That are successful that work the way theyre intended . So its thinking a lot about failure and what could go wrong. We are seeing that with the plane that went down somewhere over malaysia. We dont know exactly where. There are so many things that couldve gone wrong with that plane and there is beginning be talk about why wasnt this anticipated or or why wasnt that anticipated. Thats good engineering of a plane is that you dont let it get lost. You have safeguards builtin and even if there are people involved that want to bring the plane down deliberately there should be features in the design of the plane that are bent that from happening. We are seeing some of that even though the plane went off course. There are ways of tracking it but not in the control of the pilot. Host that takes us to your most recent look subeleven understanding failure and when you say forgive design what you mean by that . Guest will one of the first things we often hear when there is an or a failure such as the thing crashed oh it was a design problem. The designers didnt think of this or didnt think of that. Almost always when things are looked into more carefully and more deeply we find it with something else. It mightve been a pilot error in the case of an airplane or there mightve been poor maintenance in the case of a bridge that collapses. All sorts of other things besides design. This book is a defensive of design in that regard. Its really a bookend to my first book read my first book was called to engineer is human. In there i say this concept of failure is what defines engineering or the avoidance of failure i should say. At the same time the essence of engineering is designed because we are talking about creating new things as opposed to just studying things that exist. Host from an engineers perspective can you anticipate everything thats going to happen . Guest that is what the engineers supposed to do but as you can imagine its not obvious that can be done. Experience helps engineers in enumerate what could go wrong. Even if things are generally made up of old things and been up how old things work. We know how they fail in particular. Its not a dumping a task as we have seen. Host professor of petoskey you teach Civil Engineering. What is Civil Engineering . Guest it depends on how far back we want to go but until the 18th century all engineeriengineeri ng was associated with the military. So the term Civil Engineering came into existence in the latter part of the 18th century to distinguish things like public works from military objectives. Harbors, roads and bridges that are for civilian use as opposed to military use. That simply is what Civil Engineering remains to be today. Originally Civil Engineering encompassed all civil and sharing but as the 19th century 19th century developer of roads and so forth the different branches of engineering that we know today came into existence such as mechanical and electrical engineering. Originally these were under Civil Engineering but all spectrums would grow into their own field. Host in sub when you spend quite a bit of time on bridges. Why . Guest that is what i know most. Also i think bridges are among the most visible aspects of engineering especially when we are talking about failures in what could go wrong. When i was writing this book the minneapolis bridge collapse was the one on interstate 35 it just suddenly collapsed under rushhour traffic. I sometimes when i lecture i like to use bridge examples. They are photogenic so they make for good slides but generally i consider the bridge really representative of any engineering creation. Host the minneapolis bridge for example, to what happened and what went wrong . Guest i would say we still dont fully know. There are certain things that went wrong. When a bridge collapses like that all the evidence is really in a big thank you. There are a lot of theories and a lot of hypotheses about what went wrong. We read about those in the paper and we see stories about those on tv but if we are going to talk about things in a rational way in a scientific way than we have a hypothesis and we have to test the hypothesis. If somebody says in the minneapolis bridge case that this is what went wrong. It was these buset plates that were too thin well how do you prove that . You can summon the evidence and argue but you cant rigorously prove one particular cause. The one we you might be able to prove it is to build, prebuild the bridge exactly as it was but thats virtually impossible because we dont know what imperfections were built into the bridge. We dont know what improper materials mightve been used when the specifications called for one material ended other material was substituted. Theyre all sorts of problems like that so my short answer is well come, we can propose all these ideas and they have been proposed but what ultimately happened we maybe well never know. It appears as with a lot of these failures that it was a combination of things. One was the early design did have some deficiencies and these gusset plates which hold a lot of the beams and garters together were thinner than they shouldve been but that doesnt mean there were the cause of the failure is after all that bridge stood for several decades without collapsing. Usually design failures happen right away. The question of maintenance has been blamed and thats probably true. Some of the