246 Fun Facts About Engineering

The Brooklyn Bridge, opened in 1883, spans which New York waterway?

The East River crossing cost its designer his life: John A. Roebling died of tetanus in 1869 after a ferry crushed his foot, and his son Washington took over as chief engineer.

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 killed more than a dozen men building the Eads Bridge.

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 learned 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's frame is about 7,300 tonnes of puddled wrought iron; on hot days the top leans slightly away from the sun as the metal on 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 W. 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 holds back the Colorado in Black Canyon; before a block could be poured, crews drove four huge tunnels through the canyon walls to carry the whole river around the site.

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.

Joseph Strauss was chief engineer of which bridge, though Charles Ellis, whom he dismissed, did most of its calculations?

Golden Gate Bridge credit went to Strauss, who dismissed Ellis in 1931 and left him off the plaque; the bridge district formally gave Ellis major credit for the design only in 2007.

Dubai's tallest tower was renamed Burj Khalifa in 2010 to honour which emirate's ruler?

Abu Dhabi had handed debt-laden Dubai $10 billion weeks earlier, and the tower known as Burj Dubai throughout construction opened under Sheikh Khalifa's name.

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

Skidmore, Owings & Merrill's engineers gave the tower a Y-shaped plan: three wings buttress a central core, each bracing the other two, and set back in a spiral as they rise.

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.

Which French viaduct over the Tarn, opened in 2004, tops out higher than the Eiffel Tower?

The Millau Viaduct's tallest mast reaches 343 metres; Michel Virlogeux and Norman Foster's bridge carries a motorway across the valley and was built to clear the summer traffic jams in the town below.

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 winds of about 40 mph 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 a freezing night at the launch pad?

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.

What fell onto a tea dance at Kansas City's Hyatt Regency in 1981?

Suspended walkways fell, killing 114, after a late design change hung the lower one from the upper instead of from the ceiling, doubling the load on connections that were already too weak.

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 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 and hired him as a consultant in Pittsburgh?

George Westinghouse paid about $60,000 in cash and stock plus a royalty on every horsepower of motor sold; Tesla then spent a year at his Pittsburgh labs helping to build an alternating-current system.

The SI unit named after Tesla measures which quantity?

Magnetic flux density took Tesla's name in 1960, when the General Conference on Weights and Measures adopted the unit; one tesla is 10,000 gauss, which is why small magnets are rated in the older, smaller unit.

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

Pearl Street supplied 110-volt direct current to some eighty customers in lower Manhattan from 4 September 1882; low-voltage DC lost so much power in the wires that stations had to stand close to their customers.

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

To raise water, the screw turns a helix 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 the 'Notes' containing what is often called 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?

Torpedoes were to be steered by a radio signal hopping between 88 frequencies, like a player-piano roll, so it was hard to jam; the idea went unused in the war, but its principle lives on in Bluetooth.

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 enough 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.

Joseph Aspdin named his 1824 Portland cement after what?

A Dorset stone: the Leeds bricklayer thought his hardened cement resembled Portland stone, the pale limestone quarried on the Isle of Portland and prized by British architects.

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 carried water into cities over many kilometres powered by what alone?

Gravity did all the work: channels fell on a slight, carefully surveyed gradient, and most of the route ran underground, with the famous arches only carrying it across valleys.

The Great Pyramid of Giza, built from some 2.3 million stone blocks, was raised for which pharaoh?

Khufu, of the Fourth Dynasty, had about 2.3 million blocks stacked some 147 metres high; most of the polished white limestone casing that once covered them was later stripped away.

The six classical simple machines are the lever, wheel and axle, pulley, wedge, screw and which other?

Inclined plane completes the six that Renaissance scientists defined; like the others it trades force for distance, so a longer, gentler ramp lifts the same load with less push.

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 discovered self-inductance while building powerful electromagnets, and the henry bears his name; he became the Smithsonian Institution's first secretary in 1846.

Which German physicist's 1827 book set out the law that current is proportional to voltage?

Georg Ohm published Die galvanische Kette, mathematisch bearbeitet in 1827; it was so coldly received that he resigned his Cologne teaching post, and the Royal Society's Copley Medal came only in 1841.

Which measure of a material's stiffness is named after an English polymath?

Young's modulus honours Thomas Young, a physician who also revived the wave theory of light and helped decipher Egyptian hieroglyphs.

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

Ammonia is synthesised over an iron catalyst at high temperature and pressure; through fertiliser, 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 a 1947 logbook kept by Grace Hopper's team?

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 why a carburettor works: air speeding through its narrowed throat drops in pressure and draws in fuel.

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

The 1915 Çanakkale Bridge in Turkey crosses the Dardanelles with a main span of 2,023 metres, a figure chosen to mark the republic's centenary in 2023; Akashi's 1,991 metres had led since 1998.

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

Fazlur Rahman Khan 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 as the technology almost every part of modern life depends on; 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 work as a land surveyor earned him the 'first engineer' label, and 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 device, and the word reached English through Old French engigneor, a maker of war engines.

