Engineering Trivia
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248 free Engineering trivia questions with answers — technology quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
50 free Engineering trivia questions with answers. Engineering is the discipline that turns physics into things you can stand on, and this quiz covers the whole span of it. Fifty questions take in the great structures and the people behind them (the Roeblings and the Brooklyn Bridge, Eiffel's iron, Goethals at Panama, the buttressed core of the Burj Khalifa), the famous failures that changed the textbooks (Tacoma Narrows, the Challenger O-rings, the Hyatt Regency walkways), and the fundamentals every first-year student meets: why concrete needs steel, what a keystone does, which six simple machines the Renaissance settled on, and whose names ended up on the SI units. It starts at school level and works up to questions that will stretch working engineers, so it suits Engineers Week classroom sessions, STEM club quiz nights and anyone who just likes knowing how the world was put together. Ancient Rome, the Industrial Revolution and Bell Labs all get their turn. Every answer was checked against primary sources and encyclopaedia entries, and each question carries its citation. No recycled listicle errors, no guessed dates.
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Q 01Which German-born engineer designed the Brooklyn Bridge and died of tetanus early in construction?
John A. Roebling
John A. Roebling's foot was crushed by a ferry in 1869 while he surveyed the tower site; the bridge he designed opened in 1883 as the world's longest suspension span.
Q 02Which illness, later known as 'the bends', left Washington Roebling bedridden while overseeing the Brooklyn Bridge?
Caisson disease
Caisson disease struck workers who surfaced too fast from the pressurised caissons used to dig the tower foundations; the same illness had killed 15 men on the Eads Bridge in St. Louis.
Q 03What did Emily Warren Roebling carry as a symbol of victory on the first carriage ride across the Brooklyn Bridge?
A rooster
Emily Warren Roebling rode across in 1883 with a rooster, a symbol of victory; she had taught herself cable construction to relay her bedridden husband's instructions to the site engineers.
Q 04The Eiffel Tower was built as the centrepiece of which event?
The 1889 World's Fair
The 1889 World's Fair marked 100 years since the storming of the Bastille, and the tower was its showpiece.
Q 05The Eiffel Tower is made mainly of which material?
Wrought iron
The Eiffel Tower is built from about 7,300 tonnes of puddled wrought iron; on hot days the top can lean up to 18 cm away from the sun as the sunny side expands.
Q 06Which country began digging the Panama Canal in 1881 and gave up eight years later?
France
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.
Q 07Which US Army engineer directed the Panama Canal to completion in 1914, two years ahead of target?
George Washington Goethals
George Washington Goethals took charge in 1907 and the canal opened in August 1914; its locks lift ships about 26 metres up to Gatun Lake, formed by damming the Chagres River.
Q 08Hoover Dam holds back which river on the Nevada-Arizona border?
The Colorado
Hoover Dam impounds the Colorado River in Black Canyon; its reservoir, Lake Mead, was for decades the largest in the United States by volume.
Q 09How did engineers stop Hoover Dam's concrete from taking over a century to cool and cure?
Chilled water in embedded pipes
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.
Q 10Which principal engineer did most of the Golden Gate Bridge's calculations, only to be dismissed by Joseph Strauss?
Charles Alton Ellis
Charles Alton Ellis did most of the structural calculations before Strauss dismissed him in 1931 and left him uncredited; the Art Deco towers were styled by architect Irving Morrow.
Q 11How tall is Dubai's Burj Khalifa, completed in 2010?
828 m
The Burj Khalifa rises 828 m to its tip; its Y-shaped 'buttressed core' lets three wings brace a hexagonal centre against wind without a heavy steel frame.
Q 12Which firm's engineers, led by Bill Baker, designed the Burj Khalifa's buttressed-core system?
Skidmore, Owings & Merrill
Skidmore, Owings & Merrill's Chicago office devised the buttressed core under structural engineer Bill Baker, with Adrian Smith as design architect; construction ran from 2004 to 2010.
Q 13The Channel Tunnel was bored mostly through which rock layer?
Chalk marl
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.
Q 21Brunel was first engineer of which railway, laying its London-Bristol line to a wide 7 ft gauge?
The Great Western Railway
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.
Q 22Which industrialist licensed Tesla's induction motor patents in 1888, sparking the 'war of the currents'?
George Westinghouse
George Westinghouse paid about $60,000 in cash and stock plus royalties for the patents in 1888; Tesla had quit Edison's Machine Works after about six months over a pay dispute.
Q 23The SI unit named after Tesla measures which quantity?
Q 14The Millau Viaduct in southern France crosses the gorge of which river?
The Tarn
The Millau Viaduct spans the Tarn valley; Michel Virlogeux and Norman Foster's cable-stayed design, opened in 2004, tops out at 343 metres, taller than the Eiffel Tower.
Q 15What nickname did the Tacoma Narrows Bridge earn from its wobbling deck before it collapsed in 1940?
Galloping Gertie
'Galloping Gertie' had been open just four months when a 40 mph wind set its deck twisting in opposite directions until it tore apart on 7 November 1940.
Q 16Modern analysis attributes the 1940 Tacoma Narrows collapse mainly to which phenomenon?
Aeroelastic flutter
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.
Q 17Which failed parts of the right rocket booster caused the 1986 Challenger disaster, after overnight temperatures dropped to about 18 °F?
O-ring seals
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.
Q 18Which physicist on the Rogers Commission dunked rubber in ice water on live TV to show why Challenger's seals failed?
Richard Feynman
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.
Q 19How many people died when two walkways collapsed at Kansas City's Hyatt Regency in 1981?
114
114 people died on 17 July 1981; a last-minute switch from single continuous hanger rods to two offset rods doubled the load on fourth-floor connections that met only 30% of code.
Q 20Titanic's iron rivets were found to be unusually brittle because they contained high levels of what?
Slag
Metallurgists testing recovered rivets found unusually high slag content in the wrought iron, which made rivet heads brittle in icy water and let hull plates part along their seams.
Magnetic flux density
The tesla, adopted by the CGPM in 1960, measures magnetic flux density: one tesla equals one weber per square metre, or one newton per ampere-metre.
Q 24Edison's Pearl Street Station, switched on in 1882, delivered what kind of electricity?
110-volt direct current
Pearl Street supplied 110-volt direct current to about 85 customers in lower Manhattan from 4 September 1882; DC could only be sent about a mile before line losses became prohibitive.
Q 25The screw pump traditionally credited to Archimedes of Syracuse was designed to do what?
Raise water
The Archimedes screw raises water up a helix turned inside a tube, draining bilges and irrigating fields; one contested theory says bronze versions watered the Hanging Gardens in Assyria centuries earlier.
Q 26For which Babbage machine did Ada Lovelace write her 'Notes' containing the first computer program?
The Analytical Engine
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.
Q 27Elijah McCoy, the Edinburgh-trained son of escaped slaves, patented what device for locomotives in 1872?
An automatic lubricator
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.
Q 28Hedy Lamarr and George Antheil's 1942 frequency-hopping patent was for guiding which weapon?
Torpedoes
The idea of hopping between channels to defeat jamming underpins Bluetooth and early Wi-Fi; the Electronic Frontier Foundation gave the pair a Pioneer Award in 1997.
Q 29Steel is an alloy of iron and which element?
Carbon
Steel is iron with up to about 2% carbon, which makes it far harder and stronger than pure iron; add at least 11% chromium and you get stainless steel.
Q 30Concrete is usually reinforced with steel bars because alone it is weak under which load?
Tension
Concrete is strong in compression but weak in tension, so embedded steel bars carry the pulling loads; Joseph Monier patented reinforced concrete in 1867.