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“... the measure of engineering failure or success. Fifty people are killed off in the first chapter of Henry Petroski’s To Forgive Design: Understanding Failure when a plane crashes en route to Buffalo. Thirteen hundred or more died when the levees failed in New Orleans. The number of victims grows with each example: the earthquake in Haiti; the collapse of ...”

“... for the pencil what Wilson did for the pen, although more ambitiously and at far greater length. Petroski goes further than Wilson in claiming that once we know ‘the story of the pencil in the world’ we will know much also about engineering, including both ‘the inescapable business of technology’ and its ‘mythical proportions’. ‘To reflect on ...”

“... his research assistants have fudged their homework: surely if Sennett had read the civil engineer Henry Petroski’s The Evolution of Useful Things (or other parts of the Petroski corpus) he wouldn’t refer to this lover of bridges and books, post-its and paper clips, as ‘the computer technologist’. Still, it’s ...”