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

Vitruvius set out the triad in De architectura, dedicated to Augustus; its passage on the proportions of the human body inspired Leonardo's Vitruvian Man some 1,500 years later.

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

The Step Pyramid of Djoser at Saqqara, Egypt's first large stone building, is traditionally credited to Imhotep; 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 from a boiler escaped through bent nozzles and spun the sphere, a bladeless steam 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.

Which engineer's Book of Knowledge of Ingenious Mechanical Devices, finished in 1206, described an elephant clock and crank-driven pumps?

Al-Jazari spent decades as engineer to the Artuqid kings of Diyarbakır; his book did more than describe its machines, giving instructions for building each one.

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

The aqueduct reached Nîmes from springs near Uzès only about 20 km away, winding some 50 km to keep a steady fall of just 17 m; the Pont du Gard's three tiers of arches stand 48.8 m high.

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.

Which Roman road to Brindisi did Statius call the 'queen of long roads'?

Via Appia, begun by the censor Appius Claudius Caecus, became the main highway to the ports of south-eastern Italy, and so to Greece and the eastern Mediterranean.

The Great Wall's best-preserved brick-and-stone stretches, such as Badaling near Beijing, were built under which dynasty?

Ming emperors rebuilt the wall in brick and stone against Mongol raids, some 8,850 km of it; a survey that counted every dynasty's walls put the total at 21,196 km.

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 carved on the Haterii family's tomb relief is powered by what?

A human treadwheel, walked from the inside by several men, drives the crane on the Haterii relief; with compound lifting tackle such machines could raise 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?

Richard Trevithick's engine hauled 10 tons of iron and 70 men along the Merthyr tramroad on 21 February 1804, winning a wager for ironmaster Samuel Homfray.

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

The Rainhill Trials of October 1829 left Rocket the only one of five competing locomotives to finish the course; it touched 30 mph and won its builders the £500 prize.

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

First inter-city railway in the world, it opened on 15 September 1830 with a tragedy: Liverpool MP William Huskisson was run over and fatally injured by Rocket during the ceremonies.

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

George Stephenson took 4 ft 8 in from the Killingworth colliery wagonway and later added half an inch to ease running on curves, giving 'Stephenson gauge'; Brunel's rival broad gauge measured 7 ft.

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.

Thomas Telford's Pontcysyllte Aqueduct, which carries a canal high above the River Dee, stands in which country?

Wales has the aqueduct, near Llangollen: narrowboats cross in an iron trough on nineteen arches, a design Telford worked out under canal engineer William Jessop and finished in 1805.

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 finally opened in 1843.

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?

Air blown through the molten pig iron burned out its impurities, and the reaction's own heat kept the metal molten with no extra fuel; Bessemer patented the process in 1856.

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

Sheffield got Bessemer's own steelworks after established makers rebuffed his process; his firm then undersold the trade until rivals took out licences, helping make the town '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.

Which engineer's 1841 proposal became the world's first national screw thread standard?

Joseph Whitworth, who had worked for Henry Maudslay in London, fixed a 55-degree thread angle and a set pitch for each diameter; railway companies that had each used their own threads took it up.

Joseph Bramah, the locksmith who invented the hydraulic press, also patented an improved version of which household fixture?

The flush toilet in Bramah's 1778 patent had a hinged flap that sealed the bowl; his 'Challenge Lock', displayed in his London shop window with a reward for anyone who could open it, 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 stood on a hoist at an 1854 exhibition and ordered what?

Rope cut, the platform held: Otis's safety brake had caught it, and orders, few until that stunt, picked up; in 1857 he installed his first passenger elevator in a New York store.

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 future US president urged America to adopt gunsmith Honoré Blanc's interchangeable musket parts?

Thomas Jefferson, then America's envoy in Paris, put together musket locks himself from parts picked at random in Blanc's workshop and wrote home that the method might be useful to the United States.

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

Cantilever arms replaced a suspension design that was scrapped after another of its engineer's bridges blew down in an 1879 storm; the result held the record for the longest span of its kind for more than 25 years.

Which Canadian bridge collapsed twice during construction, in 1907 and 1916, killing 88 workers in all?

The Quebec Bridge's south arm buckled in 1907, killing 75 of the 86 men on it, and a new centre span fell into the St. Lawrence while being hoisted in 1916, killing 13; it was finally completed in 1917.

Dorman Long, the steel firm that designed and built the Sydney Harbour Bridge, came from which country?

England's Dorman Long, of Middlesbrough, hired Ralph Freeman for the detailed design; while the Sydney arch went up, the firm also built the smaller Tyne Bridge, 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; in the Depression it was also called 'the Iron Lung', because building it kept so many people in work.

Completed in 1874, the Eads Bridge crosses which river?

The Mississippi crossing at St. Louis pioneered the large-scale use of structural steel; in June 1874 a 'test elephant' was led across to show the public it was safe.

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, which lands on the artificial island of Peberholm, links Sweden with which country?

Denmark is reached from Peberholm by a 4 km tunnel to the island of Amager; the artificial island's name, 'Pepper Islet', was chosen to pair with natural Saltholm, 'Salt Islet', next door.

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.

Which architect designed St. Louis's Gateway Arch, a stainless-steel weighted catenary?

Eero Saarinen won the national design competition but died in 1961, before construction began; his arch tapers from 54 feet wide at each foot to 17 at the crown.

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 the Tsugaru Strait to link Honshu with which island?

Hokkaido's rail link was a ferry until 1988; after a 1954 typhoon sank ferries in the strait with the loss of more than 1,400 lives, Japan pressed ahead with the tunnel, nearly 54 km long.

Marc Brunel's 1818 tunnelling shield is said to have copied which creature?

A shipworm, whose shell guards its head as it bores through ship timbers, is said to have given Brunel the idea; James Greathead later improved the design.

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 opened the upper Great Lakes to Atlantic shipping, slashed freight costs and turned New York City into a major commercial centre.

Which dam is the world's largest power station by installed capacity, at 22,500 MW?

Three Gorges Dam turned a long stretch of the Yangtze into a reservoir, and more than a million people had to be moved out of the rising water's way.

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?

The Columbia's upper reaches lost their salmon runs because Grand Coulee was built without a fish ladder; its power ran wartime aluminium smelters, Boeing plants and shipyards.

Which flood defence, operational since 1982, has gates modelled on gas cooker taps?

The Thames Barrier's gates lie in sills on the riverbed so ships can pass, then rotate upright against a surge; designer Charles Draper worked the idea out from the taps on his gas cooker.

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

Zeeland's islands bore the brunt of the 1953 North Sea flood, which killed more than 1,800 people; damming the estuaries shortened the coast, so far fewer dikes had to be raised.

Which tower was the world's tallest free-standing structure from 1975 to 2007?

The CN Tower was built by the Canadian National railway after Toronto's new skyscrapers began reflecting broadcast signals; its antenna lifted the city's TV and radio above them all.

Which New York skyscraper, built in just 410 days, opened in 1931 as the world's tallest building?

The Empire State Building's frame rose four and a half storeys a week, but the Depression left it so short of tenants that New Yorkers called it the Empty State Building.

The Petronas Towers, the world's tallest buildings from 1998 to 2004, stand in which city?

Kuala Lumpur's twin towers were designed by César Pelli, who based each floor plan on an eight-pointed star from Islamic art to reflect Malaysia's Muslim culture.

Which skyscraper has a 660-tonne steel sphere hanging near its top to steady it in typhoons?

Taipei 101's damper, a 5.5 m ball of welded steel plates, hangs in public view from the 92nd floor; when wind pushes the tower one way the ball swings the other, cutting the sway by up to 40%.

The Sears Tower took which new name in 2009?

Willis Tower got its name when the London insurance broker Willis Group leased three floors and was given the naming rights at no extra cost; Sears itself had moved out in the 1990s.

Which skyscraper stands a symbolic 1,776 feet?

One World Trade Center's 1,776 feet echo the year of the Declaration of Independence, but it gets there only with its spire: the roof stops at 1,368 feet, matching the original North Tower.

The Shanghai Tower's facade twists 120 degrees mainly to reduce what?

Wind loads fell by about 24% thanks to the twist, which let the builders use markedly less structural steel.

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

1 kilometre was a retreat: the first plan was a mile-high tower, scaled back after soil tests cast doubt on the site. Adrian Smith, the Burj Khalifa's architect, designed it.

Which architect won the 1957 competition to design the Sydney Opera House, then resigned before it was finished?

Jørn Utzon quit in 1966 amid rows over cost and delays and left Australia; he died in 2008 without ever returning to see the building, which opened 16 years after his win.

Which Paris landmark, engineered by Arup, wears its pipes, ducts and escalators on the outside?

The Centre Pompidou was the first major 'inside-out' building: moving the frame and colour-coded services to the exterior freed up the floor space inside.

Which Chinese artist was the artistic consultant on the design of Beijing's 'Bird's Nest' National Stadium?

Ai Weiwei worked on the design with Swiss architects Herzog & de Meuron, then turned against the 2008 Games and said he refused even to be photographed with the stadium.

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

Renzo Piano's 1.7 km terminal, the world's longest, stands on a man-made island that sank faster than forecast, so its columns were built to be jacked up on steel plates.

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

The outer crescent is a breakwater lined with resort hotels; built as an unbroken wall, it left the water inside stagnant until gaps were cut to let the tide through.

Walther Bauersfeld designed the first geodesic dome after World War I to house a planetarium projector for which company?

Carl Zeiss, the optics firm, had the dome built on its factory roof in Jena; two decades later Buckminster Fuller coined the word 'geodesic' and went on to patent the idea in America.

Who patented prestressed concrete in 1928?

Eugène Freyssinet was not the first to try the idea, but he saw that only high-strength steel wire keeps doing its job as concrete slowly creeps, which made the method practical.

Why did the Leaning Tower of Pisa begin to tilt?

Soft ground gave way beneath the foundations; wars then stopped work for almost a century, which let the soil settle and probably saved the tower from toppling.

Which scientist first published his law of elasticity in 1676 as an anagram, 'ceiiinosssttuv'?

