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2005 Season
 Henry Petroski is the Aleksandar S. Vesic Professor of Civil Engineering and a professor of history at Duke University. The author of eleven previous books, he lives in Durham, North Carolina.
Henry Petroski's The Book on the Bookshelf, Engineers of Dreams, The Evolution of Useful Things, Paperboy, Remaking the World, Small Things Considered, and To Engineer Is Human are available in Vintage paperback.
To Engineer Is Human: The Role of Failure in Successful Design (1992)
The Pencil: A History of Design and Circumstance (1992)
Design Paradigms: Case Histories of Error and Judgment in Engineering (1994)
The Evolution of Useful Things: How Everyday Artifacts-From Forks and Pins to Paper Clips and Zippers-Came to be as They are (1994)
Engineers of Dreams: Great Bridge Builders and the Spanning of America (1996)
Invention by Design; How Engineers Get from Thought to Thing (1998)
Remaking the World: Adventures in Engineering (1998)
The Book on the Bookshelf (1999)
Small Things Considered: Why There Is No Perfect Design (2003)
Pushing the Limits: New Adventures in Engineering (2004)
Chapter 1
Art in Iron and Steel
Works of engineering and technology are sometimes viewed as the antitheses of art and humanity. Think of the connotations of assembly lines, robots, and computers. Any positive values there might be in such creations of the mind and human industry can be overwhelmed by the associated negative images of repetitive, stressful, and threatened jobs. Such images fuel the arguments of critics of technology even as they may drive powerful cars and use the Internet to protest what they see as the artless and dehumanizing aspects of living in an industrialized and digitized society. At the same time, landmark megastructures such as the Brooklyn and Golden Gate bridges are almost universally hailed as majestic human achievements as well as great engineering monuments that have come to embody the spirits of their respective cities. The relationship between art and engineering has seldom been easy or consistent.
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