Engineering Failure Quotes

Failure is central to engineering. Every single calculation that an engineer makes is a failure calculation. Successful engineering is all about understanding how things break or fail.

A bridge shouldn't just fall down in the middle of America. Not a bridge that's a few blocks from my house. Not an eight-lane highway. Not a bridge that I drive over with my family every day, along with tens of thousands of Minnesotans. But that's what happened.

[On Richard P. Feynman's live demonstration of the rigidity of the O-rings when cold that doomed the space shuttle Challenger, killing seven astronauts:] The public saw with their own eyes how science is done, how a great scientist thinks with his hands, how nature gives a clear answer when a scientist asks her a clear question.

I employ case studies of failure into my courses, emphasizing that they teach us much more than studies of success. It is not that success stories cannot serve as models of good design or as exemplars of creative engineering. They can do that, but they cannot teach us how close to failure they are.

I cannot even open an umbrella properly. How could I ever have been a civil engineering student?

We were ignorant, and we were ignorant of the fact that we were ignorant. That is ignorance squared, and it can lead to disaster.

Relying on nothing but scientific knowledge to produce an engineering solution is to invite frustration at best and failure at worst.

I was absolutely obsessed with the Titanic - not the film, the actual boat. I'd draw diagrams about it and theorise that if it was built in a different way, it wouldn't have sunk.

Candlestick was built on the water. It should have been built under it.

Euler calculated the force of the wheels necessary to raise the water in a reservoir ... My mill was carried out geometrically and could not raise a drop of water fifty yards from the reservoir. Vanity of vanities! Vanity of geometry!

I always say when you see that old black-and-white footage of the rocket on the launch pad and it falls over and explodes, that's because people had slide rules. Not having the decimal point is a real drawback. You want the decimal point, take it from me.