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Remaking the World: Adventures in Engineering
Science/Engineering
"Petroski has an inquisitive mind, and he is a fine writer. . . . [He] takes us on a lively tour of engineers, their creations and their necessary turns of mind." --Los Angeles Times
From the Ferris wheel to the integrated circuit, feats of engineering have changed our environment in countless ways, big and small. In Remaking the Adventures in Engineering, Duke University's Henry Petroski focuses on the Malaysia's 1,482-foot Petronas Towers as well as the Panama Canal, a cut through the continental divide that required the excavation of 311 million cubic yards of earth.
Remaking the World tells the stories behind the man-made wonders of the world, from squabbles over the naming of the Hoover Dam to the effects the Titanic disaster had on the engineering community of 1912. Here, too, are the stories of the
personalities behind the wonders, from the jaunty Isambard Kingdom Brunel, designer of nineteenth-century transatlantic steamships, to Charles Steinmetz, oddball genius of the General Electric Company, whose office of preference was a battered twelve-foot canoe. Spirited and absorbing, Remaking the World is a celebration of the creative instinct and of the men and women whose inspirations have immeasurably improved our world.
"Petroski [is] America's poet laureate of technology. . . . Remaking the World is another fine book." --Houston Chronicle
"Remaking the World really is an adventure in engineering."
--San Diego Union-Tribune
"Petroski has an inquisitive mind, and he is a fine writer. . . . [He] takes us on a lively tour of engineers, their creations and their necessary turns of mind." --Los Angeles Times
From the Ferris wheel to the integrated circuit, feats of engineering have changed our environment in countless ways, big and small. In Remaking the Adventures in Engineering, Duke University's Henry Petroski focuses on the Malaysia's 1,482-foot Petronas Towers as well as the Panama Canal, a cut through the continental divide that required the excavation of 311 million cubic yards of earth.
Remaking the World tells the stories behind the man-made wonders of the world, from squabbles over the naming of the Hoover Dam to the effects the Titanic disaster had on the engineering community of 1912. Here, too, are the stories of the
personalities behind the wonders, from the jaunty Isambard Kingdom Brunel, designer of nineteenth-century transatlantic steamships, to Charles Steinmetz, oddball genius of the General Electric Company, whose office of preference was a battered twelve-foot canoe. Spirited and absorbing, Remaking the World is a celebration of the creative instinct and of the men and women whose inspirations have immeasurably improved our world.
"Petroski [is] America's poet laureate of technology. . . . Remaking the World is another fine book." --Houston Chronicle
"Remaking the World really is an adventure in engineering."
--San Diego Union-Tribune
255 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1997
15 people are currently reading
479 people want to read
About the author
Henry Petroski
35 books261 followersHenry Petroski was an American engineer specializing in failure analysis. A professor both of civil engineering and history at Duke University, he was also a prolific author.
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Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews
November 5, 2022
wow now i have a slightly less hazy conception of what an engineer is
September 14, 2011
I did not find this book as engrossing as the same author´s The Evolution of Useful Things or To Engineer is Human: The role of failure in successful design. Perhaps it is because the collection of essays does not seem to have an underlying unifying theme, other than (civil, naval and railway) engineering is interesting in its own right.
Most of the essays deal with big engineering projects (The Great Eastern, The Panama Canal, The Channel Tunnel, Hoover Dam, The Petronus Towers, Driven by Economics, an all too brief and valedictorian history of ocean liners, and in a lighter vein The Ferris Wheel) and though they try to provide a sense of the grandeur of some outstanding engineering projects, the engineering, economic and political challenges that were posed, the role of idiosyncratic men who, by force of personality pushed the project through and the squabbles and fears that they had to contend against, they cannot be said to be uniformly successful in dealing with all these dimensions.
Some essays are more about the role of drawing or design in engineering (James Nasmyth, On the Backs of Envelopes and Good Drawings and Bad Dreams) while others (the least succesful essays in the the book, in my opinion) bemoan that engineering sometimes does not get as good a press as science (Alfred Nobel´s Prizes and Images of an Engineer).
A last group of essays are oddballs in the collection: Henry Martyn Robert reminds us of the engineer who is now chiefly remembered for his non-engineering work on parliamentary procedures; Men and Women of Progress is a formal bow in the direction of women engineers; Soil Mechanics, one of the more succesful essays, is a short introduction to the early history of this fascinating field; Failed Promises rather ineffectually deals with errors and failures in engineering, criticizes blind reliance on (faulty) engineering software and feels like a tidbit which didn´t quite make it into Petroski´s far more interesting book on the role of failures in engineering (To Engineer is Human); Is Technology Wired? is the most dated essay although ironically, its prediction of wireless computing based on the history of wireless versus wired communications was a great and pretty impressive prediction based on historical trends; finally, In context is a plea for more socio-historic context in engineering programmes.
An interesting review of this book can be found in:
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-rev...
