Professor builds success on failure.

• Position: People - Biography

Henry Petroski knows how bridges are built and how pencils and bookshelves evolved. He delights in the analysis of designs--and in particular, why they fail. A professor of civil engineering at Duke University, his specialty is errors in engineering.

Though he has based his career on failure, Petroski is quite the success. In September, New York-based Alfred A. Knopf published his 11th book, Small Things Considered. "It's about why there is no perfect design," Petroski, 61, says. "There have to be compromises made. You have to give up something to get something else."

Petroski's books are intended for professional engineers and general readers, but No. 10 in particular was not what you'd expect from an engineer. Paperboy: Confessions of a Future Engineer chronicled Petroski's childhood in Queens, N.Y., in the '50s. In it, he writes of his fixation on designing the perfect method for folding each newspaper he delivered so it would stay tightly wrapped when tossed onto a porch. Items as different as how bicycles worked to the way houses were constructed piqued his curiosity. His affair with engineering had begun.

Petroski got a bachelor's in mechanical engineering in 1963 from Manhattan College, where he started...