We begin with a chapter of accidents. The accident par excellence of the twentieth century was the loss of the RMS Titanic, which on the night of 12 April 1912 collided with an iceberg in the North Atlantic. Who, or what, was to blame for this incident, which was to become so enduring and potent a cultural symbol? There are numerous potential explanations: the iceberg might have been sighted in time, but was not. A warning message was sent, but not passed on. The metal used for the construction of the ship's rivets contained impurities, with the result that they gave under strain. The ship's architects had miscalculated the ability of sealed-off compartments to maintain buoyancy. A wireless operator on a nearby ship, which could have arrived on the scene to rescue the passengers, had turned off his set, only twenty minutes earlier, with the result that Mayday messages were not received. If the crew had been equipped with binoculars, the watch might have been alarmed in time. All of these played some role in the final disaster.

The equivalent in our own times of the loss of the Titanic – in the sense that it demonstrated the same essential vulnerability of grandiose human ambitions – was the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger in 1986, 73 seconds after launch. It is clear that ring seals failed, causing the explosion of escaping fuel, but this failure would not have occurred had the seals not been exposed to low temperatures on the ground.