198 Fun Facts About Engineering

Which German-born engineer designed the Brooklyn Bridge and died of tetanus early in construction?

John A. Roebling's foot was crushed by a ferry in 1869 while he surveyed the tower site; the bridge he designed opened in 1883 as the world's longest suspension span.

Which illness, later known as 'the bends', left Washington Roebling bedridden while overseeing the Brooklyn Bridge?

Caisson disease struck workers who surfaced too fast from the pressurised caissons used to dig the tower foundations; the same illness had killed 15 men on the Eads Bridge in St. Louis.

What did Emily Warren Roebling carry as a symbol of victory on the first carriage ride across the Brooklyn Bridge?

Emily Warren Roebling rode across in 1883 with a rooster, a symbol of victory; she had taught herself cable construction to relay her bedridden husband's instructions to the site engineers.

The Eiffel Tower was built as the centrepiece of which event?

The 1889 World's Fair marked 100 years since the storming of the Bastille, and the tower was its showpiece.

The Eiffel Tower is made mainly of which material?

The Eiffel Tower is built from about 7,300 tonnes of puddled wrought iron; on hot days the top can lean up to 18 cm away from the sun as the sunny side expands.

Which country began digging the Panama Canal in 1881 and gave up eight years later?

France's Compagnie universelle du canal interocéanique began digging in 1881 and collapsed in bankruptcy in 1889; an estimated 22,000 workers died before the United States took over in 1904.

Which US Army engineer directed the Panama Canal to completion in 1914, two years ahead of target?

George Washington Goethals took charge in 1907 and the canal opened in August 1914; its locks lift ships about 26 metres up to Gatun Lake, formed by damming the Chagres River.

Hoover Dam holds back which river on the Nevada-Arizona border?

Hoover Dam impounds the Colorado River in Black Canyon; its reservoir, Lake Mead, was for decades the largest in the United States by volume.

How did engineers stop Hoover Dam's concrete from taking over a century to cool and cure?

Chilled water was pumped through embedded pipes to cool each concrete column; once a column stopped contracting the pipes were filled with grout. Uncooled, the mass would have taken over a century to cure.

Which principal engineer did most of the Golden Gate Bridge's calculations, only to be dismissed by Joseph Strauss?

Charles Alton Ellis did most of the structural calculations before Strauss dismissed him in 1931 and left him uncredited; the Art Deco towers were styled by architect Irving Morrow.

How tall is Dubai's Burj Khalifa, completed in 2010?

The Burj Khalifa rises 828 m to its tip; its Y-shaped 'buttressed core' lets three wings brace a hexagonal centre against wind without a heavy steel frame.

Which firm's engineers, led by Bill Baker, designed the Burj Khalifa's buttressed-core system?

Skidmore, Owings & Merrill's Chicago office devised the buttressed core under structural engineer Bill Baker, with Adrian Smith as design architect; construction ran from 2004 to 2010.

The Channel Tunnel was bored mostly through which rock layer?

Chalk marl, soft yet nearly impermeable, let eleven boring machines dig the three parallel bores; the tunnel opened in May 1994, inaugurated by Queen Elizabeth II and François Mitterrand.

The Millau Viaduct in southern France crosses the gorge of which river?

The Millau Viaduct spans the Tarn valley; Michel Virlogeux and Norman Foster's cable-stayed design, opened in 2004, tops out at 343 metres, taller than the Eiffel Tower.

What nickname did the Tacoma Narrows Bridge earn from its wobbling deck before it collapsed in 1940?

'Galloping Gertie' had been open just four months when a 40 mph wind set its deck twisting in opposite directions until it tore apart on 7 November 1940.

Modern analysis attributes the 1940 Tacoma Narrows collapse mainly to which phenomenon?

Aeroelastic flutter, a self-exciting torsional oscillation, is now blamed rather than simple resonance; the only fatality was Tubby, a cocker spaniel left in a car on the deck.

Which failed parts of the right rocket booster caused the 1986 Challenger disaster, after overnight temperatures dropped to about 18 °F?

O-ring seals, primary and secondary, failed in a joint of the right solid rocket booster, and the shuttle broke apart 73 seconds after liftoff.

Which physicist on the Rogers Commission dunked rubber in ice water on live TV to show why Challenger's seals failed?

Richard Feynman clamped an O-ring sample in ice water at a televised hearing to show it lost resilience; Thiokol engineers Roger Boisjoly and Allan McDonald had argued against the cold launch.

How many people died when two walkways collapsed at Kansas City's Hyatt Regency in 1981?

114 people died on 17 July 1981; a last-minute switch from single continuous hanger rods to two offset rods doubled the load on fourth-floor connections that met only 30% of code.

Titanic's iron rivets were found to be unusually brittle because they contained high levels of what?

Metallurgists testing recovered rivets found unusually high slag content in the wrought iron, which made rivet heads brittle in icy water and let hull plates part along their seams.

Brunel was first engineer of which railway, laying its London-Bristol line to a wide 7 ft gauge?

Brunel became the Great Western Railway's engineer in 1833; its Box Tunnel, opened in 1841, was the longest railway tunnel in the world despite claims it could never be built safely.

Which industrialist licensed Tesla's induction motor patents in 1888, sparking the 'war of the currents'?

George Westinghouse paid about $60,000 in cash and stock plus royalties for the patents in 1888; Tesla had quit Edison's Machine Works after about six months over a pay dispute.

The SI unit named after Tesla measures which quantity?

The tesla, adopted by the CGPM in 1960, measures magnetic flux density: one tesla equals one weber per square metre, or one newton per ampere-metre.

Edison's Pearl Street Station, switched on in 1882, delivered what kind of electricity?

Pearl Street supplied 110-volt direct current to about 85 customers in lower Manhattan from 4 September 1882; DC could only be sent about a mile before line losses became prohibitive.

The screw pump traditionally credited to Archimedes of Syracuse was designed to do what?

