50 Fun Facts About Civil Engineering

Civil engineering got its name in the 18th century to set it apart from which older kind of engineering?

Military engineering is the only branch considered older than civil engineering. In Britain the army trained its engineers at Woolwich, while King's College London opened a civil engineering class in 1838.

Army doctor William Gorgas made the Panama Canal buildable by waging war on which disease-carrying insect?

Mosquitoes spread the yellow fever and malaria that threatened the canal's workforce. Gorgas had already used the same methods in Havana, where draining their breeding ponds cut yellow fever cases to zero within a year.

The 22-yard surveyor's chain devised by Edmund Gunter in 1620 matches the length of which sports feature?

A cricket pitch is exactly one chain long, a relic of the days when land was measured with Gunter's 100-link chain. Ten square chains made an acre, which turned farm surveys into simple arithmetic.

Which US city reversed the flow of its river in 1900 so that sewage no longer drained into its drinking water?

Chicago dug a 28-mile canal that made its river flow out of Lake Michigan instead of into it. The diluted sewage now ran inland, down the Des Plaines and Illinois rivers towards the Mississippi.

The Leaning Tower of Pisa began to tilt during its 12th-century construction because of what?

Soft ground beneath a foundation just three metres deep let the tower sink on one side. Remedial work between 1993 and 2001, which included 870 tonnes of lead counterweights, finally stabilised it.

Which Egyptian temples were taken apart in blocks and rebuilt on higher ground in the 1960s to escape a new reservoir?

Abu Simbel was rebuilt 65 metres higher by 1968, clear of the lake filling behind the Aswan High Dam. Workers first injected epoxy resin into the fragile sandstone so the blocks would survive the lift.

Builders of which San Francisco landmark formed the Half Way to Hell Club after a safety net broke their falls?

The Golden Gate Bridge had movable netting slung beneath its crews at the insistence of chief engineer Joseph Strauss, and it saved nineteen men. Ten others died when a falling scaffold tore through it in 1937.

Which Renaissance artist is credited with inventing the V-shaped mitre gates still used on canal locks?

Leonardo da Vinci devised them in the late 15th century. The two leaves close at an angle like a shallow arch, so the pressure of the water on the upstream side holds them shut.

Percy Shaw's 1934 invention, a reflective stud set into the road surface, is known in Britain by what animal name?

The cat's eye cleans itself: a passing tyre presses its reflectors down past a fixed rubber wiper. Shaw patented the design in 1934 and set up a company in Halifax the next year to make it.

Which Colorado River dam was officially called Boulder Dam from 1933 until Congress changed it back in 1947?

Hoover Dam was poured as separate blocks laced with steel pipes that carried ice-cold water from a refrigeration plant. Concrete heats up as it cures, and one solid mass would have cracked as it cooled unevenly.

An early Channel Tunnel project was abandoned in 1883 because Britain's armed forces feared it would become what?

An invasion route under the sea alarmed the generals enough to stop the boring machines after more than a mile of digging. The tunnel finally opened in 1994, linking Folkestone with Coquelles in northern France.

Which French engineer designed the internal framework of the Statue of Liberty and the Garabit railway viaduct?

Gustave Eiffel was called in by the sculptor Auguste Bartholdi in 1881 and devised a four-legged pylon to carry the statue's copper skin. His tower for the 1889 Paris exposition came later.

Which building in Rome, nearly two thousand years old, still has the world's largest unreinforced concrete dome?

The Pantheon's dome measures 43 metres across, exactly the height from the floor to the open oculus at its top, so a perfect sphere would fit inside the hall.

Which river is spanned by China's Three Gorges Dam, whose reservoir displaced more than a million people?

The Yangtze dam was first proposed by Sun Yat-sen in 1919. Planners expected its reservoir to flood all or part of 13 cities, 140 towns and 1,350 villages.

Which New York skyscraper was structurally complete just 410 days after work began and opened in 1931?

The Empire State Building was finished twelve days ahead of schedule. It was the first building with more than 100 storeys and stayed the world's tallest until the World Trade Center was topped out in 1970.

Which landmark, built by a Canadian railway company, was the world's tallest free-standing structure from 1975 to 2007?

The CN Tower takes its name from Canadian National, the railway that built it. A Sikorsky Skycrane helicopter nicknamed Olga flew its antenna up in 36 sections, saving months of work.

