Henry Petroski Quotes

It is the process of design, in which diverse parts of the 'given-world' of the scientist and the 'made-world' of the engineer are reformed and assembled into something the likes of which Nature had not dreamed, that divorces engineering from science and marries it to art.

The engineer always believes he is trying something without error, but the truth of the matter is that each new structure can be a new trial. In the meantime the layman, whose spokesman is the poet or the writer, can be threatened by both the failures and the successes. Such is the nature not only of science and engineering, but of all human endeavors.

Luxury, rather than necessity, is the mother of invention.