Henry Petroski, who demystified engineering with literary examinations of the designs and failures of major structures such as buildings and bridges, as well as everyday objects such as the pencil and toothpick, died June 14 at a hospice in Durham, NC. He was 81.
His wife, Catherine Petroski, said the cause was cancer.
Dr. Petroski, a longtime professor of civil and environmental engineering at Duke University, adapted the “form follows function” architectural axiom into one of his own “form follows failure” axioms—and covered the subject extensively in books, lectures, academic journals, NewsMadura and magazines like Forbes and American Scientist.
“Failure is at the heart of engineering,” he said when The Times profiled him in 2006. “Every calculation an engineer makes is a calculation error. Successful engineering is all about understanding how things break or fail.”
In “To Engineer Is Human: The Role of Failure in Successful Design” (1985), Dr. Petroski what happens when the design goes horribly wrong – for example, the 1981 collapse of the two skywalks at the Hyatt Regency Hotel in Kansas City, killing 114 people, and the 1940 collapse of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge in Washington state , just a few months after opening.
Shortly after the Hyatt Regency disaster, Dr. Petroski, one of his neighbors asked me how such a thing could happen.
“He wondered,” he continued, “didn’t engineers even know how to build such a simple structure as an elevated skywalk?” But, he added, he thought his explanation of the hotel collapse and other failures did not satisfy his neighbor.
He wrote the book, he said, to define what an engineer is.
“Even though I had three engineering degrees, taught engineering and was registered as a professional engineer,” he told The Times in 2014, “if a neighbor asked me, ‘What is engineering?’ I said, ‘Duh.’ I couldn’t put together a coherent definition of it.” His best effort, he said, was that “engineering is achieving a function while avoiding failure.”
Pencils turned out to be a prosaic object for Dr. Petroski.
Spurred in part by the inferior quality of the pencils he received at Duke, he used engineering equations in a 1987 paper in the Journal of Applied Mechanics to describe why pencil points break.
“Inquiring why and how a pencil nib breaks the way it does,” he concluded, “not only leads us to a better understanding of the tools of stress analysis and their limitations, but also leads to a more complete understanding of the wonders of technology when we analyze the suitability of such a manufactured product as the common pencil.
Two years later, he expanded the magazine article with “The Pencil: A History of Design and Circumstance,” a 448-page tour of invention and evolution — featuring brands like Faber-Castell, Dixon Ticonderoga, and Koh-I-Noor among them — that included a chapter on the pencil making of Henry David Thoreau’s family in Concord, Massachusetts.
Best known for writing about his experience simply living in the woods in “Walden,” Thoreau was a self-taught pencil engineer who learned about the mixture of graphite and clay that made European pencils superior, and helped adapt them to the his family’s pencil production.
Nearly 20 years after the publication of “The Pencil,” Dr. Petroski turned to an even more humble everyday object with “The Toothpick: Technology and Culture” (2007), which explained the evolution from a form used by early hominids to the creation of the modern toothpick industry in the 19th century.
The humorist Joe Queenan reviewed the book for The Times and scoffed at the need for a toothpick book that weighed over 400 pages.
“It’s not so much a book as it is a threat,” he wrote. “If you liked ‘The Toothpick,’ wait until you get a load of ‘The Grommet.'”
He added: “This stuff stuff has gone far enough, Mr. Petroski. Stop that.”
Dr. Petroski was born on February 6, 1942 in Brooklyn and grew up there and in Queens. His mother, Victoria (Grygrowych) Petroski, was a housewife. His father, also called Henry, was a tariff administrator for transport companies.
“I remember him reading the labels on cans and boxes and explaining how the contents ended up on our table,” Dr. Petroski in 2004 to The Herald-Sun of Durham, NC. “I admired how he could tell a story from such a small amount of information, and I think that influenced me somewhat.
‘As a child,’ he continued, ‘I didn’t read the labels so much as I played with the cans and boxes as building blocks. I was interested in making tall towers from tins and bridges from boxes.”
He received a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering from Manhattan College in the Bronx in 1963, then a master’s degree in theoretical and applied mechanics from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in 1964 and a Ph.D. there in 1968.
He met his future wife, Catherine Groom, when she was studying English at the University of Illinois. He was an occasional poet and courted her with sonnets, and they married in 1966. In addition to his wife, he is survived by their daughter, Karen Petroski; their son, Stephen, a mechanical engineer who is a patent attorney; his brother, William; his sister, Marianne Petroski; and two grandsons.
Dr. Petroski taught engineering at the University of Texas at Austin for six years before joining Argonne National Laboratory in Lemont, Illinois, in 1974, where he was group leader in the reactor analysis and safety department. In 1980 he left for Duke. , and his class schedule gave him the freedom to write a lot about engineering without being technical. He retired in 2020.
“He worked at the intersection of engineering and history,” Earl Dowell, a former dean of Duke’s Pratt School of Engineering, said in a telephone interview. “His readership included a wide range of engineers who enjoyed his books because they presented the bigger picture of engineering, not so much in the details, and non-engineers.”
His other books include “The Evolution of Useful Things: How Everyday Artifacts – From Forks and Pins to Paper Clips and Zippers – Came to Be as They Are” (1992); “Little Things Considered: Why There Is No Perfect Design” (2003); and “To Forgive Design: Understanding Failure” (2012), which picks up where “To Engineer Is Human” left off, with analyzes of the loss of NASA’s two space shuttles, the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, and other epic engineering failures.
Dr. Petroski received grants from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Humanities Center. He conducted structural engineering and design research sponsored by organizations such as the United States Army Corps of Engineers and the National Science Foundation.
In one of his last books, Dr. Petroski turned his curiosity and engineer’s eye to the mid-century Maine cedar cabin where he and his wife spent their summers. He analyzed its structure and its peculiarities and investigated the mystery of Robert Phinney, the engineer and amateur carpenter who built it.
“Phinney was neither a classical architect nor even, as far as I know, an architecture student,” wrote Dr. Petroski in “The House With Sixteen Handmade Doors: A Tale of Architectural Choice and Craftsmanship” (2014).
“What I deduce from his design and construction is that he was a folk architect and a folk builder, but the house he designed and built was anything but commonplace. It was, in the words of Le Corbusier, a machine à habiter – a machine to live in – and it was a custom machine. It was a construction worthy of an engineer who had worked on precision calculators.”