The Archimedes screw raises water up a helix turned inside a tube, draining bilges and irrigating fields; one contested theory says bronze versions watered the Hanging Gardens in Assyria centuries earlier.

For which Babbage machine did Ada Lovelace write her 'Notes' containing the first computer program?

Her 1843 notes on Menabrea's French article about the Analytical Engine, lettered A to G, ran three times the article's length; Note G gave an algorithm for computing Bernoulli numbers.

Elijah McCoy, the Edinburgh-trained son of escaped slaves, patented what device for locomotives in 1872?

McCoy's 1872 automatic lubricator oiled moving parts while the engine ran; the Michigan Central Railroad had hired the trained engineer only as a fireman and oiler. 'The real McCoy' is doubtfully traced to him.

Hedy Lamarr and George Antheil's 1942 frequency-hopping patent was for guiding which weapon?

The idea of hopping between channels to defeat jamming underpins Bluetooth and early Wi-Fi; the Electronic Frontier Foundation gave the pair a Pioneer Award in 1997.

Steel is an alloy of iron and which element?

Steel is iron with up to about 2% carbon, which makes it far harder and stronger than pure iron; add at least 11% chromium and you get stainless steel.

Concrete is usually reinforced with steel bars because alone it is weak under which load?

Concrete is strong in compression but weak in tension, so embedded steel bars carry the pulling loads; Joseph Monier patented reinforced concrete in 1867.

Who patented Portland cement in England in 1824?

Leeds bricklayer Joseph Aspdin took out the 1824 patent; the name came from a resemblance to Portland stone quarried in Dorset, not from any link to the city in Oregon.

Roman concrete owed its durability, and its ability to set in seawater, to which ingredient?

Volcanic ash (pozzolana) from the Bay of Naples reacted with lime to form a cement that hardened even under seawater; 2023 research also found lime clasts that regrow calcium carbonate to reseal cracks.

Roman aqueducts moved water across hundreds of kilometres using which force alone?

Aqueducts ran on gravity alone, their channels falling a few metres per kilometre; Rome's first, the Aqua Appia of 312 BC, fed a fountain at the cattle market.

Roughly how many stone blocks were quarried to build Khufu's Great Pyramid of Giza?

An estimated 2.3 million blocks, averaging more than two tonnes each, went into the pyramid; at 146.6 metres it stayed the tallest human-made structure for more than 3,800 years.

Which of these is NOT one of the six classical simple machines defined by Renaissance scientists?

Gear is not on the list; the six classical simple machines are the lever, wheel and axle, pulley, inclined plane, wedge and screw.

Trusses are built from which shape, which cannot deform without a member changing length?

Triangles are rigid: their angles cannot change unless a side changes length, so an ideal truss carries pure axial loads; a Warren truss alternates equilateral triangles along the span.

What is the wedge-shaped block at the top of a masonry arch called, the one that locks the others in place?

Keystone in, arch locked: every wedge-shaped block in the ring is a voussoir, and the outward push at the arch's feet, the thrust, is what abutments exist to resist.

The SI unit of inductance is named after which American scientist?

Joseph Henry, who discovered self-inductance independently of Faraday, gives his name to the henry; he became the Smithsonian Institution's first secretary in 1846.

In what year did Georg Ohm publish the book setting out the law that current is proportional to voltage?

Die galvanische Kette, mathematisch bearbeitet appeared in 1827 and was so poorly received in Germany that Ohm resigned his Cologne teaching post; the Royal Society's Copley Medal followed in 1841.

Who first worked out the idea behind Young's modulus, in 1727?

Leonhard Euler set out the concept in 1727; Giordano Riccati ran the first experiments in the modern form in 1782, 25 years before Thomas Young, whose name stuck.

The Haber-Bosch process makes which chemical from nitrogen and hydrogen?

Ammonia is synthesised over an iron catalyst at roughly 400-500 °C and 150-250 bar; about half the nitrogen in the average human body has passed through the process.

At which laboratory did John Bardeen and Walter Brattain demonstrate the first working transistor in 1947?

Bardeen and Brattain's point-contact transistor worked at Bell Labs in Murray Hill, New Jersey, on 16 December 1947; the MOSFET, also from Bell Labs in 1959, became the most manufactured device in history.

Moore's law observes that the number of transistors on an integrated circuit doubles roughly how often?

Gordon Moore's 1965 article, 'Cramming more components onto integrated circuits', predicted doubling every year; he revised it to every two years in 1975 and co-founded Fairchild Semiconductor and Intel.

What creature was the 'first actual case of bug being found' in Grace Hopper's 1947 log?

A moth had jammed a relay in the Harvard Mark II; it was taped into the logbook, a page now held by the Smithsonian.

Which rule from the 1738 book Hydrodynamica says a fluid's pressure drops where it speeds up?

Bernoulli's principle, from Daniel Bernoulli's 1738 Hydrodynamica, is the standard classroom explanation for why a carburettor draws fuel and why a shower curtain billows inward.

Which crossing overtook Japan's Akashi Kaikyo Bridge as the longest suspension span in 2022?

The Akashi span of 1,991 metres links Kobe with Awaji Island and had held the title since 1998.

Which engineer pioneered the 'tube' structural system behind the Sears Tower and John Hancock Center?

Fazlur Rahman Khan of SOM devised the framed and bundled tube systems; his ideas underlie most buildings over 40 storeys built since the 1960s, earning him the tag 'Einstein of structural engineering'.

What did the National Academy of Engineering, in a list Neil Armstrong announced in 2000, rank as the 20th century's top achievement?

Electrification topped the list; the automobile and airplane took second and third, and computers came in eighth.

US National Engineers Week coincides with the birthday of which president, regarded as the nation's first engineer?

Engineers Week falls around George Washington's 22 February birthday; his surveying and fort-building earned him the 'first engineer' label. The NSPE founded the week in 1951.

The word 'engineering' ultimately derives from a root in which ancient language?

The root is Latin: ingenium meant innate talent or a clever invention, and medieval Latin ingeniator described a builder of siege engines; the word reached English via Old French engigneor.

Which Roman engineer wrote that all buildings need firmitas, utilitas and venustas?

Vitruvius set out the triad in De architectura, written around 30-15 BC and dedicated to Augustus; Leonardo's Vitruvian Man illustrates its passage on human proportions.

Imhotep, an Egyptian chancellor of the 27th century BC, is credited as possible architect of what?

Imhotep is credited with Djoser's Step Pyramid at Saqqara, Egypt's first large stone building; he was also high priest of Ra at Heliopolis and was later deified as a god of medicine.

Which ancient Greek engineer described the aeolipile, a steam-powered spinning sphere?

Hero of Alexandria described the aeolipile in his Pneumatica in the first century AD: steam escaping from bent nozzles spun the sphere, the earliest recorded reaction turbine.

The Antikythera mechanism, discovered in 1901, is the oldest known example of what?

The bronze gearwork is regarded as the oldest known analogue computer; built around the 2nd century BC, it modelled the positions of the Moon and planets and predicted eclipses decades ahead.

Chinese polymath Zhang Heng presented which instrument to the court in AD 132?

Zhang Heng's seismoscope was a bronze vessel whose dragon heads dropped a ball into a toad's mouth; it reportedly registered an earthquake in Longxi some 500 km away that no one in Luoyang had felt.

Al-Jazari, author of a 1206 book of mechanical devices, served which dynasty's court?

Al-Jazari worked at the Artuqids' court in Diyarbakır, finishing his Book of Knowledge of Ingenious Mechanical Devices in 1206; its elephant clock and crank-driven water pumps are his best-known designs.

The Pont du Gard carried water about 50 km to which Roman colony?

The aqueduct wound about 50 km from springs near Uzès to the colony of Nîmes; the Pont du Gard's three tiers of arches stand 48.8 m high, the tallest of all Roman aqueduct bridges.

Construction of the Colosseum began under Vespasian and was completed in AD 80 under whom?

Titus inaugurated the Flavian Amphitheatre in AD 80 with 100 days of games; his brother Domitian later added the hypogeum beneath the arena. It remains the largest ancient amphitheatre ever built.

The Roman road network comprised more than how many kilometres of roads?

At the empire's height the network exceeded 400,000 km, of which over 80,500 km was stone-paved; the Via Appia, begun in 312 BC, was the first great trunk road.

The Great Wall of China's collective fortifications span roughly how far in total?

A 2012 Chinese state survey put all the walls' combined length at 21,196 km; the best-known Ming-dynasty sections account for roughly 8,850 km of that.

Machu Picchu is believed to have been built around 1450 as an estate for which Inca emperor?

Pachacuti, the ninth Sapa Inca who expanded the empire from Cusco, is thought to have had the estate built around 1450; Hiram Bingham brought it to international attention in 1911.

The trebuchet first appeared in the 4th century BC in which country?

The traction trebuchet, swung by crews hauling ropes, first appeared in China in the 4th century BC; the counterweight version emerged around the eastern Mediterranean in the 12th century.

The Roman crane shown on the first-century Haterii tomb relief is powered by what?

The Haterii relief shows a polyspastos crane driven by men walking inside a human treadwheel; with a multiple-pulley block such cranes could lift several tonnes.

Opened in 1781, the famous bridge at Coalbrookdale over the Severn was the first major bridge made of what?

Abraham Darby III cast the ribs at Coalbrookdale; the Iron Bridge, opened on New Year's Day 1781, was the first major bridge built of cast iron and became a symbol of the Industrial Revolution.

Whose steam locomotive hauled the world's first locomotive-drawn railway journey at Penydarren in 1804?

Trevithick also developed the first high-pressure steam engine.

Stephenson's Rocket won which 1829 competition to pick locomotives for the Liverpool and Manchester Railway?

The Rainhill Trials of October 1829 saw Rocket, built by Robert Stephenson and Company at Forth Street Works in Newcastle, beat four rivals and reach about 30 mph.

The Liverpool and Manchester Railway, opened in 1830, holds which distinction?

Opened on 15 September 1830, it was the world's first inter-city railway; it was also the first to rely exclusively on steam locomotives and the first to carry mail.

Standard railway gauge, 1,435 mm, is also known by the name of which engineer?

George Stephenson adopted 4 ft 8½ in (1,435 mm) from the Killingworth colliery wagonways, and it became 'Stephenson gauge'; Brunel's Great Western used a 7 ft broad gauge instead.

Thomas Telford was dubbed the 'Colossus of Roads' and became the first president of which body?

Telford became the Institution of Civil Engineers' first president in 1820 and held the post for 14 years until his death in 1834; 'Colossus of Roads' was Robert Southey's pun.

Telford's Pontcysyllte Aqueduct carries a canal over which river?

The cast-iron trough crosses the Dee valley near Llangollen on nineteen arches, 38 m above the river; opened in 1805, it became a World Heritage Site in 2009.

Brunel's first major project, halted in 1828 after a flood nearly drowned him, was what?

Brunel was resident engineer on the Thames Tunnel when it flooded in January 1828, killing six men; work stopped for seven years and the tunnel opened in 1843 without him.

Brunel's SS Great Eastern was repurposed in the 1860s to do what?

Great Eastern was refitted to lay transatlantic telegraph cable, losing the 1865 attempt mid-ocean and succeeding in 1866; at her 1858 launch she was by far the largest ship ever built.

Joseph Bazalgette built London's sewer system in response to which 1858 event?

The Great Stink of summer 1858, when the Thames' stench forced Parliament to act, led to Bazalgette's intercepting sewers, completed in 1875; they helped end London's cholera epidemics.

The 1856 Bessemer process made cheap steel by blowing what through molten pig iron?

Blowing air through molten pig iron oxidised excess carbon and other impurities, and the reaction's own heat kept the metal molten; Bessemer announced the process in 1856.

Henry Bessemer helped establish which English town as 'Steel City'?

Bessemer set up his own steelworks in Sheffield in 1858, and the town's crucible and Bessemer steel trades made it 'Steel City'.

Which 1800 Henry Maudslay invention allowed thread sizes to be standardised for the first time?

Maudslay's screw-cutting lathe of about 1800 used a leadscrew and change gears to cut threads of repeatable pitch; his original is in London's Science Museum.

Joseph Whitworth's 1841 screw thread standard fixed the thread angle at how many degrees?

British Standard Whitworth fixed a 55-degree thread angle with rounded roots and crests; it was the world's first national screw thread standard.

Joseph Bramah, the locksmith who invented the hydraulic press, also improved which household fixture?

Bramah's 1778 patent improved the flush toilet with a hinged flap valve and float; his 'Challenge Lock' of 1790 went unpicked until 1851.

In 1788, James Watt adapted which device to regulate steam admission in his engine?

The centrifugal governor's spinning weights rise as speed increases, closing the throttle; Huygens had used the device in the 17th century to regulate the gap between windmill millstones.

Elisha Otis's 1853 invention prevented elevators from doing what if the cable failed?

Otis's safety brake locked the car to its guide rails if the hoisting rope failed, stopping it from falling; he installed the first passenger safety elevator in New York's Haughwout store in 1857.

Ford's assembly line was introduced by William 'Pa' Klann after visiting what kind of facility in Chicago?

Klann visited Swift & Company's Chicago slaughterhouse, where carcasses moved past workers on an overhead 'disassembly line'; Ford's moving assembly line started at Highland Park in 1913.

Which French gunsmith began producing some of the first firearms with interchangeable flintlock parts around 1778?

Honoré Blanc, working under artillery reformer Gribeauval's patronage, showed Thomas Jefferson in 1785 that musket locks assembled from parts picked at random would fit together.

The Forth Bridge, completed in 1890, is which type of bridge?

It held the longest cantilever span until Canada's Quebec Bridge in 1919.

The Quebec Bridge collapsed during construction in which two years?

The south arm fell in August 1907, killing 75, and the centre span dropped into the St. Lawrence in September 1916, killing 13 more; its 549 m cantilever span was the world's longest when it opened in 1917.

Which British firm designed and built the Sydney Harbour Bridge, opened in 1932?

Dorman Long of Middlesbrough won the contract in 1924, with Ralph Freeman as its consulting designer; the firm had already built the similar Tyne Bridge at Newcastle, opened in 1928.

The Sydney Harbour Bridge earned what nickname because of its arch design?

'The Coathanger' comes from the bridge's 503-metre steel arch; it carries rail, road, bicycle and pedestrian traffic across the harbour.

Completed in 1874, the Eads Bridge crosses which river?

It was the first bridge across the Mississippi south of the Missouri.

Swiss-American engineer Othmar Ammann designed which New York crossing, opened in 1931?

Ammann's George Washington Bridge opened in October 1931 with a 1,067 m main span, nearly double the previous record; he later designed the Bayonne and Verrazzano-Narrows bridges.

On its opening day in June 2000, London's Millennium Bridge was closed because of what?

Crowds fell into step with the deck's swaying motion, a synchronous lateral excitation; dampers were fitted over almost two years at about £5 million and it reopened in February 2002.

The Øresund Bridge links Sweden to which artificial island in the middle of the strait?

The bridge lands on Peberholm, an artificial island built from dredged material; from there the 4 km Drogden tunnel completes the link to Amager and Copenhagen.

The 55 km Hong Kong-Zhuhai-Macau Bridge, opened in 2018, crosses which body of water?

The crossing spans the Pearl River estuary's Lingdingyang waters, combining cable-stayed bridges with a 6.7 km immersed tunnel so that shipping lanes stay open; it opened in October 2018.

The 164.8 km Danyang-Kunshan Grand Bridge, opened in 2011, carries which high-speed line?

The viaduct carries the Beijing-Shanghai high-speed railway across the Yangtze delta lowlands between Danyang and Kunshan; it opened in June 2011 and Guinness recognised it as the longest bridge.

The Gateway Arch in St. Louis is built in the form of what curve?

Eero Saarinen's 1947 competition design is a weighted catenary, flattened because the legs are heavier than the crown; the 630-foot stainless-steel arch was completed in 1965.

A catenary is the curve formed by what?

A hanging chain under its own weight settles into a catenary, from Latin catena, 'chain'; the same curve appears in the cross-section of a soap film stretched between two rings.

Which 57 km base tunnel beneath the Swiss Alps opened in 2016?

The Gotthard Base Tunnel, 57.1 km long, opened on 1 June 2016 after 17 years of construction and gave the Alps their first flat, low-level rail route.

Japan's Seikan Tunnel runs beneath which body of water?

The 53.85 km Seikan Tunnel runs about 100 m below the seabed of the Tsugaru Strait; it opened in 1988 and links Honshu with Hokkaido.

Who developed the first successful tunnelling shield, used under the Thames from 1825?

Marc Isambard Brunel patented the shield in 1818, inspired by the burrowing shipworm, and used it from 1825 on the Thames Tunnel; James Greathead later refined it for London's tube.

Who formed the Compagnie universelle du canal maritime de Suez in 1858 to build the canal?

Ferdinand de Lesseps, a former consul in Egypt, won the concession from Said Pasha and formed the company in 1858; the canal opened on 17 November 1869 after ten years of construction.

The Erie Canal, completed in 1825, was the first navigable waterway from the Atlantic to where?

Running 363 miles from the Hudson at Albany to Lake Erie at Buffalo, it gave the Atlantic seaboard a navigable route to the upper Great Lakes and cut freight costs by about 90%.

What is the installed capacity of China's Three Gorges Dam, fully commissioned in 2012?

Its 34 turbines total 22,500 MW of installed capacity; the dam spans the Yangtze near Yichang in Hubei, and its last main generator came online in 2012.

The Itaipu Dam on the Paraná River is jointly run by Brazil and which country?

Itaipu Binacional is owned equally by Brazil and Paraguay and straddles their border; its 20 generating units of 700 MW each total 14,000 MW.

Grand Coulee Dam, completed in 1942 in Washington state, sits on which river?

Grand Coulee spans the Columbia River in Washington state; a third powerhouse begun in 1967 eventually raised its capacity to 6,809 MW.

The Thames Barrier, protecting London from North Sea surges, became operational in which year?

The barrier became operational in 1982 and was formally opened by the Queen in May 1984; its rotating gates close ahead of dangerous high tides and reopen at low tide.

The Dutch Delta Works were built between 1954 and 1997 in South Holland and which other province?

The Delta Works mostly shield Zeeland, whose islands were devastated by the 1953 North Sea flood; closing the estuaries shortened the coastline by about 700 km so fewer dikes had to be raised.

For how many years did the CN Tower hold the record as the world's tallest free-standing structure?

The CN Tower topped out at 553 m in 1975 and held the record for 32 years until the rising Burj Khalifa passed it in September 2007.

Which architectural firm designed the Empire State Building in the Art Deco style?

Shreve, Lamb & Harmon's design went up in just 13 months, from March 1930 to April 1931, with William F. Lamb as chief designer.

Which architect designed the Petronas Towers, the world's tallest buildings from 1998 to 2004?

Argentine-American architect César Pelli designed the 88-storey towers, completed in 1998 and overtaken by Taipei 101 in 2004; their floor plan is an eight-pointed star of Islamic geometry.

How wide is the 660-tonne tuned mass damper hanging inside Taipei 101?

The 660-tonne steel sphere is 18 feet (5.5 m) across and hangs between the 92nd and 87th floors, swinging to counter wind; the tower stands about 200 m from a major fault.

How many storeys does the Willis (Sears) Tower have?

The 110-storey Willis Tower opened in 1973 as the world's tallest building, 442 m to the roof, and held the title for nearly 25 years until the Petronas Towers in 1998.

One World Trade Center's symbolic height in feet matches which year?

The tower's height of 1776 feet echoes the year of the Declaration of Independence; the spire's final section was installed on 10 May 2013.

How tall is the 128-storey Shanghai Tower?

It was the world's second-tallest building from 2015 until Merdeka 118 opened.

Jeddah Tower in Saudi Arabia was designed to be the first building to reach what height?

Jeddah Tower was designed to be the first building to reach 1 kilometre, roughly 170 metres above the Burj Khalifa's 828 m; Adrian Smith, the Burj's architect, designed it.

The Sydney Opera House was formally opened in 1973, how many years after Utzon won the design competition?

Utzon won the competition in January 1957 and the Queen opened the building in October 1973, 16 years later; Utzon had resigned in 1966 amid cost and schedule overruns, and Peter Hall's team finished it.

Ove Arup, founder of the Arup engineering firm, was born in which English city?

Ove Arup was born in Newcastle upon Tyne in 1895 to a Danish veterinary surgeon and his Norwegian wife; he was educated in Denmark and founded his firm in London in 1946.

Beijing's 'Bird's Nest' National Stadium was completed in June 2008 for which event?

The stadium hosted the 2008 Summer Olympics' opening and closing ceremonies and athletics; it seats 80,000, or 91,000 with the temporary seating used during the Games.

Who designed Terminal 1 of Japan's Kansai International Airport, opened in 1994?

Renzo Piano's 1.7 km-long Terminal 1 opened in 1994 on an artificial island in Osaka Bay, its wing-shaped roof designed to channel air across the hall.

Dubai's Palm Jumeirah is divided into the trunk, the fronds and what third area?

The outer crescent is an 11 km breakwater sheltering the trunk and the 16 fronds; Palm Jumeirah was built from 94 million cubic metres of dredged sand and welcomed its first residents in 2006.

The first geodesic dome was designed after World War I by Walther Bauersfeld for which company?

Bauersfeld's dome, built on the roof of the Carl Zeiss works in Jena in 1922, housed a planetarium projector; Buckminster Fuller later coined 'geodesic' and patented the design in 1954.

Who patented prestressed concrete in 1928?

Eugène Freyssinet patented prestressed concrete in 1928, tensioning high-strength steel so the concrete sits in compression before loading; Monier had patented ordinary reinforced concrete in 1867.

The Leaning Tower of Pisa began leaning during construction in which century?

Construction began in 1173 and the tilt appeared in 1178 while the third storey was going up, so the lean dates from the 12th century; soft ground could not support the bell tower's weight.

Robert Hooke first stated his law of elasticity in 1676 in what form?

Hooke published the Latin anagram 'ceiiinosssttuv' in 1676 and revealed its solution in 1678: ut tensio, sic vis, 'as the extension, so the force'.

In materials science, fatigue is the growth of cracks caused by what kind of loading?

Fatigue cracks grow a little with each cycle of repeated, cyclic loading well below the static strength; metal fatigue around window corners destroyed two de Havilland Comet airliners in 1954.

Aluminium is smelted by the Hall-Héroult process, which dissolves alumina in what molten substance?

Alumina dissolves in molten cryolite (Na3AlF6) at about 950 °C, far below alumina's own melting point, making electrolysis practical; the alumina itself comes from bauxite via the Bayer process.

Kevlar, developed by Stephanie Kwolek in 1965, was first used commercially in place of steel in what?

Kevlar's first commercial use, in the early 1970s, was replacing steel in racing tires; by strength-to-weight ratio the aramid fibre is about five times stronger than steel.

Bakelite, the first fully synthetic plastic, was developed by Leo Baekeland in 1907 in which New York town?

Baekeland made the phenol-formaldehyde resin in his home laboratory in Yonkers in 1907 and patented it in 1909; he had earlier sold his Velox photographic paper to Kodak.

DuPont announced nylon to the public shortly before which event?

Nylon was announced on 27 October 1938 and shown at the 1939 New York World's Fair, where stockings drew crowds; DuPont's fundamental research programme had begun in 1927.

Charles Goodyear's 1839 discovery of vulcanization treated rubber with heat and which element?

Goodyear found in 1839 that heating rubber with sulfur made it stable and elastic; sulfur atoms cross-link the polymer chains, and the process was named after Vulcan, the Roman god of fire.

The first modern patent on ball bearings went to Welsh ironmaster Philip Vaughan of which town?

Philip Vaughan of Carmarthen patented his ball bearing for carriage axles in 1794; the Conrad-style deep-groove bearing followed with a British patent in 1903.

Which mathematician is credited with the saying 'Give me a lever long enough and I shall move the world'?

Archimedes' boast is reported by Pappus of Alexandria; a lever multiplies force about a fulcrum, and Archimedes set out the law of the lever in On the Equilibrium of Planes.

The slide rule was developed in the 17th century based on whose work on logarithms?

John Napier published logarithms in 1614; Edmund Gunter marked them on a scale in 1620 and William Oughtred slid two such scales together around 1622 to make the first slide rule.

The finite element method traces back to early-1940s work by Alexander Hrennikoff and whom?

Courant divided domains into finite triangular sub-regions to solve torsion problems.

Francis Wenham built the first enclosed wind tunnel in which year?

Wenham's tunnel of 1871, built for the Aeronautical Society of Great Britain, used a fan to blow air down a 12-foot box; Benjamin Robins had earlier used a whirling arm to measure drag.

The volt is named after Alessandro Volta, who invented what in 1799?

The voltaic pile was the first true battery; Volta reported it in a two-part letter to the Royal Society published in 1800, and he also discovered methane after reading Franklin on 'flammable air'.

Michael Faraday's discoveries include electrolysis, diamagnetism and which principle behind generators?

Faraday discovered electromagnetic induction in 1831, showing a changing magnetic field drives current in a nearby circuit, the principle of every generator; he also discovered benzene and coined 'anode', 'cathode' and 'ion'.

The first constant-potential transformer was invented in which year?

Transformers made long-distance AC transmission practical.

The ampere is defined as one what per second passing a point?

One ampere is one coulomb of charge passing per second; it honours André-Marie Ampère, a founder of electrodynamics, and since 2019 has been defined by fixing the elementary charge.

One joule is the work done when a force of one newton moves a body how far?

A joule is one newton acting through one metre; it honours English physicist James Prescott Joule, whose 1840s experiments showed heat and mechanical work are equivalent.

Roughly what average power output can a labourer sustain over an eight-hour day?

About 75 watts is the typical sustained output of a healthy labourer over an eight-hour shift, roughly a tenth of a horsepower; the watt honours James Watt, whose improved engines entered service in 1776.

Who was the first woman professionally employed as an electrical engineer in the United States?

Edith Clarke was hired as an electrical engineer by General Electric in 1922 and in 1947 became the country's first female professor of electrical engineering, at the University of Texas.

Hertha Ayrton won the Royal Society's Hughes Medal for her work on electric arcs and what?

Ayrton received the 1906 Hughes Medal for her research on the electric arc and on ripple marks in sand and water, explaining how oscillating water shapes sand ripples; she held 26 patents.

The IEEE was formed in 1963 by merging the AIEE with which body founded in 1912?

The Institute of Radio Engineers, founded in 1912, merged with the 1884 AIEE on 1 January 1963 to form the IEEE; the IRE had outgrown its older rival by the mid-1950s.

The American Society of Civil Engineers, the oldest US national engineering society, was founded in what year?

ASCE was founded in New York on 5 November 1852 by twelve engineers, making it the oldest national engineering society in the United States; it is headquartered in Reston, Virginia.

Canada's Iron Ring ceremony for engineers was written by which poet?

Rudyard Kipling wrote 'The Ritual of the Calling of an Engineer' at the request of Canadian engineers in 1922, and the first ceremony was held in 1925; the ring is worn on the little finger of the working hand.

Jack Kilby demonstrated the first working integrated circuit on 12 September 1958 at which company?

Kilby, a new hire at Texas Instruments who had not yet earned summer leave, built his germanium circuit in the near-empty lab in 1958; Robert Noyce at Fairchild independently developed a silicon version soon after.

Intel's first microprocessor, released in 1971, was a CPU of how many bits?

The Intel 4004 was a 4-bit processor with 2,300 transistors, built for Busicom calculators; design work was led by new Intel hire Federico Faggin.

ENIAC, completed in 1945, was designed to calculate what for the US Army?

ENIAC was built at the University of Pennsylvania by John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert to compute artillery firing tables for the Army's Ballistic Research Laboratory; its first big job was instead hydrogen-bomb calculations.

Konrad Zuse's Z3, operational in May 1941, is regarded as the world's first what?

The Z3, built from 2,600 relays, is regarded as the first working programmable, fully automatic digital computer; Zuse's later Z4 became the world's first commercial computer when ETH Zurich leased it in 1950.

Claude Shannon's 1937 MIT master's thesis applied which kind of algebra to relay circuits?

Shannon's thesis, 'A Symbolic Analysis of Relay and Switching Circuits', showed Boolean algebra could design and simplify relay circuits, founding digital logic; he went on to found information theory in 1948.

On what date in 1989 did Tim Berners-Lee propose the information management system that became the Web?

Berners-Lee submitted 'Information Management: A Proposal' at CERN on 12 March 1989; his boss Mike Sendall annotated it 'Vague but exciting', and he built the first browser and server in 1990.

The Apollo Guidance Computer was the first computer based on what?

