Force: What It Means to Push and Pull, Slip and Grip, Start and Stop

An eminent engineer and historian tackles one of the most elemental aspects of life: how we experience and utilize physical force\n“Another gem from a master of technology writing.”—Kirkus Reviews\nForce explores how humans interact with the material world in the course of their everyday activities. This book for the general reader also considers the significance of force in shaping societies and cultures.\nCelebrated author Henry Petroski delves into the ongoing physical interaction between people and things that enables them to stay put or causes them to move. He explores the range of daily human experience whereby we feel the sensations of push and pull, resistance and assistance. The book is also about metaphorical force, which manifests itself as pressure and relief, achievement and defeat.\nPetroski draws from a variety of disciplines to make the case that force—represented especially by our sense of touch—is a unifying principle that pervades our lives. In the wake of a prolonged global pandemic that increasingly cautioned us about contact with the physical world, Petroski offers a new perspective on the importance of the sensation and power of touch.

Health, Fitness & Dieting

Petroski, Henry

Psychology & Counseling

Yale University Press

An eminent engineer and historian tackles one of the most elemental aspects of life: how we experience and utilize&nbsp;physical force &nbsp; "Another gem from a master of technology writing."--Kirkus Reviews &nbsp; Force explores how humans interact with the material world in the course of their everyday activities. This book for the general reader also considers the significance of force in shaping societies and cultures. &nbsp; Celebrated author Henry Petroski delves into the ongoing physical interaction between people and things that enables them to stay put or causes them to move. He explores the range of daily human experience whereby we feel the sensations of push and pull, resistance and assistance. The book is also about metaphorical force, which manifests itself as pressure and relief, achievement and defeat. &nbsp; Petroski draws from a variety of disciplines to make the case that force--represented especially by our sense of touch--is a unifying principle that pervades our lives. In the wake of a prolonged global pandemic that increasingly cautioned us about contact with the physical world, Petroski offers a new perspective on the importance of the sensation and power of touch.

Like The Pencil, Henry Petroski’s The Toothpick is a celebration of a humble yet elegant device. As old as mankind and as universal as eating, this useful and ubiquitous tool finally gets its due in this wide-ranging and compulsively readable book. Here is the unexpected story of the simplest of implements—whether made of grass, gold, quill, or wood—a story of engineering and design, of culture and class, and a lesson in how to discover the extraordinary in the ordinary. Petroski takes us back to ancient Rome, where the emperor Nero makes his entrance into a banquet hall with a silver toothpick in his mouth; and to a more recent time in Spain, where a young señorita uses the delicately pointed instrument to protect her virtue from someone trying to steal a kiss. He introduces us to Charles Forster, a nineteenth-century Bostonian and father of the American toothpick industry, who hires Harvard students to demand toothpicks in area restaurants—thereby making their availability in eating establishments as expected as condiments. And Petroski takes us inside the surprisingly secretive toothpick-manufacturing industry, in which one small town’s factories can turn out 200 million wooden toothpicks a day using methods that, except for computer controls, haven’t changed much in almost 150 years. He also explores a treasure trove of the toothpick’s unintended uses and perils, from sandwiches to martinis and beyond. With an engineer’s eye for detail and a poet’s flair for language, Petroski has earned his reputation as a writer who explains our world—from the tallest buildings to the lowliest toothpick—to us.