Most of the essays deal with big engineering projects (The Great Eastern, The Panama Canal, The Channel Tunnel, Hoover Dam, The Petronus Towers, Driven by Economics, an all too brief and valedictorian history of ocean liners, and in a lighter vein The Ferris Wheel) and though they try to provide a sense of the grandeur of some outstanding engineering projects, the engineering, economic and political challenges that were posed, the role of idiosyncratic men who, by force of personality pushed the project through and the squabbles and fears that they had to contend against, they cannot be said to be uniformly successful in dealing with all these dimensions.
Some essays are more about the role of drawing or design in engineering (James Nasmyth, On the Backs of Envelopes and Good Drawings and Bad Dreams) while others (the least succesful essays in the the book, in my opinion) bemoan that engineering sometimes does not get as good a press as science (Alfred Nobel´s Prizes and Images of an Engineer).
A last group of essays are oddballs in the collection: Henry Martyn Robert reminds us of the engineer who is now chiefly remembered for his non-engineering work on parliamentary procedures; Men and Women of Progress is a formal bow in the direction of women engineers; Soil Mechanics, one of the more succesful essays, is a short introduction to the early history of this fascinating field; Failed Promises rather ineffectually deals with errors and failures in engineering, criticizes blind reliance on (faulty) engineering software and feels like a tidbit which didn´t quite make it into Petroski´s far more interesting book on the role of failures in engineering (To Engineer is Human); Is Technology Wired? is the most dated essay although ironically, its prediction of wireless computing based on the history of wireless versus wired communications was a great and pretty impressive prediction based on historical trends; finally, In context is a plea for more socio-historic context in engineering programmes.
An interesting review of this book can be found in:
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-rev...
March 4, 2023
I bought this book years ago for an engineer who doesn't read essays, and I am an essay reader who isn't an engineer. So this was on my to-be-read shelf for a very long time. These essays were originally published in American Scientist so they weren't written for general readers like myself. I often found myself lost in some technical detail. But I came away with greater knowledge of this and that and am pleased to have made it through.
October 28, 2018
Thought this would be a great engineering book. While it covered a number of great engineering accomplishments, Eiffel Tower, Chunnel, and Panama Canal, it was dry. Disappointed.
June 18, 2020
Stodgy, laboured prose. Petroski is unable to bring his subject to life. Shame... the topic is inherently interesting. Shows its origin as a series of magazine articles.
February 18, 2013
Henry Petroski, professor of engineering at Duke University, may not be our era’s best writer of popular books about the history of technology, but I’d be hard-pressed to name another who’s so prolific, and – even more important – so consistently good. His seventeen books (so far) include two classics (To Engineer is Human and The Evolution of Useful Things) and one near-classic (The Pencil), but all of them are worth reading. Remaking the World, a collection of essays originally written for magazine publication, is no exception.
Like those in its successor volume Pushing the Limits: Further Adventures in Engineering, the essays in Remaking the World were written to stand alone, and (for the most part) they stand alone in the book. They deal, variously, with success and failure, with person and object and process, with the particular and with the universal. An ode to the value of back-of-the-envelope calculations shares space with a history of Hoover Dam. The Ferris wheel – a wonder of the Gilded Age, unveiled at the Chicago world’s fair of 1893 – shares space with the Petronas Towers, built in Kuala Lampur, Malaysia, a century later. Some of the essays – notably a trio on Victorian engineering genius Isambard Kingdom Brunel, his immense steamship Great Eastern, and the economics of large passenger ships in general – interlock with one another. Others – particularly a set of case studies of fatally flawed designs – exist in dialogue with Petroski’s other published work. Unlike the case studies of technological failure in To Engineer is Human or of everyday technologies in The Evolution of Useful Things the essays collected here are not marshaled in order to present and elaborate on a single, unifying idea.
The book as a whole thus, almost inevitably, makes less of an impact than (say) To Engineer is Human or The Pencil. The loss is modest, however, and the value of having these otherwise inaccessible essays available in convenient form far outweighs it. Precisely because they were written as stand-alones, they highlight one of Petroski’s most notable talents: the ability to clearly tell a complex story in limited space. The essays in this book deal with big concepts, important individuals, and major engineering achievements. There are multiple biographies of Brunel, for example, and at least one book devoted solely to the Great Eastern, but Petroski’s essays are the best short introductions to either subject I have ever read. Finishing one of them (or the equally good essays on the Golden Gate Bridge, the Ferris wheel, or the Petronas Towers), you have a sense that – although there is much more to learn about the subject – you’ve learned enough to claim a solid understanding of it.
A book collecting nothing but Petroski’s essays on the history of engineers and engineering would, for that reason, make an exceptional textbook for an introductory course on the history of technology. Until some publisher has the sense to produce such a book, however, Remaking the World and its sequel are well worth seeking out – both for their historical content and for their insider’s view of how the engineering mind works.
