On Bad Engineering

Recently on the bike club website someone got all excited about an auto review of the Bugatti Veyron and that got me thinking, movements in engineering that we, well us engineers, should hang our head in shame for. Where to begin? Well clearly Tacoma Narrows has to go down in any list of bad engineering moments, for failure to account for the then unheard phenomena of aeroelastic flutter, we cannot really go gang busters on the engineering of that bridge. Lets see, there is the Bugatti Veyron, at a staggering €1.9m and gobbling up it's entire 100L of gasoline in 12minutes at full power the Vayron's natural home, the gas station, has to go down as one of the silliest ideas in engineering. But truly the worst design ever has to be the Space Shuttle.

But lets rewind for a second and review the entrants.

The Tacoma Narrows Bridge was built in the 1930s in Washington State, it opened on July 1 (Dominion Day!) 1940 and was destroyed by 42 mph (67km/h) winds on November 7 1940. The bridge lasted an entire 129 days before it failed the result of aeroelastic flutter. An area business owner shot a film of the bridge's collapse, in the book Fountains of Paradise, Arthur C. Clarke called that film the most expensive 11 minutes of movie making ever. (The book, Fountains of Paradise was written before the making of the James Cameron movie Titanic.)

Becuase there were no deaths in the failure of the bridge, and becuase the bridge failed for entirely new and novel reasons (in 1940 no one had heard of the concept of aeroelastic flutter, this bridge, Galloping Gertie as the locals called it, opened up a brand new field of study) the Tacoma Narrows Bridge does not actually represent bad engineering, just bad luck that someone happened to be around who owned a camera.

Next post, why the Bugatti Veyron is bad engineering, but not the worst.