Henry Petroski, *To Engineer is Human*

There's actually a book — this one right here. [Tom holds up Petroski's book.] Henry Petroski. Does anybody know who Henry Petroski is? He's a professor down at Duke University. He wrote this book, To Engineer is Human: The Role of Failure in Successful Design. He was elected to the National Academy of Engineering the same year I was, for having written this book, with the idea that we only learn from our mistakes. The Hyatt Regency collapse is in here, and if you watch some of the other videos I'll talk about that and use his book. The theory is we keep on building things bigger and bigger until we hit the limit, and then we have a big failure, a bunch of people die, and all of a sudden we say, what's going on? Like the space shuttle Challenger, someone brought that up the other day.