Henry Petroski, "Being Human" and "Lessons from Play; Lessons from Life," Selections from To Engineer is Human

Questions for Making Connections Within the Reading:

1. As Henry Petroski defines it, "Engineering has as its principal object not the given world but the world that engineers themselves create." What is the difference between "the given world" and "the world that engineers create"? Which world is safer? More hospitable to live in?

2. To Engineer Is Human was originally published in 1982, just after the collapse of the Hyatt Regency in Kansas City. Around that time, Petroski maintains, "anyone could rattle off a number of technological embarrassments that were fresh in everyone's mind." Is the same true today? Twenty years after Petroski wrote that statement, is it still the case that the news that grabs the headlines involves engineering disasters? Make a list of the disasters that have dominated the news in the past decade. What does your list say about the recent history of engineering?

3. What are the lessons that Petroski learns in "Lessons from Play; Lessons from Life"? Are the lessons learned from play and from life one and the same? Would you say these lessons are surprising? Obvious? What is gained by learning them?

Questions for Writing:

1. "[T]he history of engineering in general, may be told in its failures as well as in its triumphs," Petroski writes. "Success may be grand, but disappointment can often teach us more." Why is it that Petroski wants to place failure at the center of his discussion about engineering? What is the ideal response that Petroski believes engineers and citizens should have to structural failure? If Petroski's readers came to accept the centrality of failure to the engineering process, what, if anything, would change as a result?

2. Petroski maintains, "The exact lifetime of a part, a machine, or a structure is known only after it has broken." What are the implications that this statement has for public safety? For consumer rights? For one's peace of mind?

Questions for Making Connections Between Readings:

1. Petroski writes about the inevitability of structural failure with an air of calm that some readers are likely to find unsettling. His assessment of structural reliability in terms of potential loss of life and potential loss of capital is also likely to seem, as Petroski himself puts it, "callous." In this regard, Petroski and Annie Dillard achieve the same level of remove from the emotions that are most frequently evoked by tragedies that take a large toll in human lives. While Petroski and Dillard stand at a distance from such events, do they share the same world view? That is, do the engineer and the poet/naturalist see eye to eye about humanity's place in the "grand scheme of things"? Are they both teaching the same lessons about life and play?

2. In "What Does the Dreaded 'E' Word Mean Anyway," Stephen Jay Gould distinguishes the biologist's understanding of evolution from the astronomer's understanding. Petroski is describing a different kind of knowledge worker altogether--the engineer--and how the very thoughts of such knowledge workers evolve. Do the ideas of engineers evolve like life forms or like stars? Or do they evolve in some third way that Gould does not discuss? Is their any evolutionary significance to the ways new thoughts emerge?

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