Pushing the Limits: New Adventures in Engineering

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Author: Henry Petroski

ISBN-10: 1400032946

ISBN-13: 9781400032945

Category: Engineers - Biography

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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, buildings—and 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. The Washington Post - James Trefil 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 steel3Bridges of America13Benjamin Franklin Bridge21Floating bridges31Confederation Bridge42Pont de Normandie51Britannia Bridge60Tower Bridge71Drawing bridges80An eye-opening bridge91Millennium legacies100Broken bridges113New and future bridges120Dorton Arena131Bilbao141Santiago Calatrava150Fazlur Khan159The fall of skyscrapers169Vanities of the Bonfire180St. Francis Dam194Three Gorges Dam207Fuel cells227Engineers' dreams239Engineers' achievements248