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For anyone who has ever
wondered why suspension bridges don't collapse under eight lanes of traffic,
how dams hold back -- or give way under -- thousands of gallons of water, or
what principles guide the design of a skyscraper, a nightgown, or a
kangaroo, this book will ease you anxiety and answer your questions.
Structures: Or Why Things Don't Fall Down is an informal
explanation of the basic forces that hold together the ordinary and
essential things of this world -- from buildings and bodies to flying
aircraft and eggshells. In a style that combines wit, a masterful
command of his subject, and an encyclopedic range of reference, J.E. Gordon
strips engineering of its technical mathematics and communicates the theory
behind the structures of a wide variety of materials.
Chapters on "How to Design a
Worm" and "The Advantage of Being a Beam" offer humorous insights into human
and natural creation. For architects and engineers there are cogent
explanations of the concepts of stress, shear, torsion, fracture, and
compression, and chapters on safety design and the relationship of
efficiency to aesthetics. IF you are building a house, a sailboat or a
catapult, here is a handy tool for understanding the mechanics of joinery,
floors, ceilings, hulls, masts -- or flying buttresses. Without jargon
or oversimplification, Structures surveys the nature of materials and
gives sophisticated answers to the most naive questions, opening up the
marvels of technology to anyone interested in the foundations of our
everyday lives.
J.E. Gordon is a professor of
materials science at the University of Reading. He has been awarded
the British Silver Medal of the Royal Aeronautical Society and the Griffith
Medal of the Materials Science Club. He is renowned for his research
in plastics, crystals, and the development of new materials and for his
ability to write simply about technical subjects.
an excerpt from "A Chapter of Accidents:"
Engineering
design as applied theology
In nearly all accidents we need to distinguish tow different
levels of causation. The first is the immediate technical or
mechanical reason for the accident; the second is the underlying human
reason. It is quite true that design is not a very precise business,
that unexpected things happen, that genuine mistakes are made and so forth;
but much more often the "real" reason for an accident is preventable human
error.
It is rather fashionable at present to assume that error is
one of those things for which it is not really fair to blame people, who,
after all were "doing their best" or are the victims of their upbringing and
environment, or the social system -- and soon and so on. But error
shades off into what is now very unpopular to call "sin." In the
course of a long professional life spend, or misspent, in the study of
strength of materials and structures I have been forced to the conclusion
that very few accidents just "happen" in a morally neutral way. Nine
out of ten accidents are caused, not by more or less abstruse technical
effects, but old-fashioned human sin -- often verging on plain wickedness.
Of course I do not mean the more gilded and juicy sins like
deliberate murder, large-scale fraud or Sex. It is squalid sins like
carelessness, idleness, won't learn and don't need to ask, you can't tell me
anything about my job, pride, jealousy and greed that kill people.
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List of
Plates
Forward
Acknowledgements
1 The
Structures in our lives -- or how to communicate with engineers
Part One
The difficult birth of the science of elasticity
2 Why
structures carry loads -- or the springiness of solids
3 The
invention of stress and strain -- or Baron Cauchy and the decipherment of
Young's modulus
4
Design for safety -- or can you really trust strength calculations?
5
Strain energy and modern fracture mechanics -- with a digression on bows,
catapults and kangaroos
Part Two
Tension Structures
6
Tension structures and pressure vessels -- with some remarks on boilers,
bats, and Chinese junks
7
Joints, fastenings and people -- also about creep and chariot wheels
8
Soft materials and living structures -- or how to design a worm
Part
Three Compression and Bending Structures
9
Walls, arches and dams -- or cloud-capp'd towers and the stability of
masonry
10
Something about bridges -- or Saint Benezet and SaintIsambard
11 The
advantage of being a beam -- with observations on roofs, trusses and masts
12
The mysteries of shear and torsion -- or Polaris and the bias-cut nighty
13
The various ways of failing in compression -- or sandwiches, skulls and Dr
Euler
Part
Four And the consequence was...
14
The philosophy of design -- or the shape, the weight and the cost
15 A
chapter of accidents -- a study in sin, error, and metal fatigue
16
Efficiency and aesthetics -- or the world we have to live in
Appendix
1 Handbooks and formulae
Appendix
2 Beam theory
Appendix
3 Torsion
Appendix
4 The efficiency of columns and panels under compression loads
Suggestions for further study
Index |
