Authors: Henry Petroski
ISBN-13: 9781400032945, ISBN-10: 1400032946
Format: Paperback
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Date Published: September 2005
Edition: Reprint
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.
Here are two dozen tales in the grand adventure of engineering from the Henry Petroski, who has been called America’s poet laureate of technology. Pushing the Limits celebrates some of the largest things we have created–bridges, dams, buildingsand provides a startling new vision of engineering’s past, its present, and its future. Along the way it highlights our greatest successes, like London’s Tower Bridge; our most ambitious projects, like China’s Three Gorges Dam; our most embarrassing moments, like the wobbly Millennium Bridge in London; and our greatest failures, like the collapse of the twin towers on September 11. Throughout, Petroski provides fascinating and provocative insights into the world of technology with his trademark erudition and enthusiasm for the subject.
Henry Petroski, a professor of civil engineering and history at Duke University, has made it his calling to help the rest of us see the world through the eyes of the engineer. He has been called, deservedly, the "poet laureate of engineering." Pushing the Limits is a collection of essays, first published in somewhat different form in the American Scientist, that amounts to a kind of intellectual travelogue in which he shares with us an engineer's-eye view of everything from obscure bridges to crazy (and as yet unbuilt) structures that have been proposed by engineers in the past.
Art in iron and steel | 3 | |
Bridges of America | 13 | |
Benjamin Franklin Bridge | 21 | |
Floating bridges | 31 | |
Confederation Bridge | 42 | |
Pont de Normandie | 51 | |
Britannia Bridge | 60 | |
Tower Bridge | 71 | |
Drawing bridges | 80 | |
An eye-opening bridge | 91 | |
Millennium legacies | 100 | |
Broken bridges | 113 | |
New and future bridges | 120 | |
Dorton Arena | 131 | |
Bilbao | 141 | |
Santiago Calatrava | 150 | |
Fazlur Khan | 159 | |
The fall of skyscrapers | 169 | |
Vanities of the Bonfire | 180 | |
St. Francis Dam | 194 | |
Three Gorges Dam | 207 | |
Fuel cells | 227 | |
Engineers' dreams | 239 | |
Engineers' achievements | 248 |