gusset plates began to bend for example visibly out of shape. They shouldve been paid attention to and repaired or replaced. That didnt happen. There are causes that get buried in the evidence and the evidence is just overwhelming so its a paradox. You have so much evidence yet you can find the needle in the haystack. Host theres an Association Washington d. C. I think its of engineers and each year they give a grade on americas infrastructure and its usually a d. Guest thats the American Society is Civil Engineers of which im a member and it is made up mostly of Civil Engineers who do a lot of work in infrastructure in particular. I have some issues with the. There is a vested interest in saying the infrastructures perhaps in worse condition than it is. I think that when we look at the whole picture and we look at how few accidents there are and how few accidents of the kind of the minneapolis bridge how few there are that infrastructure in is not is an end as bad shape as some people say this. If we read the report card if you will as saying what is likely to happen if we sit on our hands and dont do anything and dont invest in but infrastructure then i would say its probably accurate. But grades as we all know our subjective element and whether its a c or a d that can be argued. Host professor petroski in your book to forgive design understanding failure you also talk about deepwater horizon. What do you write about . Guest the deepwater horizon was a very interesting case. It was happening as i was writing the book so that interested me. It was a very complicated issue and it involves a lot of politics that some of the other cases and all cases involve politics but that one perhaps more so because obviously its an engineering project to create a submersible, semisubmersible offshore drilling rig and operate it and maintain it and so forth. When the accident happened obviously the engineers came in for a lot of the fault. They were accused of being negligent and so forth and the issues of design began to arise. But following that case in realtime was very interesting because although everybody appreciated that it seemed that it was an engineering problem and the engineer should be able to fix fix it fix it the scientt involves from a political perspective. The department of energy head stephen chu at the time was sent out to houston the base of operations and chu was going to solve the problem. He was going to bring science to bear on this engineering problem. That was a colossal embarrassment in my opinion. The science got in the way of engineering as a matter of fact. The Environmental Protection agency also got involved later in what we would say that punitive stage of that accident after the oil had begun to be contained but then the Environmental Protection agency said we have to clean up all this oil. There were predictions of how much there was and that became very confusing. Exactly how much oil did escape from this breach dwell . I write about that. Its a long chapter in this book and in large part to demonstrate how the engineering can get very much confused because of all these external influences. Engineering of course operates within a political environmental climate so its not to say this shouldnt happen but when there is a loss of perspective on what we are really trying to do we are really trying to understand what has happened and how we can stop it from happening and then these other issues get in the way. Host i dont need and mean to lead leave you with this question but that use of the word forgiven this title and this title intimates and theres always a punitive stage when a disaster or catastrophe happens, are you suggesting that there should not be a punitive stage . Guest no, im not suggesting. My first book was titled to engineer is human and this is a play on the Alexander Pope line to air his human and to forgive divine. The word forgive came in and was sort of forest and for that reason. But as far as the punitive aspects, bears a long history of that and for as far back as i know because in my first book i in a robbie which goes back 2500 years or more. The code red that if the builder builds a house and the house collapsed on the owner and killed the owner than the builder would be put to death. The idea for an eye for an eye was part of the Building Code in. Time. So its nothing new. I have a chapter in here now called its got legal in the title. I forgot the exact chapter title but its about the minneapolis bridge bridge. One of the reasons these failures get complicated and interpret it in assigning cause is that the lawyers get involved and of course whenever lawyers get involved theres one side and then the Opposing Side and in some cases the evidence is sealed so that you dont know exactly what happened. And you cant know what happened until the evidence is unsealed which could be years or more. So the legal aspect and rightly so. I dont mean to say that they shouldnt be there because after all as people are harmed and killed there should be some liability. There should be a determination of whether this was malicious or it was negligence that caused this and that is what charles correctly or four. Host we hear from politicians professor petroski we need more engineers come do we need more science, we need more technology. As someone who is in the field what do you think . Guest thats another tough