Henry Petroski
FameRank: 3

"Henry Petroski" is an American engineer specializing in failure analysis. A professor both of civil engineering and history at Duke University, he is also a prolific author. Petroski has written over a dozen books – beginning with To Engineer is Human: The Role of Failure in Successful Design (1985) and including a number of titles detailing the industrial design history of common, everyday objects, such as pencils, paper clips, and silver (household)/silverware. He is a frequent lecturer and a columnist for the magazines American Scientist and American Society for Engineering Education#Publications/Prism. His most recently published book is To Forgive Design: Understanding Failure.

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It shows that if we forget the history of the technology we're working in, we can be taken by surprise.

So it's ironic that he was only a one-term president, largely because of the Great Depression, and people complained that he wasn't doing enough. And yet he really had all the capabilities of carrying on a relief effort for America the same way he did in Europe, but he just wasn't given enough time.