benb said:
JR, do you remember the title? I've had a fascination, perhaps an unhealthy interest, in failure, dating back maybe to the Apollo 13 days (the mission, not the movie) and certainly to the Challenger explosion. The Internet let me discover things such as the Tacoma Narrows Bridge and first Arriane 5 launch, complete with Youtube videos and analysis pages.
In the 90s I read about the Therac-25 in Embedded Systems Programming magazine, and regularly read comp.risks until I connected reading it with the nightmares I was having. The Risks Digest is still going, and now there's this light-hearted (?) Twitter feed named @FailsWork. I've got books on failures such as "Major Malfunction" on the Challenger. One of the conclusions is that there's not just one thing that goes wrong in a big failure, it's a systemic thing of many small failures that may not hurt by themselves,but they all incidentally come together and cascade into one big oops. I've got things on general product design, like Petroski's books (though I've never read his, I think I tried a few pages and maybe the writing didn't flow for me) and this one:
https://www.amazon.com/Design-Everyday-Things-Revised-Expanded/dp/0465050654
Sorry my copy (and specific memory about the title) is long since gone, as with most of my better books. It was a paperback and I bought/read it back last centiry.
From a quick search on google there are a number of books promising analysis of engineering failure, many including more modern failures. Post analysis of failures are likely to be more accurate than analysis of why things work, so probably several good choices. ;D
"Breakdown: Deadly Technological Disasters",
by Neil Schlager, Visible Ink Press, Detroit, 1995
"Set Phasers on Stun",
by Steven Casey, Aegean Publishing Co., Santa Barbara, 1993
"To Engineer is Human",
by Henry Petroski, Vintage Books, New York, 1992
"Design Paradigms : Case Histories of Error and Judgment in Engineering",
by Henry Petroski, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1994
"Civil Engineering Practice: Engineering Success by Analysis of Failure",
by David D.A. Piesold, McGraw-Hill Professional, New York, 1991
"When Technology Fails: Significant Technological Disasters, Accidents, and Failures of the Twentieth Century",
by Neil Schlager (Editor), Nell Y. Schlager (Editor), Gale Group, New York, 1994
"Inviting Disaster: Lessons From the Edge of Technology",
by James R. Chiles, Harper Business, New York, 2002
Good Luck.
JR
PS To engineer is human, rings a bell loudly... that was probably it...I even recognize the cover. I suspect we could learn from several of those titles.
