A Simple ‘Paperboy’s’ Feats That Engineered a Career

PAPERBOY

Confessions of a Future Engineer

By Henry Petroski

Alfred A. Knopf

368 pp., $25

In 1954, on Henry Petroski’s 12th birthday, he and his family moved from Brooklyn to Cambria Heights, Queens, in the suburbs. The same day, he received as a birthday present the object of his desire, a Schwinn bicycle.

Working fast, lest his clumsy father awkwardly try to help and damage the bike, Petroski got it out of its box and put it together. The bike opened to the boy a teenage career as a paperboy for the afternoon daily Long Island Press and, though he didn’t recognize it yet, a grown-up career as an engineer.

A professor of civil engineering and history at Duke University, Petroski is the author of noted books about engineering, including “The Pencil” and “To Engineer Is Human.” In his joyous and finely calibrated “Paperboy,” he takes the reader into the mind of a boy who, already at 12, thinks like an engineer though he doesn’t know it yet.

Having figured out how to fold the paper, balance 60 papers in his bike basket, flip them neatly onto the porch and where his densely clustered customers lived, “I was,” he writes, “more interested in numbers than names, in things than ideas, in newspapers than books. What mattered most to me were the day-to-day practicalities of delivering the Long Island Press. I was an engineer long before I understood all the connotations of the word.”

In 1957, when Petroski was nearly 16 and giving up his paper route after four years, the Russians inaugurated the Space Age by sending up Sputnik. Were the Reds going to beat us? Congress passed the Defense Education Act to fund students in math and science, and the race was on. As naturally as Petroski had been riding his bike, he flowed into the production line of science and technology education.

Along the way, he learned to articulate the lessons he had been learning since he opened that Schwinn box. “Engineering,” I would learn,” is neither math nor science, though it uses them as fundamental knowledge and as tools. In its most basic form, engineering is the synthesis of things, as a working computer comes out of the idea of a computer and its parts, or as a three-dimensional bicycle comes out of a flat box of its parts. Things did come simply of the math and science with which they were understood. Rather, things came of engineering....

“Being an engineer is a lot like being a paperboy.... How many papers a paperboy had to draw was math; how he delivered them was engineering ... how the papers were supposed to be flipped was science; how the papers were flipped was engineering.... How many raindrops danced on the head of a paperboy was math and science; how he avoided half of them on his speeding bike was engineering. And as simple as the theory might be, it was never that easy in practice.”

Petroski went on a madcap teenage bike ride with two friends and ended up in a bicycle wreck that sent him to Jamaica Hospital. Before, he had approached literature in his classes through Classics Illustrated; after, he read Joseph Conrad. He also looked out of the hospital window at the Van Wyck Expressway and the pedestrians and the elevated train platforms.

“Though the people and the cars they drove were free to go in all sorts of directions, they followed very predictable patterns through the day and night. There was an overarching order.... What I was watching was technology in motion, and what made it happen was the engineering of the machines and the transportation systems within which they moved.... I was becoming equally attracted to the real world of things on the street and the imaginary world of ideas in books.”

Petroski was growing up.

Petroski writes “Paperboy” with the observant eye of an engineer and the imaginative heart of a novelist. Anyone who has had any acquaintance with the experience of being young in those years, the years of Eisenhower, and of that milieu, a big Eastern city with its huge populations of the children and grandchildren of immigrants, will recognize and smile at Petroski’s portrait of his loving family in a seemingly stable nation on the verge of upheaving change. Those too young to know that time can be assured that that is the way it was.