The Toothpick: Technology and Culture

History

World

KNOPF

From the acclaimed author of The Pencil and To Engineer Is Human, The Essential Engineer is an eye-opening exploration of the ways in which science and engineering must work together to address our world’s most pressing issues, from dealing with climate change and the prevention of natural disasters to the development of efficient automobiles and the search for renewable energy sources. While the scientist may identify problems, it falls to the engineer to solve them. It is the inherent practicality of engineering, which takes into account structural, economic, environmental, and other factors that science often does not consider, that makes engineering vital to answering our most urgent concerns. Henry Petroski takes us inside the research, development, and debates surrounding the most critical challenges of our time, exploring the feasibility of biofuels, the progress of battery-operated cars, and the question of nuclear power. He gives us an in-depth investigation of the various options for renewable energy—among them solar, wind, tidal, and ethanol—explaining the benefits and risks of each. Will windmills soon populate our landscape the way they did in previous centuries? Will synthetic trees, said to be more efficient at absorbing harmful carbon dioxide than real trees, soon dot our prairies? Will we construct a “sunshade” in outer space to protect ourselves from dangerous rays? In many cases, the technology already exists. What’s needed is not so much invention as engineering. Just as the great achievements of centuries past—the steamship, the airplane, the moon landing—once seemed beyond reach, the solutions to the twenty-first century’s problems await only a similar coordination of science and engineering. Eloquently reasoned and written, The Essential Engineer identifies and illuminates these problems—and, above all, sets out a course for putting ideas into action.

The Essential Engineer: Why Science Alone Will Not Solve Our Global Problems

Science & Math

Technology

A celebration culture and technology, as seen through the history of the humble yet ubiquitous toothpick, from the best-selling author of The Pencil. From ancient Rome, where emperor Nero made his entrance into a banquet hall with a silver toothpick in his mouth, to nineteenth-century Boston, where Charles Forster, the father of the American wooden toothpick industry, ensured toothpicks appeared in every restaurant, the toothpick has been an omnipresent, yet often overlooked part of our daily lives. Here, with an engineer's eye for detail and a poet's flair for language, Henry Petroski takes us on an incredible tour of this most interesting invention. Along the way, he peers inside today's surprisingly secretive toothpick-manufacturing industry, and explores a treasure trove of the toothpick's unintended uses and perils, from sandwiches to martinis and beyond.

Vintage

Evolution

Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group

The Evolution of Useful Things: How Everyday Artifacts-From Forks and Pins to Paper Clips and Zippers-Came to be as They are.

Americas

Essays discuss libraries, art, computers, engineering students, time, books, reading, baseball cards, the federal budget, Christmas, and the metric system

Beyond Engineering: Essays and Other Attempts to Figure Without Equations

St Martins Pr

Examines the process of the development of an engineering design and discusses the causes of the unsuccessful designs of engineering structures

To Engineer Is Human: The Role of Failure in Successful Design

This collection of informative and pleasurable essays by Henry Petroski elucidates the role of engineers in shaping our environment in countless ways, big and small. In Remaking the World Petroski gravitates this time, perhaps, toward the big: the English Channel tunnel, the Panama Canal, Hoover Dam, the QE2, and the Petronas Twin Towers in Malaysia, now the tallest buildings in the world. He profiles Charles Steinmetz, the genius of the General Electric Company; Henry Martyn Robert, a military engineer who created Robert's Rules of Order; and James Nasmyth, the Scotsman whose machine tools helped shape nineteenth-century ocean and rail transportation. Petroski sifts through the fossils of technology for cautionary tales and remarkable twists of fortune, and reminds us that failure is often a necessary step on the path to new discoveries. He explains soil mechanics by way of a game of "rock, scissors, paper," and clarifies fundamental principles of engineering through the spokes of a Ferris wheel. Most of all, Henry Petroski continues to celebrate the men and women whose scrawls on the backs of envelopes have immeasurably improved our world.

Remaking the World: Adventures in Engineering

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Petroski, Henry. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Petroski, Henry

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Petroski, Henry. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Force: What It Means to Push and Pull, Slip and Grip, Start and Stop

Force: What It Means to Push and Pull, Slip and Grip, Start and Stop

The Toothpick: Technology and Culture

The Essential Engineer: Why Science Alone Will Not Solve Our Global Problems

The Toothpick: Technology and Culture

The Essential Engineer: Why Science Alone Will Not Solve Our Global Problems

The Evolution of Useful Things: How Everyday Artifacts-From Forks and Pins to Paper Clips and Zippers-Came to be as They are.

Beyond Engineering: Essays and Other Attempts to Figure Without Equations

To Engineer Is Human: The Role of Failure in Successful Design

Remaking the World: Adventures in Engineering