Did you know...
Check out these fun facts about women, engineers, and cool engineering achievements.-
Rube Goldberg was a cartoonist and an engineer, but his name has come to be an adjective defined as accomplishing something simple through complicated means.
- Robots are increasingly being used in hospitals to allow critical care physicians to be in two places at once.There are less than 20 bobsleigh tracks in the entire world approved by the sport's international governing organization. The 2002 Olympic track in Park City, Utah, is the southernmost track in the world and is designed for bobsleigh, luge and skeleton events. The $25 million bobsleigh track of Park City, Utah is the most challenging sports track of its time.Ada Byron Lovelace, daughter of famous poet Lord Byron, published a paper in 1843 that predicted the development of computer software, artificial intelligence, and computer music. In 1834, Ada heard of Babbage’s ideas for a new calculating engine – the Analytical Engine. Ada suggested to Babbage a plan for calculating Bernoulli numbers with the Analytical Engine. This plan is now regarded as the first “computer program.”A team of five biomedical engineers in Edinburgh, Scotland created the first working bionic arm in 1993. The Bionic Arm also called the Edinburgh Modular Arm System, is packed with microchips, position-control circuits, miniature motors, gears, and pulleys. It rotates at the shoulder, bends at the elbow, rotates and twists at the wrist, and can grip using artificial fingers. The pulses then control each movement of a "new" arm.The Experimental Breeder Reactor-1 was the first facility to produce electricity generated by nuclear energy. The EBR-1 produced the first usable electricity generated by atomic energy. The EBR-1 supplied all of the power for its own building. Three years after it was decommissioned, President Johnson dedicated the facility as a registered National Historic Landmark. The nearby city of Arco, Idaho became the first city in the world to be lit by nuclear power.A woman named Emily Roebling supervised construction of the Brooklyn Bridge. When her husband became ill in 1872 Emily took over day-to-day supervision of bridge construction. Emily had studied many engineering topics related to bridge construction including mathematics, strength of materials, and cable construction. Her name is included on the plaque dedicating the bridge - recognizing her role in creating one of her era's great engineering achievements.Did you know the Ferris Wheel is considered an engineering wonder? The Ferris Wheel was designed by George W. Ferris in 1893. It was designed to be the landmark of the World's Fair in Chicago in 1893. The wheel is supported by two 140-foot steel towers. The towers are connected by a 45-foot axle, making the axle the largest single piece of forged steel made at that time.Given each year by the National Academy of Engineering, The Charles Stark Draper Draper Prize for Engineering was established in 1988 and is awarded for outstanding achievement, particularly innovation and reduction to practice, in engineering and technology contributing to the advancement of the welfare and freedom of humanity.In Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, the Crystal Bridge Conservatory is the focus of the Myriad Botanical Gardens. Engineers designed a cloud-making system to provide the necessary environment for a rainforest. A path next to a 35-foot waterfall leads up a "mountain" of rock formations, which are really latex molds from actual rock outcroppings. The conservatory is made from over 3,000 acrylic panels. It is seven stories tall and 224 feet long.The Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel was considered to be "One of Seven Engineering Wonders of the Modern World."
The Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel opened as a two-lane highway in 1964. Thirty-five years later in 1999, the southbound side opened, making it a four-lane highway. The 20-mile road connects Southeastern Virginia to the Delmarva Peninsula and cuts 95 miles from the trip between Virginia Beach, Virginia and points north of WIlmington, Delaware. It is made of two high bridges, two, one-mile tunnels, four man-made islands, and 12 miles of trestle. Each island is 10 acres in size and has almost 1.2 million tons of rock armor. The 12 miles of trestle are supported by more than 5000 concrete piles. Although it is no longer on the American Society of Civil Engineers list of Engineering Wonders, it was chosen as One of Seven Engineering Wonders of the Modern World when it was built in 1964 due to the number and different types of major structures included in one ...Big Brutus is the second largest electric shovel in the world. Engineers designed the 15,000 horsepower shovel to revitalize the strip-mining industry. At 11 million pounds, Big Brutus' bucket can lift up to 150 tons of coal - enough to fill three railroad cars.Bakelite was the first plastic not to melt when put in high temperatures. In 1907, the American chemist, Dr. Leo Baekeland made a breakthrough when he accidentally created the first commercially successful thermosetting synthetic resin, which was called Bakelite (known today as phenolic resin). He realized that a resin which would not melt under high temperatures would have a much wider appeal when used as a molding compound. Use of Bakelite quickly grew. It has been used to make products such as jewelry, telephones, and pot handles.Atalaya mansion in South Carolina included running water throughout the 40,000 square-foot 55-room home in 1933. Atalaya, Spanish for "watchtower", was built in 1931-33 by William Thomson. Thomson took verbal instructions on how and what to build from Atalaya's designer and owner, Archer Huntington. The unique engineering feature of Atalaya is its water system. This engineering achievement was way before its time. The system consists of Artesian well water pumped into a 10,000-gallon cistern, where the sand was allowed to settle out. From there, the water is pumped into a 3,000-gallon tank in a 40-foot high tower. This height created enough pressure to provide running water throughout the 55-room home.The Trans-Alaska Pipeline System was the largest private construction project of its time. The pipeline is 800 miles long and has a diameter of four feet. The zigzagging pipeline carries crude oil from 250 miles north of the Arctic Circle to the terminal at Valdez.On September 8, 1900, a hurricane sent an 8-foot high wave crashing into the city of Galveston, Texas. This hurricane killed 6,000-8,000 people and is considered to be the worst natural disaster in U.S. history. After the hurricane, the city asked retired Army engineer Henry Robert to design a seawall that would be seven miles long and seventeen feet high. Robert designed the wall as asked and also raised the city by pumping sand underneath the buildings. In 1915, the seawall was tested by another hurricane. This time, all but 8 people survived.Hedy Lamarr was a famous movie actress of the 1930's. While starring in famous movies, Hedy Lamarr was also an engineer. Lamarr held a patent on technology which is the foundation for today's advanced wireless networks. Lamarr had an idea for frequency hopping: switching from frequency to frequency in split-second intervals. Lamarr's idea, combined with a friend's idea of a device allowing the frequency to be synchronized, created technology that was never used as intended in World War II, but it created the foundation for today's wireless communications and has been used in the control of many U.S. intercontinental missiles.
The Hoover Dam is one of the tallest concrete dams ever built and it created one of the largest manmade lakes in the United States. At 726.4 feet tall, it took 200 engineers from several consulting firms and the Bureau of Reclamation to design the dam. It has 3,125,000 cubic yards of concrete and weighs more than 6.6 million tons! Construction of the dam, power plant, and related works took five years to build and was finished two years ahead of schedule. The reservoir created can hold enough water to cover the entire state of Pennsylvania with water one foot deep.
- The Hubble Telescope, one of the largest and most complex satellites ever built, was the result of over 20 years of science research and engineering. Deployed April 25, 1990 from the space shuttle Discovery, Hubble barely skims the Earth's atmosphere, orbiting just 380 miles above our planet. It is the size of a school bus and looks like a five-story tower of stacked silver canisters. Each canister houses important telescope equipment: the focusing mirrors, computers, imaging instruments, and pointing and control mechanisms. Extending from the telescope are solar panels for generating electricity and antennas for communicating with operators on the ground. It is named after American astronomer Edwin Powell Hubble, who among other achievements, discovered in 1929 that the universe is expanding. Every 97 minutes, the Hubble telescope orbits around Earth, moving at the speed of five miles per second -- fast enough to travel across the United States in about 10 minutes.At 24 miles long, the Lake Pontchartrain Causeway in Louisiana is the world longest continuous over-water highway bridge. The Causeway is one of the oldest prestressed concrete bridges in the United States. The Causeway consists of two parallel bridges that are supported by more than 9,500 hollow pilings 55 inches in diameter. Since its opening in 1956, traffic has grown from 3,000 vehicles per day to over 42.000 vehicles each week day From 1969 until 2011 it was listed in as the longest over-water bridge in the Guinness World Records. In 2011 in response to the building of the Jiaozhou Bay Bridge in China Guinness created two categories of over-water bridges. The Causeway became the longest continuous over-water bridge, and the Jiaozhou Bay Bridge became the longest aggregate over-water bridge.
