Disaster strikes when a hotel skywalk collapses on to a crowded dance-floor, killing 114 people. An engine falls off a jumbo jet and it crashes in a ball of fire, killing 273.

Engineer Henry Petroski is shocked but not surprised by such disasters. To him engineering is only part exact-science. So it is failures of imagination rather than miscalculations which more often lead to disaster. From pyramids to space shuttles, and from the knives in his own kitchen to the chiming mechanism of Big Ben, Petroski explains how engineers learn more from a single failure than from a thousand successes.

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