Dr. Petroski was born on Feb. 6, 1942, in Brooklyn and grew up there and in Queens. His mother, Victoria (Grygrowych) Petroski, was a homemaker. His father, also named Henry, was a rate clerk for trucking companies.
“I remember how he would read the labels on cans and boxes and explain how their contents got to our table,” Dr. Petroski told The Herald-Sun of Durham, N.C., in 2004. “I admired how he could tell a story from such a small amount of information, and I expect that influenced me somewhat.
“As a child,” he continued, “I did not read the labels so much as play with the cans and boxes as building units. I was interested in making tall towers out of tin cans and bridges out of boxes.”
He earned a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering from Manhattan College in the Bronx in 1963, then received a master’s degree in theoretical and applied mechanics from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in 1964 and a Ph.D. there in 1968.
He met his future wife, Catherine Groom, when she was studying English at the University of Illinois. An occasional poet, he wooed her with sonnets, and they married in 1966. In addition to his wife, he is survived by their daughter, Karen Petroski; their son, Stephen, a mechanical engineer who is a patent lawyer; his brother, William; his sister, Marianne Petroski; and two grandsons.
Dr. Petroski taught engineering at the University of Texas at Austin for six years before joining the Argonne National Laboratory in Lemont, Ill., where he was a group leader in the reactor analysis and safety division, in 1974. He left for Duke in 1980, and his teaching schedule gave him the freedom to write prolifically about engineering without being technical. He retired in 2020.
“He worked at the intersection of engineering and history,” Earl Dowell, a former dean of Duke’s Pratt School of Engineering, said in a phone interview. “His readership included a wide range of engineers who enjoyed his books because they presented the bigger picture of engineering, not so much down in the details, and non-engineers.”
