HENRY PETROSKI is the Aleksandar S. Vesic Professor of Civil Engineering and Professor of History at Duke University, where he also chairs of the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering. Before moving to Duke in 1980, he was on the faculty of the University of Texas at Austin and on the staff of Argonne National Laboratory.

Petroski has written on many aspects of engineering, including design, success and failure, error and judgment, the history of bridges, and the use of case studies in education and practice. His books on these subjects, which are intended for professional engineers and laypersons alike, include: To Engineer Is Human, which was adapted for a BBC-television documentary; The Pencil; The Evolution of Useful Things; Design Paradigms; Engineers of Dreams; Invention by Design; and Remaking the World. Among the languages into which his books have been translated are Chinese, Finnish, German, Hebrew, Korean, and Japanese. His latest book, a history of books as artifacts and the structures that have housed them from ancient times to the computer age, is entitled The Book on the Bookshelf.

In addition, he has published over 75 technical articles in refereed journals and a like number of articles and essays in newspapers and magazines, including the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, and Scientific American. Since 1991 he has been writing the engineering column in the bimonthly magazine, American Scientist. He lectures regularly to both technical and general audiences, in the U.S. and abroad, and has been interviewed frequently on radio and television, including appearances on National Public Radio and the television show Today.

Henry Petroski has been a Guggenheim Fellow, a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow, and a Fellow of the National Humanities Center. Among his other honors are the Ralph Coats Roe Medal from the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, the Civil Engineering History and Heritage Award from the American Society of Civil Engineers, honorary degrees from Clarkson University and Trinity College (Hartford, Conn.), and distinguished engineering alumnus awards from both Manhattan College and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering.