The paper looks at the place of trial and error as a formal part of engineering practice, how unexpected catastrophe influences engineering standards and behaviours, as well as the more recent influence of litigation and product liability on tolerance for failure. I am particularly interested in how failures are reported through engineering institute lectures and publications – in the past, reporting of failure was encouraged and added considerably to the engineering body of knowledge, whereas nowadays reporting of failure, even in a prototype or lab environment, is strongly discouraged by the corporate lawyers. My thesis would be that this limits the body of engineering knowledge.