The AGC was the first computer built from silicon integrated circuits, using about 2,800 Fairchild dual three-input NOR-gate chips; its software was stored in hand-woven core rope memory.

Margaret Hamilton, who led Apollo's on-board flight code, coined which term?

Hamilton is credited with coining 'software engineering' to give her discipline the respect hardware had; she led the MIT Instrumentation Laboratory's flight-software team and received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2016.

Charles Kao laid the groundwork for fibre-optic communication in 1966 at a lab in which English town?

Kao and George Hockham at Standard Telecommunication Laboratories in Harlow, Essex, showed in 1966 that glass-fibre loss could fall below 20 dB/km once impurities were removed; Kao won the 2009 Nobel Prize.

Who built the first laser, in 1960, at Hughes Research Laboratories?

Theodore Maiman fired the first laser, a flash-lamp-pumped synthetic ruby rod, on 16 May 1960 at Hughes Research Laboratories in Malibu; 'laser' stands for light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation.

The term RADAR was coined in 1940 by which organisation?

The US Navy coined RADAR in 1940, from 'radio detection and ranging', for a technology that Britain, Germany and the United States had each developed in secret during the 1930s.

The first official transatlantic telegram in 1858 was sent by Queen Victoria to which US president?

Victoria's 98-word greeting to President James Buchanan on 16 August 1858 took about 16 hours to transmit; Cyrus West Field's Atlantic Telegraph Company had laid the cable, which failed within weeks.

Marconi shared the 1909 Nobel Prize in Physics with which German physicist?

Ferdinand Braun shared the 1909 prize for wireless telegraphy, having devised the crystal detector and the sparkless antenna coupling that extended Marconi's range; he also invented the cathode-ray oscilloscope.

Alexander Graham Bell was awarded the first US patent for the telephone on which date?

US patent 174,465 was issued on March 7, 1876; three days later Bell made the first intelligible call to Watson. His work with the deaf had led him to experiment with speech transmission.

The GPS prototype satellite launched in 1978; when did the full 24-satellite constellation become operational?

The 24th satellite went up in 1993 and the constellation was declared initially operational that December, with full operational capability following in 1995; the Department of Defense had started the project in 1973.

Unimate, the first industrial robot, went to work in 1961 on an assembly line of which company?

Unimate was installed at General Motors' Inland Fisher Guide plant in Ewing Township, New Jersey, in 1961, lifting hot die-cast parts; George Devol invented it and co-founded Unimation with Joseph Engelberger.

The Segway self-balancing transporter, launched in 2001, was invented by whom?

Dean Kamen, also inventor of the first wearable insulin pump and the iBOT stair-climbing wheelchair from which the Segway's balancing technology grew, unveiled it in December 2001.

Karl Benz's Patent-Motorwagen, considered the first practical modern automobile, dates from which year?

He patented it in 1886, the year he first drove it in public.

Nikolaus Otto's four-stroke compressed-charge engine, the 'Otto cycle', appeared in which year?

Otto's compressed-charge four-stroke engine of 1876 ran at Deutz; his German patent was voided in 1886 after Alphonse Beau de Rochas's 1862 description of the cycle surfaced as prior art.

The Wright Flyer's first controlled powered flight on December 17, 1903 took place at what site?

The flights took off from the sands of Kill Devil Hills, four miles south of Kitty Hawk, North Carolina; the best of the day's four flights covered 852 feet in 59 seconds.

Igor Sikorsky's Russky Vityaz of 1913 was the first successful aircraft with how many engines?

The Russky Vityaz, flown in May 1913, was the first successful four-engined aircraft; Sikorsky followed it with the Ilya Muromets bomber and, in America, the practical helicopter.

Which German firm built the first jet-propelled aircraft, flown in August 1939?

Heinkel's He 178, powered by Hans von Ohain's HeS 3 turbojet, flew at Rostock-Marienehe on 27 August 1939, nine years after Whittle's British patent.

The de Havilland Comet, the first commercial jet airliner, first flew in which year?

The prototype Comet first flew on 27 July 1949 and BOAC began jet service in May 1952; two 1954 crashes were traced to metal fatigue in the airframe.

Chuck Yeager broke the sound barrier in 1947 flying which aircraft?

Yeager's Bell X-1, named Glamorous Glennis after his wife, reached Mach 1.06 on 14 October 1947 after being dropped from a B-29 over the Mojave Desert.

Kelly Johnson's Skunk Works built its first jet, the XP-80, in 1943 inside what?

The XP-80 Shooting Star was designed and built in 143 days in 1943 inside a circus tent rented beside a smelly plastics factory, which inspired the 'Skonk Works' nickname from the Li'l Abner strip.

Who led the Boeing 747 design team after leaving the 737 programme in 1965?

Joe Sutter, 'father of the 747', led the roughly 4,500-strong design team; the first 747 rolled out of the purpose-built Everett plant on 30 September 1968 and flew in February 1969.

Concorde was powered by four Olympus 593 turbojets built by Rolls-Royce and which French firm?

Snecma built the Olympus 593's afterburner and exhaust assembly while Rolls-Royce, via Bristol Siddeley, made the core; Concorde entered service on 21 January 1976 with Air France and British Airways.

Which airline took the first delivery of the Airbus A380 in October 2007?

Singapore Airlines took delivery on 15 October 2007 and flew the first commercial A380 service, Singapore to Sydney, ten days later; the type was the largest passenger airliner ever built.

The first Shinkansen line opened in 1964 shortly before which event?

The Tōkaidō Shinkansen opened on 1 October 1964, nine days before the Tokyo Summer Olympics began; the route links Tokyo, Yokohama, Nagoya and Osaka.

A modified TGV set the wheeled-train speed record of 574.8 km/h in which year?

On 3 April 2007 a shortened, up-rated TGV POS set reached 574.8 km/h on the LGV Est, beating the 515.3 km/h mark of 1990.

