Catastrophic Failure

Abstract

Previous chapters have dealt with failure using examples drawn mainly from Edison’s laboratory notebooks. Even when these failures significant effect on the inventions he was developing, none could be described as a catastrophic failure. In contrast, catastrophic failures are easily recognised because the artefact is either destroyed or severely damaged, often at considerable economic and human cost. It takes no specialist knowledge to recognise that a collapsed bridge, a train crash or a ship sinking is a failure. Because of the cost of catastrophic failures, most literature relating to the failure of artefacts deals with catastrophic cases yet the overwhelming majority of failures are not catastrophic or even dramatic. A pen that stops writing is just as much a failure as a collapsed bridge. Both the pen and the bridge are failures because they do not meet a success criterion, not because of the consequences of not meeting it. What distinguishes a catastrophic failure is the consequences of failure.