In May 1987 the Golden Gate Bridge had a 50th birthday party. The bridge was closed to motor traffic so people could enjoy a walk across it. Organizers expected perhaps 50,000 people to show up. Instead, as many as 800,000 crowded the roads to the bridge. By the time 250,000 were on the bridge, engineers noticed something terrible: the roadway was flattening under what turned out to be the heaviest load it had ever been asked to carry. Worse, it was beginning to sway. The authorities closed access to the bridge and tens of thousands of people made their way back to land. A disaster was avoided.
1987年5月，金门大桥举办了50岁生日派对。大桥禁止机动车通行，所以人们可以在桥上散步。组织者预计可能会有5万人出现，实际上有80多万人挤满了通往大桥的道路。当25万人登上大桥时，工程师们注意到了一件可怕的事情：道路在有史以来要求承载的最重负载下被压平。更糟糕的是，它开始摇晃。当局关闭了通往大桥的通道，数万人返回陆地。一场灾难得以避免。

The story is one of scores in To Forgive Design: Understanding Failure, a book that is at once a love letter to engineering and a paean to its breakdowns. Its author, Dr. Henry Petroski, has long been writing about disasters. In this book, he includes the loss of the space shuttles Challenger and Columbia, and the sinking of the Titanic.
这是《原谅设计：理解失败》一书中的故事之一，这本书既是一封给工程界的情书，也是对其失败的赞歌。它的作者亨利·彼得罗斯基博士长期以来一直在写关于灾难的文章。在这本书中，他包括了挑战者号和哥伦比亚号航天飞机的损失，以及泰坦尼克号的沉没。

Though he acknowledges that engineering works can fail because the person who thought them up or engineered them simply got things wrong, in this book Dr. Petroski widens his view to consider the larger context in which such failures occur, Sometimes devices fail because a good design is constructed with low quality materials incompetently applied. Or perhaps a design works so well it is adopted elsewhere again and again, with seemingly harmless improvements, until, suddenly, it does not work at all anymore.Readers will encounter not only stories they have heard before, but some new stories and a moving discussion of the responsibility of the engineer to the public and the ways young engineers can be helped to grasp them.
尽管他承认工程作品可能会失败，因为构思或设计它们的人只是做错了，但在这本书中，彼得罗斯基博士拓宽了他的视野，考虑了发生此类失败的更大背景。有时设备失败是因为一个好的设计是用低质量的材料建造的，而这些材料的应用并不充分。或者，一种设计效果很好，它一次又一次地被其他地方采用，看似无害的改进，直到突然间，它根本不起作用了。读者不仅会遇到他们以前听过的故事，还会遇到一些新的故事，以及关于工程师对公众的责任以及如何帮助年轻工程师掌握这些故事的感人讨论。

"Success is success but that is all that it is,” Dr, Petroski writes. It is failure that brings improvement.
彼得罗斯基博士写道：“成功就是成功，但仅此而已。”只有失败才能带来进步。