Robert Hooke used the anagram to claim priority without giving the discovery away; two years later he unscrambled it as '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?

Cyclic loads far below a part's breaking strength still grow cracks a little at a time; a locomotive axle that snapped this way caused the 1842 Versailles rail disaster.

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.

Which DuPont fibre, discovered by Stephanie Kwolek in 1965, was first sold as a replacement for steel in racing tires?

Kevlar came from a cloudy solution that would normally have been thrown away; Kwolek talked a colleague into spinning it and got a fibre five times stronger than steel by weight.

Which material, first made in a home laboratory in Yonkers, New York, in 1907, was the first fully synthetic plastic?

Bakelite was the work of Leo Baekeland, who could afford a private laboratory because Kodak had bought his Velox photographic paper for a reputed $750,000.

DuPont announced nylon to the public shortly before which event?

The 1939 New York World's Fair put nylon stockings on show; the war then diverted nylon to parachutes, and when stockings came back shoppers queued in their thousands in the 'nylon riots'.

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

Sulfur links rubber's long molecules together, so vulcanized rubber no longer turns soft and sticky in the heat; Goodyear spent five more years perfecting the process before patenting it in 1844.

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

Archimedes is said to have made the boast to King Hiero; in Plutarch's telling the king demanded proof, and he drew a loaded ship along single-handed.

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.

Which computer method models a bridge or car body as a mesh of thousands of simple pieces?

Finite element analysis lets engineers test and refine a design on screen, cutting the number of physical prototypes they must build; it grew from 1940s work by Richard Courant and Alexander Hrennikoff.

Aviation pioneer Francis Wenham built the first enclosed what in 1871?

A wind tunnel gave Wenham and John Browning a steady stream of air to test model wings in, and their measurements revealed the advantage of long, narrow wings.

What did Alessandro Volta, namesake of the volt, invent in 1799 by stacking discs of zinc and copper?

The electric battery began as an argument: Volta built his 'pile' of metal discs to show that the current came from the metals, not from the frogs' legs Luigi Galvani had used.

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

Electromagnetic induction came from a man with almost no schooling: Faraday, once a bookbinder's apprentice, showed in 1831 that a changing magnetic field drives a current in a nearby wire.

Which device steps AC voltage up for power lines and down for homes?

The transformer made long power lines workable: raise the voltage and the current falls, and the heat lost in the wires falls with the square of the current.

One ampere is a flow of one what per second past a point?

Coulomb per second is what an ampere amounts to; until 2019 the unit was officially defined by the force between two parallel wires, and it now rests on the charge of a single electron.

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

One metre is the distance; James Joule pinned down the link between work and heat by letting a sinking weight spin a paddle wheel in water and measuring the tiny rise in temperature.

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

75 watts is about a tenth of a horsepower, the unit James Watt adopted to compare his steam engines with the draught horses they replaced.

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

Edith Clarke could not find work as an engineer after her MIT degree, so she supervised General Electric's human 'computers' until GE made her a salaried electrical engineer in 1922.

Engineer Hertha Ayrton's hand-held fan was issued to British troops in World War I to clear what from the trenches?

Poison gas could be flapped back out of a trench with the Ayrton fan; the War Office dismissed the idea at first, then issued more than 100,000 of them on the Western Front.

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

The Institute of Radio Engineers was itself a 1912 merger of the Wireless Institute and a telegraph engineers' society; by 1957 the upstart had more members than the 1884 AIEE.

Civil engineering was given its name in the 18th century to set it apart from which older branch?

Military engineering came first; John Smeaton, builder of the Eddystone Lighthouse, was the first to call himself a civil engineer, and in 1771 founded a society of them.

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

Rudyard Kipling wrote the ritual at a Toronto professor's request, and it was first held in 1925; the ring goes on the little finger of the working hand, where it drags on the page as a reminder.

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 his own version soon after.

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

4 bits were enough for the Busicom desktop calculator it was built for; Intel then repaid Busicom's $60,000 development money in return for the right to sell the 4004 to other customers.

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.

Which engineer completed the first working programmable computer in Berlin in 1941, using about 2,600 relays?

Konrad Zuse's Z3 was destroyed in a 1943 air raid on Berlin, but his next machine, the Z4, survived the war and went to work at a Swiss university, ETH Zurich, 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.

At which laboratory was Tim Berners-Lee working in 1989 when he proposed what became the World Wide Web?

CERN, the European particle physics lab, received the proposal in March 1989; his boss Mike Sendall scribbled 'Vague, but exciting' on the cover and let him pursue it.

During Apollo 11's descent, the guidance computer flashed '1202' alarms because it was what?

Overloaded with tasks by a stream of data from the rendezvous radar, the computer shed its low-priority jobs and kept flying the descent, so Mission Control let the landing go on.

Margaret Hamilton, who led Apollo's on-board flight code, is credited with coining 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's 1966 work at a laboratory in Harlow, England, laid the groundwork for which communications technology?

Fibre optics then lost too much light to be useful; Kao showed that impurities in the glass were to blame, and four years later Corning made the first fibre pure enough to work.

Theodore Maiman built the first working example of what in 1960, using synthetic ruby?

A laser made of ruby had been written off by other researchers, and when it worked Physical Review Letters turned Maiman's paper down, so the breakthrough appeared in Nature instead.

The acronym RADAR was coined in 1940 by which American armed service?

The US Navy coined RADAR in 1940 from 'radio detection and ranging'; Britain's own secret system went by the deliberately misleading cover name RDF.

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

James Buchanan had to wait 16 hours for Queen Victoria's 98 words to come through, so weak was the signal; within a month the line had gone dead.

Which radio pioneer shared the 1909 Nobel Prize in Physics with the German physicist Ferdinand Braun?

Guglielmo Marconi's co-winner met a sad end: Braun went to New York to testify in a radio patent case, was detained as an enemy alien when America entered the war, and died there in 1918.

Three days after his 1876 telephone patent was granted, Alexander Graham Bell made the first intelligible call to whom?

Thomas Watson, in the next room, heard 'Mr. Watson, come here, I want to see you'; Bell's application had reached the patent office on the very day rival Elisha Gray filed his own claim.

GPS satellite clocks are corrected by 38 microseconds a day for what?

Einstein's relativity pulls two ways: orbital speed slows the clocks by 7 microseconds a day and their height above Earth speeds them up by 45; uncorrected, positions would drift about 10 km a day.

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

General Motors put Unimate to work at its Ewing Township, New Jersey, plant handling hot die-castings, a job that exposed human workers to toxic fumes and the risk of losing a limb.

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

Dean Kamen had already invented a portable drug-infusion pump and the iBOT, a stair-climbing wheelchair whose self-balancing technology became the basis of the Segway.

Who built the 1885 Patent-Motorwagen, regarded as the first practical car?

Karl Benz's wife Bertha proved the car's worth in 1888, driving it to Pforzheim and back without telling him and buying fuel from a pharmacy on the way.

Nikolaus Otto's 1876 engine established which operating cycle, the basis of most petrol car engines?

Four-stroke engines take in, compress, burn and exhaust in turn; Otto later lost a patent on the cycle when a French engineer's 1862 patent, never built, came to light.

The Wright brothers' 1903 flights took off at Kill Devil Hills, just south of which North Carolina town?

Kitty Hawk was chosen for its steady winds and soft sand after Wilbur studied Weather Bureau records; after the flights the brothers walked back there to telegraph the news to their father.

Which British engineer patented the turbojet engine in 1930?

Frank Whittle let his patent lapse in 1935 because he could not afford the £5 renewal fee and the Air Ministry would not pay it; his own engine first flew in 1941.

Which aircraft entered service with BOAC in 1952 as the first jet airliner?

The de Havilland Comet was grounded after a series of mid-air break-ups; investigators sank a whole fuselage in a water tank to test it and traced the crashes to metal fatigue.

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.

Which secretive aircraft design unit began in 1943 in a rented circus tent, building the XP-80 jet fighter in 143 days?

Skunk Works took its name from the 'Skonk Works' of the Li'l Abner comic strip, a foul-smelling place in the woods where a potent drink was brewed; the tent stood beside a factory with a strong smell of its own.

Which airliner, designed under Joe Sutter and first flown in 1969, was the first wide-body jet?

The 747's hump exists because Boeing expected supersonic jets to take over passenger travel: the cockpit sits upstairs so the nose could one day open as a freight door.

The Olympus 593 turbojets, built jointly by Rolls-Royce and Snecma, powered which aircraft?

Concorde lit its engines' afterburners only for take-off and to push through the sound barrier, then cruised at twice the speed of sound without them.

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

Singapore Airlines flew the first passengers ten days later, from Singapore to Sydney, having sold the seats in an online charity auction where bids ran from $560 to over $100,000.

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

The Tokyo Summer Olympics were the deadline: the line opened nine days before them, so far over budget that the railway's president and chief engineer had both resigned the year before.

Which train set the speed record for wheeled trains, 574.8 km/h, in 2007?

A French TGV cut down to three cars between two power units ran on oversized wheels under a boosted 31,000-volt supply, beating the 1990 record by almost 60 km/h.

Shanghai's airport train, running since 2004, rides on what instead of wheels?

Magnetic levitation got its first commercial high-speed line here, built for 431 km/h with German Transrapid technology; Germany's own last planned line, to Munich airport, was cancelled in 2008.

Krupp's Bagger 288, the world's heaviest land vehicle in 1978, is what kind of machine?

A bucket-wheel excavator built for German coal mines, it crawled 22 km to a new pit in 2001, crossing a motorway, a river and a railway line on a journey that took three weeks.

Who launched the world's first liquid-fuelled rocket in 1926, a flight that lasted just 2.5 seconds?

Robert Goddard's rocket rose 41 feet over a Massachusetts farm; a 1920 New York Times editorial had mocked his ideas about spaceflight, and the paper printed a correction as Apollo 11 flew to the Moon.

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

The Kármán line, 100 km up, is named after Theodore von Kármán, who worked out roughly where the air grows too thin for wings to carry an aircraft; this V-2 climbed to about 176 km.

Which secret Soviet 'Chief Designer' launched Sputnik and Yuri Gagarin?

Sergei Korolev built his rocket, the R-7, as the first intercontinental missile; two decades earlier he had been a prisoner of Stalin's Gulag, sent to the Kolyma camps on false charges.

The last Saturn V lifted off in 1973 carrying which payload?

Skylab, America's first space station, was itself a converted Saturn V third stage; it lost a shield during launch, and its first crew had to rig a parasol-like sunshade to cool it.

Which company oversaw development of the Apollo Lunar Module?

Grumman's lander doubled as Apollo 13's lifeboat, and the firm later sent the command module's maker a joke towing invoice for $312,421.24, which was politely declined.

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?

Spherical aberration crept in because the device used to test the mirror was assembled with one lens 1.3 mm out of place, so the mirror was polished precisely to the wrong shape; astronauts fitted corrective optics in 1993.

The Large Hadron Collider's 27 km ring tunnel lies just outside which Swiss city?

Geneva sits beside the ring, which runs up to 175 m underground; the tunnel was dug in the 1980s for an earlier collider and reused for the LHC instead of boring a new one.

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

Chicago Pile-1 was stacked up in a rackets court under the stands of Stagg Field; its success was reported by phone in code: 'The Italian navigator has landed in the New World.'

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

Fat Man's plutonium implosion design was intricate enough that it had to be proved at Trinity first; the simpler gun-type Little Boy was dropped on Hiroshima without ever being tested.

Thomas Bouch's railway bridge over which Scottish estuary collapsed under a train in December 1879?

The Firth of Tay disaster killed everyone aboard and ruined Bouch, knighted for the bridge only months before; his design for a second great bridge, already under way, was scrapped.

The 1928 St Francis Dam collapse ended which Los Angeles water engineer's career?

William Mulholland had inspected the dam himself about twelve hours before it burst and saw no urgent danger; at least 431 people died in the flood that followed.

A burst storage tank sent a 25-foot wave of what through Boston's North End in January 1919?

Molasses moving at about 35 mph killed 21 people; the tank's steel was too thin and it had never been test-filled with water, and it leaked so badly the owners painted it brown to hide the streaks.

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 a whole corner of the two-month-old block fell away, killing four; British building rules were rewritten to prevent such chain-reaction collapses.

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

Ohio lay on the far bank, at Gallipolis; one cracked eyebar in the suspension chain brought the whole bridge down at rush hour, killing 46, and led to America's first national bridge inspection programme.

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

A gusset plate design error left the plates at one joint too weak, and on 1 August 2007 the added weight of earlier modifications, traffic and stockpiled construction materials pushed them past failure; 13 people died.

The Therac-25 radiotherapy machine gave patients massive overdoses in the 1980s because of a fault in what?

Its software had taken over safety checks that earlier models left to mechanical interlocks, so when a timing bug struck there was nothing left to stop the full-power beam.

Which 17th-century warship sank barely 1,300 m into her maiden voyage and was raised almost intact in 1961?

Vasa had already failed a stability test: thirty men ran back and forth across her deck to make her roll, and the admiral stopped them after three passes for fear she would capsize.

The 2010 blowout at BP's Macondo well in the Gulf of Mexico destroyed which drilling rig?

Deepwater Horizon burned and sank after the well's blowout preventer failed to seal it; 11 crew died and oil flowed into the Gulf for 87 days.

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

The windshield wiper she patented was a rubber blade on an arm worked from inside the vehicle; she failed to sell the idea, yet by 1922 Cadillac was fitting wipers as standard.

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

The Statue of Liberty's first engineer died in 1879 with his plans unfinished, so Eiffel took over and gave her a flexible metal skeleton that lets the thin copper skin move with wind and heat.

In a classic school design contest, students build a device to protect which fragile object dropped from a height?

A raw egg has to survive the fall intact. In a harder version called the naked egg drop, a bare egg is dropped into a container that must catch it without breaking it.

In an 18-minute team design challenge, a tower of spaghetti sticks, tape and string must hold which sweet on top?

A marshmallow tops the tower in a challenge where kindergartners regularly out-build business school graduates. The children start building and testing at once instead of planning.

The nose of Japan's 500 Series Shinkansen bullet train was modelled on the beak of which bird?

A kingfisher caught the eye of a bird-watching engineer on the project, who copied its beak to stop the bullet train making a loud boom whenever it ran through a tunnel.

James Dyson built about 5,127 test versions over five years before launching his redesign of which household appliance?

The vacuum cleaner that finally worked was first sold in Japan as the G-Force, because no British manufacturer would take it. Dyson got through those five years partly on his wife's salary as an art teacher.

Which idea-generating method, popularised by advertising executive Alex Osborn, asks groups to withhold criticism?

Brainstorming was first called organized ideation by Osborn. The people who took part in his agency's sessions came up with the catchier name.

From Greek words meaning 'first' and 'impression', what do engineers call an early sample built to test a design?

A prototype is often made by a different process from the finished product, because the custom tooling that mass production needs costs too much for a handful of parts.

