An interesting section from the article (read the whole thing though):
"I heard a fascinating story just this week from a physics professor here in Austin who has written a paper about how the British lost the commercial airliner industry after World War II. They set out with a national priority to dominate civilian aviation. But they had the wrong model. And their model was that they would inspect the hell out of their planes so that there was no metal fatigue. And their planes kept falling out of the sky. They kept saying ‘we inspected them,’ but there was still metal fatigue.
Boeing hired a grad student who didn’t know the accepted wisdom that there could be no failure. He read all the papers on the subject, found some obscure guy who said that what we have to do is make the planes more resilient so they can tolerate cracks in the metal, and based on that Boeing figured out how to use tougher material that could handle cracks. They figured out what the maximum crack length was before you had a catastrophic failure and they figured out how to have periodic reinforcements so that cracks would never get longer than that—rather than that there would be no cracks at all.
And in a similar way, we need to understand what’s a catastrophic crack and what’s tolerable. And if we can have more tolerance for failure, we’ll have a more resilient system and a more resilient system is more adaptable, and it’s going to do better."
Fracture Mechanics (the study of cracks in structural materials) was pioneered by Griffith and was well known prior to WWII. He's not exactly "obscure" in the field of mechanical/aerospace engineering.
EDIT: Although, I do remember hearing my material science professer tell us that it was not actually Griffith who came up with the theory, but one of his graduate students. Anyone know more about the history here?
Sufficiently obscure at the time for his knowledge to be unavailable to the British airline industry. I'm just glad someone picked the knowledge up and ran with it.
"I heard a fascinating story just this week from a physics professor here in Austin who has written a paper about how the British lost the commercial airliner industry after World War II. They set out with a national priority to dominate civilian aviation. But they had the wrong model. And their model was that they would inspect the hell out of their planes so that there was no metal fatigue. And their planes kept falling out of the sky. They kept saying ‘we inspected them,’ but there was still metal fatigue.
Boeing hired a grad student who didn’t know the accepted wisdom that there could be no failure. He read all the papers on the subject, found some obscure guy who said that what we have to do is make the planes more resilient so they can tolerate cracks in the metal, and based on that Boeing figured out how to use tougher material that could handle cracks. They figured out what the maximum crack length was before you had a catastrophic failure and they figured out how to have periodic reinforcements so that cracks would never get longer than that—rather than that there would be no cracks at all.
And in a similar way, we need to understand what’s a catastrophic crack and what’s tolerable. And if we can have more tolerance for failure, we’ll have a more resilient system and a more resilient system is more adaptable, and it’s going to do better."