The Evolution of Useful Things

I love this book! It’s perfect for people who are avid readers or people who love odd facts. Each chapter stands alone.

Interesting book- lots of history on various everyday items. Can be read through or just in bits as interest dictates. Fun source book.

Some nice case studies and illustrations, but the author is a bit long-winded sometimes, has some silly rhymes, and goes on too much about a weird theory that artifacts only evolve in response to failures of previous versions. I was a Science, Technology, and Society major in college, and this book had some of the same elements that made me roll my eyes at some of our readings.

On the face of it, the Evolution of Useful Things simply lists fun trivia about familiar objects. Why does a fork have four tines and not two or three? What's a perfect paperclip? Is there such a thing? Who invented the zipper? How many things can you see on your desk right now? However the book gives us much more. Petroski uses a large number of concrete facts to present general laws of human thought and activity. The paper clip appeared because pins used to hold papers together made holes in them and could injure someone looking through files, but it took a while for it to reach the form we know today. We invent new things because we are dissatisfied when we find problems. Form follows not function, but failure. While small objects play the center role here, large machines such as locomotives and large projects such as bridges also come up. Petroski argues that for his concepts to be valid, they must apply to the great as well as the small and he shows that engineers design new bridges or tunnels by solving problems observed found while building other bridges and tunnels. The book's title is especially good. The evolution of man-made things differs fundamentally from the evolution of living things. Natural selection follows a mindless process of sifting through countless minute _random_ changes. Things, however, evolve through a different process of sifting through countless _intended_ changes (sometimes small, somtimes large) until something arises that works better than before. Petroski's writing does annoy me a little; he's got some really bad puns. For example he follows two different quotations of how to manufacture a needle with the phrase "there's more than one way to make a point." Another problem is that he repeats himself. For instance, he twice mentions Karl Marx's astonishment at finding 500 different kinds of hammers in a Birmingham factory. But the originality of his thesis far outweighs these minor flaws. Henry Petroski is a philosopher of engineering examining the question of why we invent things. He asks why we are always perfecting our inventions, why we are never satisfied with our tools as they are. His proposed answers in no small way explain much of the history of our rich living environment with its tens of thousands of useful things. Vincent Poirier, Tokyo

This book held my interest from the first page to the last. I like the logical yet sensible way the author develops his theme (in my opinion) - that there really is no such thing as an original invention. Every so-called invention is actually an improvement on an earlier design and/or a synthesis of multiple design components into a new combination. The examples are simple to understand. All in all, this is a positively fascinating book. I bought this book years ago. The one I bought from Amazon was for a friend. I not only recommend it, I buy it for friends and family.