Now I know the reason for all those broken toys through the years...the engineering concept of fatigue. I love the author's example of the Speak and Spell in Chapter 3. It is interesting to imagine the engineers dilemma in creating a child's toy without "overcreating" and making the toy too heavy, too cumbersome or just too expensive. They must also create this toy to last a reasonable amount of time. With this in mind, toy recalls still happens when a child is injured by a "faulty design."
We often blame engineers for failures so this quote at the end of Chapter 2 made perfect sense. "It is as if engineers and non-engineers alike, begin human, want their creations to be superhuman. And that may not seem to be an unrealistic aspiration, for the flesh and bone of steel and tone can seem immortal when compared with the likes of man." Engineers continue to be human however and therefore we should not be surprised that those toys do not last forever!
I agree that we want things to last forever even if they were never designed to last forever (and we generally know it)
ReplyDeleteI loved this chapter because I had a Speak and Spell that did lose 4 of its buttons including the "e" and the "s". I remember putting a pencil in the holes to trigger the signal. I was amused by how the author was angry about the toy breaking while his son just adapted - of course he was the one who paid for it. In the same chapter there was a discussion about shoe laces breaking and I mused about how cotton ones stay tied much better but do break more often than the nylon ones.
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