Brockton Massachusetts steam boiler explosion

It was a shoe factory down here in Brockton, Massachusetts — a boiler blew up, kapow, around 1905 or so — and the ASME decided we're getting tired of this. The first research contract ever led by the US government was in 1836 or so. Some steamboat on the Ohio River blew up, and Congress actually appropriated some money for someone to go and figure out why these boilers were blowing up and killing people. So pressurized boilers — the Barlow formula, sigma equals PR over T, pressure radius over thickness — those types of equations were around. The boiler and pressure vessel code is the world code today. Mainland China doesn't use it because they don't want to spend sixteen thousand dollars to purchase a code; they basically have their own codes that copy it, and they don't care about copyrights.

Brief reference as the comparison point for what an ammo-dump lightning strike would look like ("something worse than the Brockton shoe factory"). Not developed in this lecture; treated by Tom as already-known to the class.

Where do we get all these standards? I have a little history story here, hopefully fun for you to read, about lightning protection standards. Ben Franklin in 1752 — he got out there with his kite and his key and almost killed himself. This is a history of lightning protection systems, written by a guy at the US Army in one of their labs in New Jersey. He's an electrical engineer. The US Army is really interested in lightning protection. Anybody know why? They have a lot of ammo dumps. If lightning strikes an ammo dump, you have something that looks even worse than the Brockton shoe factory.

Reference back to a prior lecture's image (the shoe factory boiler explosion). Used here as origin-of-codes example.

Remember how the code came about historically. The code was written because we learned about failures. I showed you the picture of the Brockton, Massachusetts shoe factory. [Tom holds up Henry Petroski's To Engineer Is Human.] Here's Henry Petroski's book — this professor at Duke University, who wrote it about 1980. He's written a bunch of books since. Copyright 1982. To Engineer is Human — he's a civil engineer. He talks about the role of failure in successful design. I'll use an example next week out of this — the Hyatt Regency walkway collapse. None of you were born at that time, I don't think, but it killed a couple hundred people in Kansas City.