Edward Tenner is the go-to expert for explaining why things go tragically wrong—specifically when technology and culture collide. His 1997 book Why Things Bite Back: Technology and the Revenge of Unintended Consequences should be required reading for all designers working in today’s world.
As science editor of Princeton University Press, Tenner published general-interest books in astrophysics, animal behavior and earth sciences. In 1991 he received a Guggenheim Fellowship and was appointed a visitor at the Institute for Advanced Study (Albert Einstein’s bailiwick for over 20 years), where he began a project on the unintended consequences of technology. As a fellow of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, he turned to the history of human interactions with everyday objects, which led to Our Own Devices: The Past and Future of Body Technology. His new book, Why the Hindenburg Had a Smoking Lounge: Essays in Unintended Consequences, is what Sherry Turkle calls “a masterclass in the complexities of human/machine entanglement.” I’d add “design” to the melange.
Here Tenner discusses some promising inventions that took a bad turn, focusing, as does the title of his book, on the greater wisdom of allowing passengers to smoke in a giant airship using hydrogen to keep it afloat.
The Hindenburg as it instantly caught fire at Lakehurst, New Jersey, while attempting a landing.
What triggered your interest in unintended consequences?
The science portfolio at Princeton University Press was a technological laboratory. I was already corresponding with Soviet scientists via the internet in 1988 while preparing for a visit to Moscow as a guest of the Academy of Sciences Space Science institute. Some of the examples in Bite Back emerged from my experience. For instance the TEX programming language, widely used for books with equations, was not designed to drive publishers’ typesetting systems, and it was often more economical for typesetting contractors to (discretely) discard the TEX file and set conventionally with lower-paid human operators than to retain programming specialists to fix the inevitable bugs, for example in making a proper hairline rule. I also saw the growth of PUP’s computer network filled our recycling bins, and they were huge at the time, the size of commercial laundry baskets. My most frequently reprinted essay of the 1990s, included in Hindenburg, was “The Paradoxical Proliferation of Paper.” I enjoyed selling reprint rights to paper companies.
How is it possible to engineer and design something without seeking to know all the possible outcomes?
It isn’t, but it is possible to design so that the inevitable glitches can be corrected promptly and economically. Little failures can be good.
Are there countless disasters just waiting to happen? Similarly, are there countless miracles in the wings?
As my Princeton freshman seminar, Understanding Disasters, explored, there are so many potential disasters that we lack resources to prevent or even mitigate all of them. Also, sometimes a predicted disaster, like a new Spanish flu, may have surprising features as COVID-19 did, that make many preparations moot. Sometimes as with Katrina and the Los Angeles fires, people are aware and take precautions, but the scale of the event blows them away. If I had to name a candidate, it would be a regional power failure because there are so many possible causes: climate change, grid overload from crypto and AI, difficulty of integrating renewables, state actors, and terrorists. We may be due for one within 10 years. I was on the media circuit 22 years ago in 2003.
You’ve recorded dozens of examples, but the title of your book speaks to the one that is the most disastrous. Why did a gas-filled, “lighter-than-air” airship indeed have a smoking lounge?
It was pure economics. The Zeppelins were the Concordes of the 1930s, trading the luxury of first class on the Normandie for speed at the cost of relatively spartan quarters. Few people could afford tickets, and up to half of them smoked. Plus the Zeppelin company, unlike ill-fated British and American military dirigibles, had an unblemished safety record. The passengers, I suspect, were willing to accept the imperfections of the safety systems, like negative air pressure. I’ve written on strategi ignorance.
With all its potential dangers, smoking tobacco was routine on airplanes. Why were people encouraged to smoke on board the Hindenburg?
We have largely forgotten the ritual aspect of smoking. I encountered this while researching my Ph.D. dissertation on popular disorders in early 19th-century Germany. Tobacco pipes, often elaborately decorated, were fixtures of student rituals. Early 19th-century monarchs banned smoking in public parks as a plebeian branch of decorum. Berlin revolutionaries demanded the right to smoke in the Tiergarten! Smoking was also perceived as a form of intoxication. The word Rausch, used today for marijuana smoke, originally applied to tobacco. As recently as the 1980s a cartoon appeared in a German newspaper of a timid middle-aged man about to sit down with regulars at the Stammtisch, asking them, “Do you mind if I don’t smoke?”
Some souvenir Hindenburg ashtrays were made with real diesel fuel. You can’t make this up. The ashtrays on board were more utilitarian brass.
You wanted to use the late Bruce McCall’s famous National Lampoon illustration from his faux travel brochure of the Hindenburg maiden voyage. What stopped you from doing so?
The artist’s agent and our copyright editor agreed to terms, and I was convinced that Bruce McCall would have loved the idea. I don’t know the family’s reason for rejecting the offer. But I’m glad they did because the ultimate design was even better, reflecting the variety of essays, not just the title piece.
In addition to the Hindenburg, what are your top five examples, and why?
1. The Titanic, of course. The big surprise is that the ship was following customary practices in sea ice. Many other disaster themes were foretold by Titanic.
2. The Eastland was a Great Lakes excursion ship that capsized while loading partly because of the extra weight of lifeboats added in response to Titanic.
3. The collision of two 747s on a runway on Tenerife, Canary Islands—partly the result of Dutch safety legislation that pressured the captain to take off as soon as possible to avoid exceeding flying time.
4. The Stockholm ramming the Andrea Doria in the fog in 1956—what is called a radar-assisted collision. The former’s navigator misread the radar scale to believe that the Andrea Doria was three times the true distance.
5. Y2K—the disaster that didn’t happen, probably because predictions of disaster inspired upgraded computer systems and remote backup, which saved many companies when the unforeseen disaster, Sept. 11, happened. (I was a speaker at a security conference at Annapolis in 1998, and nobody mentioned air terrorism. It was all about dealing with feared cyberattacks on Jan. 1, 2000.) The Times invited me to write a postmortem. Even now, nobody understands why there were so few incidents.
I wrote on the Eastland for JFK Jr.’s George. He telephoned me after seeing Bite Back in a bookstore [while] looking for another book. You can see why I believe in serendipity. The essay was based on an excellent book by an economist.
The ashtrays on board were more utilitarian brass.
Were there any examples that consequently were dropped from the book?
The people who bought the IP of the Industry Standard demanded a fee for reproducing my own essays in my collection. I excluded such cases, including several pieces from the NYT, which has an apparently rigid arrangement with its sourced rights company. This piece observes that [former F.B.I. director] J. Edgar Hoover learned the use of filing systems as an intern at the Library of Congress; the librarian also had expanded the library’s role as a national library unauthorized by the Constitution in a way that Hoover would repeat in his FBI career.
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