What is the usual name for the ribbed steel rods cast inside concrete to help it resist stretching forces?

Rebar works because steel and concrete expand at almost the same rate as the temperature changes, so the two never pull apart. The ribs on each bar help it grip.

Galvanized steel is protected from rust by a thin coating of which metal?

Zinc keeps protecting the steel even where the coating is scratched through, because it corrodes in place of the exposed metal. The usual method is to dip the finished part in a molten bath.

Which chemical element has been added to drinking water since the early 1900s to kill cholera and typhoid germs?

Chlorine first treated a whole town's supply at Maidstone, England, in 1897. Permanent dosing began in Lincoln in 1905, after a faulty sand filter let a typhoid epidemic take hold.

Which US president, impressed by Germany's wartime autobahns, signed the 1956 act creating the Interstate highways?

Dwight D. Eisenhower had also crossed America in a 1919 Army convoy that took 62 days to reach San Francisco, slowed by poor bridges and engines clogged with desert sand.

William Mulholland's 1913 aqueduct carried water from the Owens Valley by gravity alone to which California city?

Los Angeles took so much water that the Owens Valley ceased to be a viable farming community. The aqueduct needs no pumps and even generates electricity on its way downhill.

Which country's Zuiderzee Works dammed a shallow inlet of the North Sea and drained part of it to create a new province?

The Netherlands sealed off the Zuiderzee in 1932, two years ahead of forecast, and kept draining polders until the new province of Flevoland was created in 1986.

What is the name of the structure that releases surplus water from a reservoir so the dam is never overtopped?

A spillway can be a simple chute down the face of the dam or a giant funnel standing in the reservoir. The funnel kind is nicknamed the morning glory, after the flower it resembles.

What are the long columns of timber, steel or concrete driven deep into the ground to carry a building's weight called?

Piles of timber have held up Venice since the city began, and the Royal Palace of Amsterdam still rests on 13,659 of them, preserved because they sit below the groundwater level.

Which Victorian engineer built the Great Western Railway on a 7-foot gauge and designed the Clifton Suspension Bridge?

Isambard Kingdom Brunel believed his broad gauge would run better at high speed, but the railway's directors found it no better than the standard one. The Clifton bridge was completed only after his death.

Which Scottish engineer gave his name to a road surface made of compacted layers of small crushed stone?

John McAdam, surveyor to the Bristol Turnpike Trust from 1816, raised his roads above the surrounding ground so that rain drained away. Binding the stones with tar came later and gave us the word tarmac.

Which surveying instrument uses a rotating telescope to measure angles in both the horizontal and vertical planes?

Theodolite first appears as a word in a 1571 surveying textbook by Leonard Digges, who applied it to an instrument that measured horizontal angles only.

Canadian engineers receive what item, worn on the little finger, in a ritual written by Rudyard Kipling?

An iron ring is a reminder of the profession's obligations and ethics, though many are now made of stainless steel. A persistent myth says the first batch was forged from the collapsed Quebec Bridge.

The number painted at the end of an airport runway is taken from which measurement?

Its compass heading, counted in tens of degrees, gives each runway a number from 01 to 36. Runways are occasionally renumbered because the Earth's magnetic field slowly drifts.

What do engineers call the sand, gravel and crushed stone bound together by cement in concrete?

Aggregate is the most mined material in the world. Crushed recycled concrete is now used for it as well as natural sand, gravel and stone.

Concrete sets hard through which chemical reaction in its cement, rather than by simply drying out?

Hydration gives off heat, so the surrounding temperature affects how long concrete takes to set. The mix must also be kept moist while it cures if it is to reach its full strength.

The slump test, which lifts a metal cone off a sample of fresh concrete, checks which property of the mix?

Workability is how easily the wet mix flows into place. Once the cone is lifted away, testers measure how far the heap sags: very dry mixes for road paving drop an inch at most.

What name do structural engineers give to the sudden sideways bowing of a long, slender column under compression?

Buckling was first analysed by Leonhard Euler in 1757, and his formula still gives the greatest load a slender column can carry. A short, stocky column is simply crushed before it can bow.

What term describes cracks that start and spread in a metal part under repeated cycles of loading?

Fatigue baffled Victorian engineers, who thought the metal of snapped railway axles had crystallised because the break looked brittle. That theory has since been disproved.

Which measure of how stiff a material is under tension or compression is named after a 19th-century British scientist?

Young's modulus honours Thomas Young, yet Leonhard Euler developed the concept in 1727 and Giordano Riccati ran the first experiments on it in 1782, 25 years before Young's own work.

Which dimensionless quantity tells engineers whether water in a pipe will flow in smooth layers or turn turbulent?

The Reynolds number was introduced by George Stokes in 1851 but named in 1908 for Osborne Reynolds, who had studied when pipe flow turns turbulent. Low values mean smooth, sheet-like flow.

What is the name for the process in which earthquake shaking makes loose, waterlogged sand lose its strength?

Liquefaction makes solid ground behave like a fluid, so buildings sink or fall over and a buried sewer manhole can float up through the road. Engineers took notice after two big earthquakes in 1964, in Alaska and at Niigata.

What is the name for a temporary enclosure built in water and pumped dry so construction can be done inside?

A cofferdam has to be heavily braced even though it is temporary, because once it is pumped out the weight of the surrounding water presses on its walls.

The Austrian engineer Karl von Terzaghi is known as the father of which branch of civil engineering?

Soil mechanics took shape as a discipline with his 1920s book on the physics of how earth behaves in construction. Born in Prague, he became the first president of the subject's international society.

Which 18th-century builder of the third Eddystone Lighthouse was the first person to style himself a civil engineer?

John Smeaton locked the lighthouse together with dovetailed blocks of granite and pioneered hydraulic lime, a mortar that sets under water. He is often regarded as the father of the profession.

Which chief engineer built London's main sewer system in response to the Great Stink of 1858?

Joseph Bazalgette's sewers were expected to end cholera by removing the foul air, or miasma, then blamed for it. They did relieve London of its epidemics, and his design remains the basis of sewer engineering.

Joseph Monier, a pioneer of reinforced concrete, filed his first patent in 1867 while working in which trade?

Gardening set the problem: Monier disliked the flowerpots on offer, and his plain concrete tubs were not stable enough until he embedded metal in them. Patents for pipes, bridges and beams followed.

Portland cement takes its name from a pale building stone quarried on an isle in which English county?

Dorset's Portland stone built St Paul's Cathedral and the British Museum. Joseph Aspdin chose the name for his 1824 patent because the hardened cement resembled it.

The first tunnelling shield, used to dig the Thames Tunnel from 1825, is said to have been inspired by which creature?

The shipworm is a mollusc that bores through submerged timber, which the shield's inventor had watched at work in a shipyard. His first shield was a rectangular frame with three levels of twelve sections each.

Where did two suspended walkways at a Hyatt Regency hotel collapse onto a crowded tea dance in July 1981?

Kansas City lost 114 people in the collapse, which investigators traced to a change in the design of the steel hanger rods that held the walkways up.

What kind of device is the 660-tonne steel pendulum that hangs near the top of the Taipei 101 skyscraper in Taiwan?

A tuned mass damper sways to offset the movement that strong gusts cause in the building. The one in Taipei is so popular with visitors that Sanrio was hired to design it a mascot, the Damper Baby.

Which Indian civil engineer, chief engineer of the KRS Dam at Mysore, is honoured each 15 September on Engineer's Day?

M. Visvesvaraya also helped plan flood protection for Hyderabad, a city under constant threat from the Musi river. He received the Bharat Ratna, India's highest civilian honour, in 1955.

Which engineer, born in Newcastle to a Danish father, led the structural design of the Sydney Opera House?

Ove Arup's team wrestled with the roof until 1961, when every shell was redrawn as a section of one sphere so that the arches could be cast in a common mould.

Which Dubai skyscraper, opened in 2010, rises from a Y-shaped floor plan modelled on a spider lily flower?

Burj Khalifa stands on a central core buttressed by three wings, a layout that also suits its flats and hotel rooms. The shape echoes the flower of the Hymenocallis, or spider lily.

Which Roman road, begun in 312 BC as a route for armies marching south, eventually ran from Rome to Brindisi?

The Via Appia was hailed by the poet Statius as the queen of the long roads. Its first section ran 132 Roman miles to Capua, and the push on to the port at Italy's heel came later.