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

294 Pages·1992·3.12 MB·English

by  Henry Petroski

Acclaim for Henry Petroski’s
THE EVOLUTION OF USEFUL THINGS
“[It] offers the reader many fascinating data about human artifacts.… Petroski is an amiable and
lucid writer.… He belong[s] with the poets, extending the Romantic embrace of nature to the
invented, manufactured world that has become man’s second nature.”
—John Updike, The New Yorker
“Petroski weaves wonderfully odd facts into this book.… [He] makes us pay attention to ordinary
objects … just the ticket for the technophile.”
—Los Angeles Times
“A constellation of little marvels [that] all make good stories.… [A] paean to Yankee
ingenuity … an informative, entertaining book.”
—Boston Globe
“One has to admire a man who delivers an intelligent tirade on a garbage bag.… Readable and
entertaining … Petroski liberally mixes biography, social history, design theory and even word
derivations into these affectionately told tales.”
—Chicago Tribune
“This book is a monument to the historian’s curiosity and the engineer’s tenacity. It is a treasure
trove of fascinating facts and amusing anecdotes.”
—New Criterion
BOOKS BY HENRY PETROSKI
The Book on the Bookshelf
Remaking the World
Invention by Design
Engineers of Dreams
Design Paradigms
The Evolution of Useful Things
The Pencil
Beyond Engineering
To Engineer Is Human
Paperboy
Small Things Considered
Henry Petroski
THE EVOLUTION OF USEFUL THINGS
Henry Petroski is the Aleksandar S. Vesic Professor of Civil Engineering
and a professor of history at Duke University. He is the author of more
than ten books.

FIRST VINTAGE BOOKS EDITION, FEBRUARY 1994
Copyright © 1992 by Henry Petroski
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in
the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and
simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in
hardcover by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.,
New York, in 1992.
Some of this material first appeared, in different form, in
American Heritage of Invention and Technology, Technology Review,
Wigwag, and Wilson Quarterly.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published
material:
Barrie & Jenkins: Excerpts from The Nature and Aesthetics of Design by David Pye (Barrie &
Jenkins, London, 1978). Reprinted by permission of Barrie & Jenkins, a division of The
Random Century Group Limited.
Caliban Books: Excerpt from William Smith, Potter and Farmer, 1790–1858 by George Sturt
(Caliban Books, London, 1978). Reprinted by permission.
HarperCollins Publishers Inc.: Excerpts from Etiquette: The Blue Book of Social Usage by Emily
Post. Copyright © 1965 by Funk and Wagnalls Co., Inc. Reprinted by permission of
HarperCollins Publishers Inc.
Harvard University Press: Excerpts from Notes on the Synthesis of Form by Christopher
Alexander (Harvard University Press, 1964). Reprinted by permission.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Petroski, Henry.
The evolution of useful things / Henry Petroski.—1st Vintage Books ed.
p. cm.
Originally published: New York: A. Knopf, 1992.
eISBN: 978-0-30777305-0
1. Inventions. 2. Patents. I. Title.
T212.P465 1994
609—dc20 93-6351
Author photograph © Catherine Petroski
v3.1
to my mother,
and to the memory of my father
Contents
Cover
Other Books by This Author
About the Author
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Preface
1 How the Fork Got Its Tines
2 Form Follows Failure
3 Inventors as Critics
4 From Pins to Paper Clips
5 Little Things Can Mean a Lot
6 Stick Before Zip
7 Tools Make Tools
8 Patterns of Proliferation
9 Domestic Fashion and Industrial Design
10 The Power of Precedent
11 Closure Before Opening
12 Big Bucks from Small Change
13 When Good Is Better Than Best
14 Always Room for Improvement
Notes
Bibliography
List of Illustrations
Preface
ther than the sky and some trees, everything I can see from
O
where I now sit is artificial. The desk, books, and computer
before me; the chair, rug, and door behind me; the lamp, ceiling,
and roof above me; the roads, cars, and buildings outside my window,
all have been made by disassembling and reassembling parts of nature. If
truth be told, even the sky has been colored by pollution, and the stand
of trees has been oddly shaped to conform to the space allotted by
development. Virtually all urban sensual experience has been touched by
human hands, and thus the vast majority of us experience the physical
world, at least, as filtered through the process of design.
Given that so much of our perception involves made things, it is
reasonable to ask how they got to look the way they do. How is it that
an artifact of technology has one shape rather than another? By what
process do the unique, and not-so-unique, designs of manufactured
goods come to be? Is there a single mechanism whereby the tools of
different cultures evolve into distinct forms and yet serve the same
essential function? To be specific, can the development of the knife and
fork of the West be explained by the same principle that explains the
chopsticks of the East? Can any single theory explain the shape of a
Western saw, which cuts on the push stroke, as readily as an Eastern
one, which cuts on the pull? If form does not follow function in any
deterministic way, then by what mechanism do the shapes and forms of
our made world come to be?
Such are the questions that have led to this book. It extends an
exploration of engineering that I began in To Engineer Is Human, which
dealt mainly with understanding why made things break, and that I
continued in The Pencil, which traced the evolution of a single artifact
through the cultural, political, and technological vicissitudes of history.