Which practice of taking a finished product apart to learn how it works let the Soviet Union copy America's B-29 bomber?

Reverse engineering produced the Tupolev Tu-4, a bomber copied from B-29s that the Soviets seized after the American crews made emergency landings in the USSR.

Which technology, also called additive manufacturing, builds a test part layer by layer straight from a digital model?

3D printing owes much to Chuck Hull, who in 1984 filed a patent for stereolithography, a way of hardening light-sensitive liquid into a solid object one thin layer at a time.

What is the first step of the engineering design process, done before researching or sketching any possible solutions?

Define the problem comes first because every later step is judged against it. The guidelines used in US schools say the more precisely a task is specified, the likelier the solution is to succeed.

What do engineers call the limits a design must work within, such as the materials, time or money available?

Constraints are written into school engineering too: US classroom guidelines ask pupils from third grade up to design within set limits on materials, time or cost.

TeachEngineering's classroom design cycle runs Ask, Research, Imagine, Plan, Create, Test and which final step?

Improve closes the loop rather than ending it: teams redesign as needed, then run through the steps again as many times as it takes to reach a great solution.

What do engineers call cycling through design, test and redesign again and again, refining the solution on each pass?

Iteration means engineers rarely take the steps in order just once: it is very common to test something, find a fault, and go back to an earlier step to change it.

What do engineers call accepting less of one quality, such as strength, to gain more of another, such as lightness?

A trade-off is forced on designers by limits as basic as physics: only so much fits in a given space, so a full container has to give up some items before it can take any more.

Which US school guidelines, drawn up with 26 states and released in 2013, added engineering design to the sciences?

The Next Generation Science Standards count engineering among four core disciplines, alongside life science, Earth and space science and physical science.

Which process of testing a hypothesis by experiment is the research counterpart of engineering's design process?

The scientific method is a way of acquiring knowledge through careful observation, rigorous skepticism and experiment, where the design process sets out to make something instead.

Which tool, also called the Pugh method after designer Stuart Pugh, scores rival designs against a list of criteria?

A decision matrix sets a list of criteria against a group of candidate designs. A weighted version also ranks the criteria by importance, so the ones that matter most count for more.

Sierra Sam, a pioneering test dummy of the 1940s, was created to try out which piece of safety equipment?

Ejection seats, flying helmets and pilot harnesses were Sierra Sam's first assignments. Before dummies, car makers ran crash tests with cadavers, animals and live volunteers.

Thomas Edison tried material after material before settling on which one for a filament lasting over 1,200 hours?

Bamboo beat the hemp and palmetto Edison had already tried. An earlier filament of carbonised cardboard had burnt out too quickly to give lasting light.

Swiss engineer George de Mestral designed Velcro after studying what kept sticking to his dog's fur on a hunting trip?

Burdock burrs turned out, under a microscope, to be covered in hundreds of hooks. When de Mestral took his copy of them to the weavers of Lyon, they at first turned him down.

Which Duke University professor wrote To Engineer Is Human, a 1985 book on the role of failure in successful design?

Henry Petroski, a specialist in failure analysis, went on to write whole histories of everyday designs, including the pencil, the paper clip and the toothpick.

Which branch of engineering, named in the 1700s to set it apart from military work, covers roads, canals and dams?

Civil engineering found its first self-proclaimed practitioner in John Smeaton, builder of the Eddystone Lighthouse, who in 1771 formed a dining society for the profession's leaders.

Which kind of engineer designs the large-scale plants that turn raw ingredients into medicines, fuels and plastics?

Chemical engineers owe their title to George E. Davis, an English consultant credited with coining the term. The society he tried to found under that name in 1881 ended up called something else.

Which kind of engineer develops prosthetic limbs, micro-implants and imaging machines such as MRI scanners?

Biomedical engineers also work on growing replacement tissue: several artificial bladders have been grown in laboratories and transplanted successfully into patients.

Which branch of engineering, fathered by Frederick Taylor and his time studies, works to cut waste and lift output?

Industrial engineering was carried further by Frank and Lillian Gilbreth, whose motion studies broke manual work down into basic movements they named therbligs.

Which branch of engineering did Admiral Hyman Rickover champion at sea, giving the submarine Nautilus its power plant?

Nuclear propulsion was Rickover's life's work: he directed its original development and controlled its operations for three decades, earning the title Father of the Nuclear Navy.

Herbert Hoover grew rich before politics in which kind of engineering, sent by a London firm to Western Australia?

Mining made Hoover rich young: the London firm that hired him ran gold mines in Western Australia, and he rapidly became a wealthy engineer and businessman.

Aerospace engineering has two overlapping branches: aeronautical, for aircraft, and which other, for spacecraft?

Astronautical work is the branch people mean by rocket science. The older word aeronautical once covered the whole field, until flight reached outer space and a broader name was needed.

What name do combat engineers carry in the British and other armies, from a French verb meaning to undermine a wall?

Sappers dug the trenches, called saps, that brought cannon within range of a besieged fort. In Britain's Royal Engineers, Sapper is the rank equivalent to private.

