But what is Brunel’s solution to the underlying problem? A bridge has fallen down. Presumably the engineers who designed it had no murderous intent. They tried their best to make a solid bridge. Do we just let engineers build bridges however they please and then be angry if they fall down? How is that going to help anybody?
I would guess that he would feel that the commission was the wrong instrument to fix the underlying problem in the first place, and so giving specific suggestions to that same body would only weaken his argument.
There is a hint of how he would prefer to solve the problem:
> the free exercise of engineering skill in this country, subjected as it ever is, under the present system, to the severe and unerring control and test of competing skill and of public opinion.
The ultimate goal should not be solely "never let X happen ever again" because that would ignore any harmful effects of prioritizing that goal over everything else. In the limit, the most effective approach would be to build no more bridges. (Lest you think I am being extreme, how many nuclear power plants do you see being built outside of China?)
With the commission in the article, would it have been better or worse if they had then produced no regulations? We can't really know. Presumably the engineers of the time weren't stupid, so they would take steps to avoid repeating the mistake. How well would that information be disseminated and internalized by the profession? I don't know, but I also don't know the effect of regulations and red tape.
It was a different time and with a vastly different scale of things happening (and poorer communications mechanisms too, but also a smaller community to communicate within). I wouldn't want to just abandon regulations today, but I also think that regulations have stifled a lot of potential progress and cost a lot of lives. We did not find an optimal path, sadly, and we seem to stray further from the optimal every day.
External regulation helps except in the ways it doesn't. Self-regulation works until it doesn't. I don't think there's a simple "just do X" fix to this sort of thing.
> The ultimate goal should not be solely "never let X happen ever again" because that would ignore any harmful effects of prioritizing that goal over everything else.
I can’t help but think that aviation safety is a counter example to this. The 737 Max disasters were almost entirely a failure or regulation in an industry which has otherwise produced a huge amount of both innovation and safety improvements over the last 50 years - leading to the recent launch of the worlds largest rocket just a few days ago.
This rocket was launched with regulatory approval - and still went kaboom! - demonstrating at least that innovation and rism is still possible within a regulatory framework that prioritises safety.
Aircraft safety standards and rocket safety standards are totally different!
SpaceX has blown up 7 rockets and advanced ridiculously quickly. On the other hand we are aggressively safety conscious in aviation and that’s great but in the first 60 years of flight we went from the Wright brothers to the 737 and in the next 60 years we went from the 737 to the 737 Max.
As much as people hate to hear you can’t have it both ways, I think the evidence we can take from this is that innovation basically isn’t possible within an aggressively safety optimizing regime.
My point was that the FAA regulates both. So it seems to counter the idea that regulation necessarily impedes progress.
I must say, suggesting that the only progress we've seen in aviation is from the 737 to the 737 Max is very disingenuous. Since the first flight of the original 737 in 1967, we've seen - this is just a tiny and obvious sample - the 747, 767, 777, A300, A380, A350... composite wings and fuselages, glass cockpits, fly-by-wire, high-bypass turbofans, TCAS, GPS, ETOPS, ADS-B... it's a very long list of innovations. It's incredible that you think the last 60 years has been static.
Well, if you define safety as “few deaths” vs “few explosions” then, sure. If SpaceX had to 100% avoid explosions they would make much less progress than they do.
But don’t be silly. Obviously safety is about avoiding harm to humans and avoiding damage to third parties. “Avoiding explosions” is usually a good partial proxy to achieve this goal but not always. In terms of rocketry you can’t reliably avoid explosions. So you do other things like launching towards an ocean, maritime exlusion zones, NOTAMs. Even with manned rockets we usually can’t entirely avoid explosions but instead furnish the manned compartment with some means of an escape system.
Have you thought about why SpaceX a company headquartered in Hawthorne, California is testing their rockets from Boca Chica, Texas? Wouldn’t it be so much simpler to just wheel the rocket out from their HQ and launch it right from there? Of course it would be, but when things predictably go wrong they would rain metal shrapnel on lovely Californian suburbs. The whole reason why they built a launch pad on a coast is safety. Not safety by not exploding things, but safety by making sure that when things explode people and other people’s property will be unharmed.
Well, if engineers aren't allowed to design new types of bridges (which, in the nature of things, will occasionally fall down) society would never advance past the "rough-hewn log over the stream" stage.