Like those in its successor volume Pushing the Limits: Further Adventures in Engineering, the essays in Remaking the World were written to stand alone, and (for the most part) they stand alone in the book. They deal, variously, with success and failure, with person and object and process, with the particular and with the universal. An ode to the value of back-of-the-envelope calculations shares space with a history of Hoover Dam. The Ferris wheel – a wonder of the Gilded Age, unveiled at the Chicago world’s fair of 1893 – shares space with the Petronas Towers, built in Kuala Lampur, Malaysia, a century later. Some of the essays – notably a trio on Victorian engineering genius Isambard Kingdom Brunel, his immense steamship Great Eastern, and the economics of large passenger ships in general – interlock with one another. Others – particularly a set of case studies of fatally flawed designs – exist in dialogue with Petroski’s other published work. Unlike the case studies of technological failure in To Engineer is Human or of everyday technologies in The Evolution of Useful Things the essays collected here are not marshaled in order to present and elaborate on a single, unifying idea.
The book as a whole thus, almost inevitably, makes less of an impact than (say) To Engineer is Human or The Pencil. The loss is modest, however, and the value of having these otherwise inaccessible essays available in convenient form far outweighs it. Precisely because they were written as stand-alones, they highlight one of Petroski’s most notable talents: the ability to clearly tell a complex story in limited space. The essays in this book deal with big concepts, important individuals, and major engineering achievements. There are multiple biographies of Brunel, for example, and at least one book devoted solely to the Great Eastern, but Petroski’s essays are the best short introductions to either subject I have ever read. Finishing one of them (or the equally good essays on the Golden Gate Bridge, the Ferris wheel, or the Petronas Towers), you have a sense that – although there is much more to learn about the subject – you’ve learned enough to claim a solid understanding of it.
A book collecting nothing but Petroski’s essays on the history of engineers and engineering would, for that reason, make an exceptional textbook for an introductory course on the history of technology. Until some publisher has the sense to produce such a book, however, Remaking the World and its sequel are well worth seeking out – both for their historical content and for their insider’s view of how the engineering mind works.
February 3, 2017
Henry Petroski writes about engineering, and over the years he has created some enchanting works. His best books record and examine the evolution through time of objects big and small: pencils, bridges, tin cans, forks. Petroski brings great passion and expertise to these works.
"Remaking the World" is nowhere near Petroski's best work. The book lacks focus. Some chapters are right in his wheel-house (the chapters on the Ferris wheel and Isambard Kingdom Brunel, for instance), but his diffuse musings on software faults lack any depth of insights, and are now sorely out of date. The chapter on the Petronas towers doesn't have a point other than filling the need to say something about a recent and very big engineering feat.
When the material isn't compelling, Petroski's old-fashioned and fuddy-duddy writing style can get distracting. Don't get me wrong, he writes much better than most people writing about engineering, but I suspect that when you've spent a lifetime researching the works of the great Victorian engineers, after a while you start to sound a bit like them.
If you want to read Petroski at his best, pass on this book and read either "The Pencil" or "The Evolution of Useful Things" instead.
"Remaking the World" is nowhere near Petroski's best work. The book lacks focus. Some chapters are right in his wheel-house (the chapters on the Ferris wheel and Isambard Kingdom Brunel, for instance), but his diffuse musings on software faults lack any depth of insights, and are now sorely out of date. The chapter on the Petronas towers doesn't have a point other than filling the need to say something about a recent and very big engineering feat.
When the material isn't compelling, Petroski's old-fashioned and fuddy-duddy writing style can get distracting. Don't get me wrong, he writes much better than most people writing about engineering, but I suspect that when you've spent a lifetime researching the works of the great Victorian engineers, after a while you start to sound a bit like them.
If you want to read Petroski at his best, pass on this book and read either "The Pencil" or "The Evolution of Useful Things" instead.
October 16, 2013
A series of stories taken from the author's columns in a science-engineering magazine. Well-written and interesting, but a little lightweight. Very good on the relationship of engineering projects to social, economic and political forces. I do look forward to reading some his more substantial monographs.
January 10, 2015
An entertaining and enlightening series of essays about the engineering profession and those who practice it. The topics are wide ranging, from Alfred Nobel's prizes to soil mechanics to the Petronas towers.
I recommend this for anyone who not only likes to know about science, but how people build actual things.
I recommend this for anyone who not only likes to know about science, but how people build actual things.
June 24, 2014
I learned a lot from this book. The chapters were small enough chunks that I was able to finish the book without ever really getting into it; I could just pick it up every so often for 15 minutes at a time.
November 25, 2009
Interesting history (sort of) of engineering. The author kind of idolizes engineers and I'm not totally sure that everything he says about them is true but the book is very entertaining (so far).
January 8, 2019
Read in 2005
Currently reading
September 23, 2014Random search on my local library's on line catalog found this collection of essays Petroski wrote for magazines.
February 18, 2015
Interesting read. There was a lot of good information in there.
Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews