nearly as many illustrations as were used
in my PowerPoint presentations at Princeton.
Engineers approach the lecture format in quite a different
manner from that of humanists. In my experience, the latter
typically read verbatim from a prepared text and use few, if any,
graphics or illustrations. In contrast, engineers tend to use
a good number of slides and related visual aids—in the form of
x Preface

drawings, diagrams, charts, graphs, equations, and demonstra-

tions—to illustrate their talks, which are typically delivered
extemporaneously. That is not to say that they are unprepared,
for the engineer will more likely than not have gone over and
over the visual materials and the essence of the commentary
that will accompany them. The number and order of slides will
be edited and reedited in the weeks leading up to the talk, for
which the illustrations serve also much the same purpose as do
prompting notes on index cards. Over the years, mechanical,
visual, and digital devices ranging from magic lanterns to com-
puter software like PowerPoint have greatly facilitated the pro-
cess of preparing and projecting slides. Still, there remains
room for improvement, as is described in the first chapter of
this book.
Writing also benefits greatly from the use of computers, of
course, but no author should ever blame malfunctioning elec-
trons for the misfire of neurons in his own brain. If I have
made any errors in this book, they are my responsibility alone
and not that of the individuals who have helped me in so
many ways. As always, I am deeply indebted to libraries and
librarians, most importantly those at Duke University, and in
particular Eric Smith and Linda Martinez. I am especially
grateful to them for their assistance in helping me identify
and secure obscure sources from incomplete references, and
for introducing me to increasingly powerful electronic data-
bases. And I am once again greatly in debt to the largely
anonymous but immensely generous institution of Interlibrary
Loan.
I am also grateful to Jack Judson, director of the Magic
Lantern Castle Museum in San Antonio, Texas, who guided
 Preface xi

me through his outstanding collection of lanterns and related

materials; to Tom Hope, who provided me hard historical data
on the development of the slide projector; to Robin Young,
who invited me and my wife to visit Stonecrop Gardens and
who ensured that we had a good view of its flint bridge; and to
Pete Lewis, who provided insight into and documentation for
cast-iron bridges. Charles Siple, an inveterate correspondent
and draftsman, was kind enough to draw the diagrams of split-
ting wedges and an arch from my amateur sketches. As usual,
my family was also extremely helpful. Stephen Petroski helped
me find documentation for my statements about design in
sports, and Karen Petroski improved my knowledge of the In-
ternet. Once again, Catherine Petroski was my first reader, and
she also served as photographer and provider of digital images
and graphics.
I was asked to write this book by Sam Elworthy of Prince-
ton University Press. I am grateful to him for his persistence in
convincing me to present the series of lectures and to prepare a
book on the topic of design. The Princeton University Com-
mittee on Public Lectures and its chair, Sergio Verdú, extended
to me the invitation to speak in the Vanuxem lecture series,
which dates from 1912. It is an honor for me to join the distin-
guished list of Vanuxem lecturers.
Finally, I appreciate the planning, warm reception, and hos-
pitality that members of the Princeton community extended to
Catherine and me over the three days of the lectures. Susan
Jennings and an excellent audiovisual crew made sure that the
mechanical and electronic details were in order in the lecture
room in McCosh Hall. David Billington, who was enormously
generous with his time, turned me loose in his Maillart
xii Preface

Archive and allowed me to sit in on some of his own lectures

and to meet with his students. David and Phyllis Billington
were most gracious hosts, who helped Catherine and me
experience Princeton in times of leisure and in time of
emergency.
SUCCESS THROUGH FAILURE
 INTRODUCTION

Desire, not necessity, is the mother of invention. New things

and the ideas for things come from our dissatisfaction with
what there is and from the want of a satisfactory thing for do-
ing what we want done. More precisely, the development of
new artifacts and new technologies follows from the failure of
existing ones to perform as promised or as well as can be hoped
for or imagined. Frustration and disappointment associated
with the use of a tool or the performance of a system puts a
challenge on the table: Improve the thing. Sometimes, as when
a part breaks in two, the focal point for the improvement is ob-
vious. Other times, such as when a complex system runs disap-
pointingly slowly, the way to speed it up may be far from clear.
In all cases, however, the beginnings of a solution lay in isolat-
ing the cause of the failure and in focusing on how to avoid,
obviate, remove, or circumvent it. Inventors, engineers, design-
ers, and common users take up such problems all the time.
The earliest useful things were, of course, those found in na-
ture. Not surprisingly, these same things became the earliest
tools. Thus, rocks came to be used as hammers. Whether a
particular rock makes a good hammer depends on its size and
shape and on its hardness and toughness relative to the object
being hammered. Rock types that failed to accomplish desired
ends became known as poor hammers and so came to be
2 success through failure

passed over. Better hammers resulted from eliminating the fail-

ures. However, even the best of rocks have limitations as ham-
mers, and the recognition of their failure in this regard defined
the design problem: Devise a better hammer. Among the prob-
lems with a hammer-rock can be that it is awkward or uncom-
fortable to wield. An improvement might be sought in the
shape of the rock or in providing a handle for it—or from re-
placing the rock with something better. In time, a growing va-
riety of metal hammer heads and wooden hammer handles,
appropriate to a variety of tasks and grips, would reflect in-
creasing specialization and diversification. Among such diver-
sity, one might expect that there was a single best hammer for a
particular task. All the others would fail to work as well at that
task. Should all existing hammers fail to work properly for a
newly developed task, then a still newer hammer might have to
be developed. By the latter part of the nineteenth century,
some five hundred different types of hammers were being pro-
duced in Birmingham, England, alone.
Technological systems also have their roots in the given
world. The circadian and seasonal rhythms of nature drove the
development of patterns of rest and migration. Even the sim-
ple act of sleeping when it is dark could be fraught with dan-
ger, however, as may have been discovered the hard way. If all
the members of a group slept simultaneously, some might fail
to survive the night. Recognizing this failure of the system
would naturally lead to such concepts as the staggered watch
and other means of protection. Thus, the group might begin
sleeping in a cave whose single entrance could be guarded by a
boulder rolled across it. The inconveniences of migration ulti-
mately led to the development of systems of agriculture and
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