The Pendulum
NEWS
Thursday, December 1, 2005 *Page 7
Professor finds success in others’ failure
Brandon Hughes
Reporte/-
Engineering professor Henry Petroski spoke
about finding success by looking at the failure
of others, especially in engineering, Tuesday
night in Elon’s McCrary Theater.
Petroski addressed how wind affects
bridges, skyscrapers and levees. The speech
included a Power Point presentation that
showed specific bridges, skyscrapers and lev
ees. A brief question and answer period fol
lowed his speech.
Petroski started with early suspension
bridges in Europe. He pointed out their ineffec
tiveness due to their inability to carry railroad
train cars or stand up to winds.
then talked about John Roebling, a
german engineer, who came to America to
tiild sustainable suspension bridges.
Roebling studied what had caused suspen
sion bridges of the past to fail in order to create
better, more sustainable bridges, or what he
-Called “success through failure.”
1 Petroski then spoke about the four compo
nents to a successful bridge as defined by
Roebling, “weight, girders, trusses and stays.”
Petroski continued by speaking about how
engineers copied Roeblings’ models because
of the success he had achieved.
Eventually the success lead to more failure
because engineers forgot their history and built
bridges unable to handle the wind. He con
cluded this part of his speech by saying, “the
reaction to failure is to regress.”
Petroski then moved onto cable stay bridges
and how the success of early cable stay bridges
has lead to longer and longer bridges. He drew
parallels between the failure of the suspension
and cable stay bridges.
“We should not be surprised if a cable stay
bridge collapses hke a suspension bridge,”
Petroski said. “As structures become more
familiar they become less challenging and
young engineers forget the lessons of the past
Petroski then talked about skyscrapers and
their limiting factors, resistance to wind and
adequate elevators. He went on to say deter
mining skyscraper height is “usually a ques
tion of ego or impression that makes buildings
as tall as they are.”
He also discussed how the John Hancock
Center introduced the tubular design concept
that allowed skyscraper'buildings to be built
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Brittany Smith/ Photographer
Duke professor Henry Petroski shared how
engineers learned from their mistakes
Tuesday night in McCrary Theater.
more than 75 stories high.
He briefly addressed how skyscrapers were
built to withstand high winds, but not fire or
terrorism. Tall buildings like the T\vin Towers
proved to the world that skyscrapers are not
plane resistant. There is still debate about
whether or not they can be made fire resistant.
Petroski concluded with the levees in New
Orleans. The biggest problem Petroski in his
mind is that there is no successful models of
levees to look at and that even the failures are
relatively few.
' “How the levees are built will be a matter of
politics and emotions,” Petroski said.
Petroski is currently the Aleksandar S. Vesic
professor in the department of Civil and
Environmental Engineering at Duke
University. He has also served as leader at
Argonne National Laboratory and has written
“To Engineer is Human; The Role of Failure in
Successful Design.”
Kevin Rate, a freshman here at Elon,
thought the speech was “Interesting, I didn’t
know a lot about engineering before this
speech but the information was relative and
helped me get into the speech.”
Contact Brandon Hughes at
pendulum@elon.edu or 278-7247.
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