Disasters by Design: How Engineering Failures Shaped the Modern World

How history’s most infamous disasters shaped the field of engineering, from the creator of the popular YouTube channel Practical Engineering

When a giant bridge collapses, a gas explosion blows up a building, or a major dam bursts, it’s hard not to wonder how things could have gone so catastrophically wrong. According to Grady Hillhouse, those failures are the defining force of engineering, where the most important lessons have been learned the hard way.

With the same engaging and accessible approach that makes his YouTube videos so popular, Hillhouse breaks down complex failures into their component parts, showing how poor judgment and willful ignorance can play just as big a role as an errant measurement or faulty component. The fascinating behind-the-scenes stories of history’s greatest structural breakdowns, from the Leaning Tower of Pisa to the Johnstown Flood and the Tacoma Narrows Bridge collapse, reveal how engineers learned from their mistakes and developed the core principles that keep buildings standing today.

Not all of us will design a building or lay out an electrical grid, but thinking like an engineer can help us spot weak links, respect margins, and value hard truths over wishful thinking. Disasters by Design highlights human resilience and our extraordinary capacity for progress.

Grady Hillhouse is an author, civil engineer, and science communicator widely known for his educational video series Practical Engineering, currently one of the largest engineering channels on YouTube with over 4 million subscribers. Grady’s videos, which focus on homebuilt demonstrations of engineering concepts, have garnered media attention from around the world and been featured on the Discovery and Science Channels. Hillhouse is a licensed civil engineer and spent nearly ten years in private practice working on a wide variety of infrastructure projects with a focus on dams, hydraulic structures, and river bank restorations.