Successes And Failures

Your magazine is most interesting and provocative for someone who has spent his career as a chemical engineer in the research and development of aerospace technology. And special thanks to Robert Kargon for his article “Inventing Caltech” (Spring 1986). His historical perspective brings into view much of what has influenced me since I joined Caltech’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in 1956.

The article about the Quebec Bridge in the same issue suggests that we can often learn much more from our failures than from our successes. Yet we usually try not to permit any failures to occur. Might this be one reason for the lack of much contribution by engineers and scientists to drag-racer design, as pointed out in Robert Post’s “In Praise of Top Fuelers”?