The 431 km/h Shanghai maglev, opened in 2004, runs on technology from which country?

Germany's Transrapid system powers it; Japan's experimental L0 Series set the overall record of 603 km/h in 2015.

Bagger 288, the bucket-wheel excavator that became the heaviest land vehicle in 1978, was built by whom?

Krupp built Bagger 288 for the Rheinbraun lignite mines; at 13,500 tonnes it superseded the 12,700-tonne Marion 6360 shovel as the heaviest land vehicle in 1978.

Robert Goddard launched the world's first liquid-fuelled rocket on which date?

Goddard's first liquid-fuelled rocket flew from his aunt's farm in Auburn, Massachusetts, on March 16, 1926, climbing 41 feet in 2.5 seconds; he launched 34 rockets between 1926 and 1941.

The V-2 became the first artificial object to reach space by crossing which boundary in 1944?

A V-2 test launch on 20 June 1944 reached about 176 km, crossing the 100 km Kármán line; Wernher von Braun's team developed the rocket at Peenemünde.

Sergei Korolev directed development of which rocket, the world's first ICBM?

The R-7 was built as an intercontinental ballistic missile, but modified versions launched Sputnik and Yuri Gagarin.

How many Saturn V rockets were launched between 1967 and 1973?

13 Saturn Vs flew, from Apollo 4 in November 1967 to the Skylab launch in May 1973, without losing a payload; nine of them sent 24 astronauts toward the Moon.

Which company oversaw development of the Apollo Lunar Module?

Grumman built the Lunar Module at Bethpage, New York, under a 1962 contract; six LMs landed astronauts on the Moon between 1969 and 1972.

Apollo 13's Moon landing was aborted after what exploded two days into the mission?

Oxygen tank 2 in the service module exploded about 56 hours into the flight, crippling the fuel cells; Jim Lovell, Jack Swigert and Fred Haise used the lunar module as a lifeboat.

Katherine Johnson hand-checked the orbital calculations for which astronaut's 1962 flight?

John Glenn asked for Johnson to re-check the computer's orbital calculations by hand before his February 1962 Friendship 7 flight; her 33-year NASA career was dramatised in Hidden Figures.

The two Voyager probes launched in 1977 to exploit what?

A favourable planetary alignment occurring once every 175 years let the probes use gravity assists from Jupiter and Saturn; Voyager 2 went on to Uranus and Neptune.

Hubble's main mirror was ground incorrectly, causing which optical flaw?

The 2.4 m primary mirror was ground about 2.2 micrometres too flat at the edge, causing spherical aberration; the COSTAR corrective optics were installed on the December 1993 servicing mission.

The Large Hadron Collider's tunnel is how long in circumference?

The ring is 27 km (26.7 km) around and lies 50 to 175 m beneath the France-Switzerland border near Geneva, in the tunnel dug for the LEP collider in the 1980s.

The first human-made self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction took place on 2 December 1942 in what?

Chicago Pile-1, a stack of graphite blocks and uranium under the University of Chicago's Stagg Field stands, went critical under Enrico Fermi's direction on 2 December 1942.

The Trinity test's implosion device shared its design with which bomb?

Trinity's 'Gadget', detonated on July 16, 1945 in New Mexico, was a plutonium implosion device of the same design as Fat Man, dropped on Nagasaki on 9 August; Little Boy was a gun-type uranium bomb.

Who designed the Tay Bridge, which collapsed under a train in a storm in December 1879?

Thomas Bouch, knighted months earlier for the bridge, was blamed by the inquiry for its poorly braced cast-iron piers; about 75 people died, and Bouch himself died within a year.

The 1928 failure of the St. Francis Dam killed at least how many people?

At least 431 people died when William Mulholland's dam failed just before midnight on 12 March 1928, sending a wall of water 54 miles down the Santa Clara River valley; it stored Los Angeles Aqueduct water.

Boston's 1919 Great Molasses Flood sent a wave through the North End at roughly what speed?

The 2.3-million-gallon tank burst on 15 January 1919 and the wave, up to 25 feet high, moved at about 35 mph, killing 21 people and injuring about 150.

Ronan Point, a London tower block, partially collapsed in 1968 after what?

A gas explosion in an 18th-floor flat blew out load-bearing wall panels and one corner of the 22-storey block fell away, two months after it opened in 1968; four people died.

The Silver Bridge, which collapsed in 1967, connected Point Pleasant, West Virginia, with which state?

It was an eyebar-chain suspension bridge named for its aluminium paint.

The NTSB blamed the 2007 Minneapolis I-35W bridge collapse on which excessively thin component?

The NTSB found the U10 gusset plates were half the thickness they should have been, and construction loads pushed them past failure on 1 August 2007; 13 people died.

Which company built the Therac-25, the radiation therapy machine whose software overdosed patients in the 1980s?

Atomic Energy of Canada Limited built the Therac-25; race conditions in its software let it fire a high-energy electron beam without the spreading target, overdosing patients in at least six incidents from 1985 to 1987.

The Swedish warship Vasa sank in 1628 after sailing roughly how far on her maiden voyage?

Vasa heeled over and sank on 10 August 1628 after sailing roughly 1,300 m from her berth in Stockholm; she was salvaged largely intact in 1961 after 333 years on the seabed.

The 2010 Deepwater Horizon blowout occurred while drilling at which prospect in the Gulf of Mexico?

BP's Macondo well, drilled by the Deepwater Horizon rig about 41 miles off Louisiana, blew out on 20 April 2010, killing 11 crew and spilling oil for 87 days.

Mary Anderson's 1903 patent, inspired by a snowy New York streetcar ride, described what?

Anderson's windshield wiper, patented in November 1903, was a hand-operated arm with a rubber blade to clear snow, ice or sleet; manufacturers declined it and the patent lapsed.

Gustave Eiffel built the internal metal framework of which famous monument?

Sculptor Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi designed the copper-clad statue, dedicated in 1886.