Reading for Inspiration
True-life tales that will reignite your engineering enthusiasm.
By Henry Petroski
In this column a year ago, I described some books about engineers and engineering that I had read over the previous year. Positive feedback on that column has encouraged me to describe some of my more recent reading of books by and about engineers.
The Never-Ending Challenge of Engineering is a compilation by Paul E. Cantonwine of speeches and writings of Adm. Hyman G. Rickover, the legendary “Father of the Nuclear Navy.” This book, published by the American Nuclear Society, is full of insightful reflections on the engineering profession and on the management of large engineering projects, with specific examples drawn naturally from the nuclear reactor development with which Rickover was so intimately involved.
An Astronaut’s Guide to Life on Earth is Col. Chris Hadfield’s memoir of going into space and what it taught him “about ingenuity, determination, and being prepared for anything.” Mechanical engineer Hadfield was born, educated, and began his astronaut career in Canada but was assigned early on to duty at NASA by the Canadian Space Agency. Because of this, the book has a distinctly American flavor. It provides considerable insight into the mind—and ego—of an engineer/astronaut.
Slide Rule is the autobiography of Nevil Shute Norway, who wrote under just his first two names. Norway was a British aeronautical engineer who worked on the development of airships, principally between the two world wars. He has much to say about the differences between government-run projects and those carried out by private enterprise. Although the book was first published in 1954, its insights remain fresh. Nevil Shute was also the author of On the Beach, which deals with life in the wake of a nuclear war, and other novels.
Charles H. Thornton: A Life of Elegant Solutions is the memoir of the structural engineer of the Petronas Towers, the tallest building in the world when opened in 1996. Thornton writes about his childhood, education, and career in a highly personal way, providing insights into what can shape the character of a highly accomplished engineer. I found his descriptions of how he cultivated clients for the structural engineering firm of Thornton Tomasetti especially interesting and instructive.
Death of the Guilds, by sociologist Elliott A. Krause, is a revealing comparative study of how the legal, medical, engineering, and academic professions evolved in four European countries and the United States from 1930 to the mid-1990s, when the book was published. Krause traces how government and industrial policies had considerable influence on practice within the professions. The book is especially interesting in how it treats engineering from a sociologist’s perspective.
Ingenious, by journalist and author Jason Fagone, is, in the words of its subtitle, “a true story of invention, automotive daring, and the race to revive America.” It chronicles the efforts of four young teams competing for the $10 million X Prize awarded for building a vehicle capable of traveling 100 miles on the equivalent of a single gallon of gasoline that also has the potential of being mass produced. The book captures the personalities of team members and teams, as well as the excitement of competition among these future engineers.
Reading this selection of a half dozen widely ranging nonfiction books showed me that no matter how much the practice of engineering and the nature of the profession have changed over the decades and centuries, the essence of engineering and invention remains fundamentally unchanged. It is the constancy of purpose of problem solving and invention — embodied in such qualities of design and development as ingenuity, daring, boldness, and elegance of solutions — that makes engineering a profession full of life, inspiration, and sheer enjoyment.
Henry Petroski is the Aleksandar S. Vesic Professor of Civil Engineering and a professor of history at Duke. His most recent book is The House With Sixteen Handmade Doors: A Tale of Architectural Choice and Craftsmanship.
Photo by Catherine Petroski