So it's been a while...

Well that didn't last long haha. As I mentioned in the introductory post, I'm new to this whole blogging thing and didn't really have a good plan for how to keep up with the routine of blogging. As a result, this blog kind of fell by the wayside when time demands from a family house renovation, the holidays, and the job search took over. But the New Year has come and gone so I've decided to make blogging more of a priority this time around. My goal is to post at least once (but hopefully more) per week.

In my first post back, I'd like to talk a little bit about an idea that I came across while reading "To Engineer is Human" by Henry Petroski. The overall goal of the book is to talk about human nature and the role of failure in engineering and life. He argues that we often learn the most from failure because until the point of failure, we assume that we understand the stresses and forces involved in designing an object or structure. One example of this idea is the concept of fatigue. Once engineers had a pretty good idea of how to design things to combat stress, they thought that these structures would last forever as long as the load on the structure was less than the yield strength of the material.

In this case, they were mistaken: the primary example of this being railroad components and structures. These components are exactly the kinds of components we now know to be most vulnerable to fatigue: components that undergo high stress cyclic loading. Mechanical fatigue is very similar to the idea of fatigue in people: it is the idea that a repeatedly applied (cycled) load or strain can cause damage over time and eventually lead to fracture. None of these loads by themselves cause the structure to break (as it would with a sudden impact), but over time microfractures that are difficult to see develop and weaken the constitution of the material. Eventually, these microfractures can cause the complete collapse of the structure.

Though the idea of fatigue was first proposed in 1837, engineers did not begin to really understand the idea of fatigue until much later after the failure of parts that were supposed to be sound and the death of passengers resulting from collapses that weren't supposed to happen. The point Petroski makes is that we should not to try to forget or endlessly criticize these failures, but instead to accept them as an unfortunate and necessary part of being human. Only through failure can we grow and progress, not only as engineers, but also as people.