Civil engineer, author and educator Henry Petroski died June 14 at age 81, his longtime employer, Duke University, announced. The cause was cancer, The New York Times reported, citing his wife, Catherine Petroski. He had been in hospice care in Durham, N.C.
Petroski was a prolific writer on engineering-related topics, including as a contributor to ENR. He wrote 20 books and had a column in the Sigma Xi honor society’s American Scientist magazine, as well as for the Times, other publications and more than 75 peer-reviewed academic journal articles.
His first book, “To Engineer Is Human: The Role of Failure in Successful Design,” was published in 1985 and helped explain to a general audience, complex structures, as well as failures such as the 1940 Tacoma Narrows Bridge collapse and 1980 Kansas City Hyatt Regency hotel walkways collapse. The book was developed into a TV documentary featuring Petroski two years later.
The engineer's books explored different aspects of engineering, design and history, as well as offering deep dives into consumer products such as pencils, books and toothpicks. His most recent title, “Force: What It Means to Push and Pull, Slip and Grip, Start and Stop,” was published by Yale University Press last year and is due to be released as a paperback in September.
Petroski was remembered as “a quiet revolutionary through his many books,” said former Duke engineering school dean Earl Dowell in a university obituary. “Before his career as an author of widely praised brooks, he was a well-respected scholar in theoretical and applied mechanics, a field that anticipated much of what is now pervasive throughout engineering.”
Petroski was the Aleksander S. Vesic distinguished professor emeritus of civil engineering at Duke, having taught at the university since 1980. He earned a B.S. degree in mechanical engineering from Manhattan College, and M.S. degree and doctorate from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Before joining Duke, he taught at the University of Illinois and at the University of Texas, Austin.
Petroski led a group researching fracture mechanics at the Argonne National Laboratory and served as a presidential appointee on the U.S. Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board from 2004 through 2012. Sponsors of Petroski’s research included the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the National Science Foundation and Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, among others, according to his Duke biography.
His career earned Petroski numerous awards and accolades. He was named a fellow by the Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, American Society of Mechanical Engineers, American Academy of Arts and Sciences and National Humanities Center. He received awards from the American Society of Civil Engineers, Western Society of Engineers and Cosmos Club Foundation and received several honorary degrees from universities.