On North American railways, the plain word 'engineer' refers to which member of a train's crew?

The driver of a train is a railroad engineer in North American English, usually shortened to engineer. Elsewhere the job goes by names such as motorman and locomotive operator.

Which US state passed the first engineering licensing law, after amateurs botched applications to use its water?

Wyoming acted after lawyers, notaries and others with no engineering training kept filing poor-quality requests to use state water for irrigation.

Which ancient king's law code ordered that a builder be put to death if his house collapsed and killed its owner?

Hammurabi's laws went further: if the collapse killed the owner's son, the builder's son was to die. They hold the earliest known written building code.

Under the first canon of the NSPE Code of Ethics, engineers must hold paramount the safety, health and welfare of whom?

The public comes first in engineering codes beyond the United States too: Ontario's rules likewise call a practitioner's duty to public welfare paramount.

Which carmaker admitted in 2015 that its diesel engines were programmed to run emissions controls only during lab tests?

Volkswagen was caught after West Virginia University researchers tested its diesel cars on the road. US regulators then found the cars emitted up to 40 times the legal limit of nitrogen oxides in normal driving.

Which 1970s Ford became an ethics case study after rear-end crashes ruptured its fuel tank and caused deadly fires?

The Pinto became a textbook case because Ford was accused of knowing the tank was badly placed and forgoing design changes on the strength of an internal cost-benefit analysis.

New York's Citicorp Center was secretly reinforced in 1978 after its engineer feared which force could topple it?

A high wind striking the tower's corners was the danger William LeMessurier saw once a student's query sent him back to his calculations. The repairs stayed secret until 1995.

Which Morton Thiokol engineer warned in a July 1985 memo that the Space Shuttle's boosters risked catastrophe on launch?

Roger Boisjoly was apparently ignored by his managers, and Challenger was lost six months later. In 1988 he received the AAAS Award for Scientific Freedom and Responsibility.

Which American corporation was majority owner of the pesticide plant at Bhopal, India, that leaked toxic gas in 1984?

Union Carbide controlled the Indian company that ran the plant, where methyl isocyanate escaped from a storage tank and exposed more than 500,000 people nearby to the toxic gas.

Canadian engineers wear the Iron Ring, a reminder of their obligations, on which digit of the working hand?

The little finger of the dominant hand carries a ring first made of puddled iron. A persistent myth says the earliest rings were cut from the beams of the collapsed Quebec Bridge.

Which phrase did sociologist Diane Vaughan use for NASA's tolerance of known flaws before the Challenger disaster?

Normalization of deviance is how a clearly unsafe practice comes to seem normal because it has not yet caused a catastrophe. The idea has since been applied to aviation safety and medicine.

Which term, said to have been coined by Ralph Nader, describes an insider exposing an employer's wrongdoing?

Whistleblowing borrows from the whistles of police and referees. Nader is said to have wanted a word free of the stigma attached to informer and snitch.

Which branch of engineering, one of the oldest and broadest, deals with physical machines, forces and movement?

Mechanical engineers formed their first British professional society in 1847, though the roots of their field go back several thousand years.

Which branch of engineering became a distinct occupation in the late 1800s, once the telegraph and telephone spread?

Electrical engineering had an early ancestor in the 18th century, when Georges-Louis Le Sage built a telegraph with a separate wire for each letter of the alphabet.

Which branch of engineering deals with wastewater treatment, recycling, waste disposal and keeping air and water clean?

Environmental engineers also plan against waterborne disease, designing sanitation for urban, rural and recreational areas as well as municipal supplies of drinking water.

Which branch of engineering is concerned with producing crude oil and natural gas from underground reservoirs?

Petroleum engineering is one of the oil and gas industry's two main subsurface disciplines. The other, exploration, belongs to earth scientists.

Which branch of engineering designs the 'bones and joints' of buildings so that they carry their loads safely?

Structural engineers trace their science to Galileo, whose 1638 book Two New Sciences examined how simple structures fail.

Which field of engineering takes its name from a word coined by the science fiction writer Isaac Asimov?

Robotics builds on robot, a word the Czech author Karel Čapek introduced in his play R.U.R. Asimov went on to write the Three Laws of Robotics that recur through his books.

Karl von Terzaghi, the 'father of soil mechanics', founded the modern form of which branch of engineering?

Geotechnical thinking was spurred by foundation failures such as the Leaning Tower of Pisa, which pushed scientists to study the ground beneath a structure more rigorously.

Which branch of engineering designs concert halls to flatter an orchestra and barriers to cut traffic noise?

Acoustical engineers also put sound to work, from ultrasound in medicine to railway station speakers set up so that announcements can be understood.

Which science of friction and wear between moving surfaces takes its name from a Greek verb meaning 'I rub'?

Tribology was named by Peter Jost, whose 1966 report set out what friction, wear and corrosion were costing the British economy.

Which field, its name a blend of two words, covers the electronic systems carried aboard aircraft?

Avionics joins aviation and electronics, a name coined by Philip J. Klass, a senior editor at the magazine Aviation Week & Space Technology.