Disasters by Design
How Engineering Failures Shaped the Modern World
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Disasters by Design
Narrated by:
Grady Hillhouse
Pre-order for $24.60
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Narrated by:
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Grady Hillhouse
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By:
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Grady Hillhouse
When a giant bridge collapses, a gas explosion blows up a building, or a major dam bursts, it’s hard not to wonder how things could have gone so catastrophically wrong. According to Grady Hillhouse, those failures are the defining force of engineering, where the most important lessons have been learned the hard way.
With the same engaging and accessible approach that makes his YouTube videos so popular, Hillhouse breaks down complex failures into their component parts, showing how poor judgment and willful ignorance can play just as big a role as an errant measurement or faulty component. The fascinating behind-the-scenes stories of history’s greatest structural breakdowns, from the Leaning Tower of Pisa to the Johnstown Flood and the Tacoma Narrows Bridge collapse, reveal how engineers learned from their mistakes and developed the core principles that keep buildings standing today.
Not all of us will design a building or lay out an electrical grid, but thinking like an engineer can help us spot weak links, respect margins, and value hard truths over wishful thinking. Disasters by Design highlights human resilience and our extraordinary capacity for progress.
* This audiobook edition includes a downloadable PDF featuring the illustrations, diagrams, charts, maps, and other visual elements from the print edition.
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Critic Reviews
Praise for Disasters by Design
“Grady opens a door through the seemingly mundane to reveal a universe of hidden structures and human ingenuity all around us. Disasters by Design is infrastructure appreciation, a history lesson, and engineering magic all in one.” —Adam Savage, co-host of Mythbusters and bestselling author of Every Tool’s a Hammer
“A sober reminder, written with warmth and heart, that engineering is vital to the safe functioning of our communities, and that engineers hold responsibility. If you live in, work in, or use structures and infrastructure, this book is for you.” —Roma Agrawal, author of Built and Nuts and Bolts
“A gripping exploration of how catastrophe shapes the world we build. Grady Hillhouse turns engineering failures into compelling human stories and shows how understanding what went wrong helps us build better.” —Fred Mills, author of Mega Builds and creator of The B1M
“Every structure has a record of decisions that made it—some great, some disastrous. Hillhouse shows how those decisions echo across history, sharing fascinating tales about how the things that fell apart taught us to build the world still standing. It's awesome.” —Brent Underwood, bestselling author of Ghost Town Living
“An unexpectedly inspiring masterpiece. It’s Aesop’s Fables, if Aesop was a civil engineer. The moral of every story is that despite humanity’s maddening proclivity to have to learn lessons the hard way, we do ultimately learn them. A tribute to failure, even the most catastrophic failure, as a road to do better.” — Latif Nasser, co-host of Radiolab
“Wonderful. I’ve read a lot of popular science and almost everything in this book was totally new to me. Somehow a sequence of disasters convinced me I should've spent my life as an engineer.” —Zach Weinersmith, bestselling coauthor of Soonish and A City on Mars
“Grady opens a door through the seemingly mundane to reveal a universe of hidden structures and human ingenuity all around us. Disasters by Design is infrastructure appreciation, a history lesson, and engineering magic all in one.” —Adam Savage, co-host of Mythbusters and bestselling author of Every Tool’s a Hammer
“A sober reminder, written with warmth and heart, that engineering is vital to the safe functioning of our communities, and that engineers hold responsibility. If you live in, work in, or use structures and infrastructure, this book is for you.” —Roma Agrawal, author of Built and Nuts and Bolts
“A gripping exploration of how catastrophe shapes the world we build. Grady Hillhouse turns engineering failures into compelling human stories and shows how understanding what went wrong helps us build better.” —Fred Mills, author of Mega Builds and creator of The B1M
“Every structure has a record of decisions that made it—some great, some disastrous. Hillhouse shows how those decisions echo across history, sharing fascinating tales about how the things that fell apart taught us to build the world still standing. It's awesome.” —Brent Underwood, bestselling author of Ghost Town Living
“An unexpectedly inspiring masterpiece. It’s Aesop’s Fables, if Aesop was a civil engineer. The moral of every story is that despite humanity’s maddening proclivity to have to learn lessons the hard way, we do ultimately learn them. A tribute to failure, even the most catastrophic failure, as a road to do better.” — Latif Nasser, co-host of Radiolab
“Wonderful. I’ve read a lot of popular science and almost everything in this book was totally new to me. Somehow a sequence of disasters convinced me I should've spent my life as an engineer.” —Zach Weinersmith, bestselling coauthor of Soonish and A City on Mars
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