question because there are two sides to it. In its been the electronics and the rise of the internet, computer modeling very much so. Not that these things didnt exist 30 years ago. Its just they have become so pervasive. Here at duke they have an engineering, air freestanding engineering library. We dont have that today because of Information Technology or a i. T. As its called. I used to love physical library. I began to realize that i was doing more and more of that reading on line. It was more and more directly accessible. I would order copies of articles that i needed and it really was the way the future was going to go. Just being for the sake of opposition was not a wiser rational response. The space in the Engineering Building was much more valuable for classroom for offices and laboratories than for books. Its was just a fact of life so now all of our books and engineering books are in the main library and we seldom have to visit them because almost all of them are also available on line or you can get them delivered very easily. Host i want to ask you about one of your previous books. The book on the bookshelf. Whats that about . Guest well its about how to restore books. How his books been stored on shelves over time. The idea for the book came from from i had developed a reputation, this was around the late 90s i suppose. I had written a book discussing the history of the zipper and a paperclip and other small objects. I had developed a certain reputation. It was time to write a simple thing and ive written a memoir and was looking for another topic. I was sitting in my study looking around and looking around for something simple. The book is a little more complicated. Then a paperclip lets say but the bookshelf caught my eye. The shelf itself, not the books on it. The shelf itself in the first i thought thats a bridge between the side in that side the bookcase. Maybe there are some engineering to that and i could write a book about that. The first thing i did was look into whether there was a book written about that. It turned out they really had been. Fortunately we have a very good library at duke and i was literally able to go into the stacks and look at the books that popped up first in the search. I thought this is something. I will write about the shelf itself but then you cant write about Something Like that in isolation. Thats the whole point of so much of my writing is to put things into context and to understand how they dont exist simply in the abstract. Books as we know them more scrolls for example became part of an introductory chapter. Then when you Start Talking about shelving books and how you catalogue looks. I had always been fascinated by in an good i heard long ago that it book needs to be chained to the shelf. They were called chained libraries. Why was that . It turned out it was because books were so scarce back then because manuscript was before gutenberg and before printing. Thats fascinated me and i thought it would make french or sting study and reading. But then so i began to look more and more into the history of storing or shelving books and it turned out to be a very interesting story and there were even engineers involved. The library of congress in washington in particular was a central topic in the development and the building. And its book stacks which were designed by a Civil Engineer even. So that prompted me to really get going. Host finally professor petroski whats on the cover of to forgive design . Guest listen in shersinger story. Thats a carton of eggs. Its a closeup of a carton of eggs. When i was first presented with the coverage by the publisher i thought this book is really not about eggs. Its about the good things like bridges and a horizon. I do have a whole chapter in their in which i talk about some things are meant to be broken like eggs for instance. The matrix designed for an egg is brilliant. It contains the shape until the check is ready to break out of it but at the same time from the external point of view the egg is a very wonderful package because it is very hard to crack on the outside just by lets say sitting on it and trying to hatch it. Host Henry Petroski professor of Civil Engineering and a professor of history here at duke university. You are watching booktv on cspan2s. I have a general philosophy that im approaching on all issues and it starts with the basic premise with which i approach editing. Economic freedom and from that comes for factors. One does the commission of authority to act on a particular issue . What authority is Congress Given us in the statute . Two is of harm to consumers and the solution that we can remedy for whatever harm is brought forward. Three is the solution tailored to the particular problem we are addressing and would not weaken it by analogy and forth even with all those three elements to the benefits of regulation outweigh the costs . That is how im approaching each issue individually but you do tend to take each issue as they come before you with my overall philosophy. The limits of government are clear in the constitution. The Administrative Functions or enforcing contracts cant do this sort of thing in coining money and then you have actual functions and when government sticks to those functions it has at least a chance to do well. When it moves into the area as you referred to as investments and Economic Development ki