The Essential Engineer

The Essential Engineer

How can engineering solve the world’s most pressing issues? In The Essential Engineer Henry Petroski shows how engineering, working in tandem with the sciences, will help avert human-induced climate change, seek renewable energy sources and so forth.
In Petroski’s view, while it is the role of science to identify problems, engineering must fix them. It is this inherent practicality of engineering, which must take into account the structural, economic and environmental factors to an extent that scientists need not always do, that lends it its importance.
The book’s 14 essays explore the feasibility of biofuels, the progress of battery-operated cars, and the quest to ramp up nuclear power’s role as an energy source. We find an in-depth investigation of various options for renewable energy—solar, wind, tide and ethanol among them—along with a look at the benefits and risks of each. Will windmills soon populate our landscape the way they did in the 19th century? Will synthetic trees, more efficient at absorbing harmful CO₂ than real trees, soon dot our prairies? Will we go ahead and construct a “sunshade” in space to protect ourselves from harmful radiation?
Petroski also takes us on a brief historical tour of the most revolutionary accomplishments of engineering and science of the past two centuries, demonstrating that great advances once thought impossible—the steamship, the airplane, the Moon landing—are in fact within reach. Engineering and science can bring about analogous feats in the 21st century.
The Essential Engineer illuminates the technological problems and paradoxes we are facing today, and sets out a course for putting our ideas into action.

Hardcover: 288 pages

Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc./Random House ( February 23, 2010 )

Item #: 27-9704

ISBN: 9780307272454

Product Dimensions: 6.25 x 9.25 x 0.0 inches

Product Weight: 21.0 ounces