HN Books @HNBooksMonth

To put the history in context, it’s nice to have some basic understanding of the physics/engineering involved in holding things together.

As no kind of expert myself, I really enjoyed JE Gordon’s book The New Science of Strong Materials. It’s a nice easy-to-read introduction, I’d guess about 250 pages long, and talks about not only iron and steel, but also wood, glass, etc. I also liked his later book Structures, which is somewhat overlapping in subject but a bit longer, focused more on the engineering and less on materials per se or historical development.

The two books are from 1968 and 1978, respectively, but age pretty well. Used copies can likely be found for a few dollars.

http://amzn.com/0691125481 http://amzn.com/0306812835

Someone who knows these fields better can probably recommend more recent sources.

I read this story[1] once, although I don't remember where:

Someone somewhere needed a large number of cargo vessels built quickly (think WWII liberty ships, but those weren't made of wood), so they brought in a bunch of cabinet makers to bolster their shipwrights. It worked great, until the ships built by normal woodworkers saw significant wave action, at which time they broke up and sank. The punchline being that, on land, rigidity is the primary constraint; if you build it not to be floppy, it will be plenty strong. At sea (and especially in aerospace), strength is primary; if you build it to be rigid, it will be too heavy and if you build it to be not-heavy, it will probably fall apart.

An amateur can build a fairly large boat (although usually to plans by an actual naval architect), and a small boat can make it across an ocean, but if you're serious about schlepping things around, the design constraints for ships aren't much looser than those in aerospace.

[1] Maybe this, although that's not the cover I remember: http://www.amazon.com/Structures-Things-Dont-Fall-Down/dp/03...

I should probably enforce a limit on the number of times I'm allowed to plug this book on HN every year: J.E. Gordon's Structures, Or Why Things Don't Fall Down

http://www.amazon.com/Structures-Things-Dont-Fall-Down/dp/03...

It's not exactly a young book, but it's newer than the Bay Bridge...

⬐ notauser

By the same author I can recommend The New Science of Strong Materials: Or Why You Don't Fall Through the Floor. (The section on wooden planes is particularly interesting.)

http://www.amazon.co.uk/New-Science-Strong-Materials-Through...

⬐ billswift

This is less technical and more readable, http://www.amazon.com/Engineer-Human-Failure-Successful-Desi... , and Petroski describes a bridge that failed as the result of a single eyebeam failure. In that case though, there were only 4 very short eyebeams supporting the roadbed, one at each corner. He didn't actually call them eyebeams, but hangers, but from the photos, they are the same thing.