200 free Engineering trivia questions with answers — technology quiz, new questions added Aug 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
His foot was crushed by a ferry while he surveyed the tower site; the bridge that eventually opened in 1883 was the longest suspension span in the world.
Q 02Which illness, later known as 'the bends', left Washington Roebling bedridden while overseeing the Brooklyn Bridge?
Caisson disease
Workers digging the tower foundations inside pressurised caissons came up too fast; the same mystery 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
She had taught herself catenary curves, materials strength and cable construction to relay her husband's instructions to the engineers on site.
Q 04The Eiffel Tower was built as the centrepiece of which event?
The 1889 World's Fair
The date marked 100 years since the storming of the Bastille; the tower's 18,038 iron pieces were joined with 2.5 million rivets.
Q 05The Eiffel Tower is made mainly of which material?
Wrought iron
The metalwork weighs about 7,300 tonnes, and the top can lean up to 18 cm away from the sun on hot days as the sunny side expands.
Q 06Which country began digging the Panama Canal in 1881 and gave up eight years later?
France
The effort was led by Ferdinand de Lesseps, fresh from Suez; 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
The canal's Pacific and Atlantic locks lift ships 26 metres up to Gatun Lake, an artificial reservoir made by damming the Chagres River.
Q 08Hoover Dam holds back which river on the Nevada-Arizona border?
The Colorado
The reservoir it created, 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
Once each column stopped contracting, the pipes were pumped full of grout; the dam was known as Boulder Dam from 1933 until Congress restored the Hoover name in 1947.
Q 10Which principal engineer did most of the Golden Gate Bridge's calculations, only to be dismissed by Joseph Strauss?
Charles Alton Ellis
The graceful Art Deco towers were shaped by Irving Morrow, a residential architect who was almost unknown when he got the job.
Q 11How tall is the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, the world's tallest building since 2010?
828 m
Its Y-shaped plan is a 'buttressed core': three wings brace a hexagonal centre so the tower resists 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
The same Chicago firm employed Fazlur Khan, whose tube structures made the Sears Tower and John Hancock Center possible a generation earlier.
Q 13The Channel Tunnel was bored mostly through which conveniently soft, watertight rock layer?
Chalk marl
Eleven tunnel boring machines dug three parallel bores, two for trains and a smaller service tunnel between them, before the 1994 opening 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
Its Box Tunnel was the longest in the world when it opened, 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
The deal was worth $60,000 in cash and stock; Tesla had quit Edison's Machine Works after only about six months over a pay dispute.
Q 23The SI unit named after Tesla measures which quantity?
Magnetic flux density
Q 14The Millau Viaduct, the world's tallest bridge for two decades, crosses the gorge of which river?
The Tarn
Engineer Michel Virlogeux and architect Norman Foster's cable-stayed design 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
It had been open just four months; a 40 mph wind set the deck twisting in opposite directions until it tore apart.
Q 16Modern analysis attributes the 1940 Tacoma Narrows collapse mainly to which phenomenon?
Aeroelastic flutter
The only fatality was Tubby, a three-legged cocker spaniel left in a car on the deck; the designer, Leon Moisseiff, had also consulted on the Golden Gate.
Q 17The 1986 Challenger disaster was traced to which failed components in the right rocket booster?
O-ring seals
Overnight temperatures had dropped to about 18 °F; 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
Morton Thiokol engineers Roger Boisjoly and Allan McDonald had argued against launching in the cold the night before.
Q 19How many people died when two walkways collapsed at Kansas City's Hyatt Regency in 1981?
114
A last-minute change from single continuous hanger rods to two offset rods doubled the load on the fourth-floor connections, which could carry only 30% of what they were asked to hold.
Q 20Titanic's iron rivets were found to be unusually brittle because they contained high levels of what?
Slag
The ship's 16 compartments were designed to keep her afloat with two, or in some combinations four, flooded; the iceberg opened six.
The name was adopted in 1960; the inductance unit is the henry, charge is the coulomb and conductance the siemens.
Q 24Edison's Pearl Street Station, switched on in 1882, delivered what kind of electricity?
110-volt direct current
Edison held 1,093 US patents, but the invention that first made him famous was the phonograph of 1877.
Q 25The screw pump traditionally credited to Archimedes of Syracuse was designed to do what?
Raise water
One theory holds that bronze versions were already irrigating the Hanging Gardens in Assyria centuries before Archimedes, though the evidence is contested.
Q 26For which Babbage machine did Ada Lovelace write her 'Notes' containing the first computer program?
The Analytical Engine
Her seven notes, lettered A to G, ran three times longer than the French article they annotated; the US Department of Defense named its Ada language after her.
Q 27Elijah McCoy, the Edinburgh-trained son of escaped slaves, patented what device for locomotives in 1872?
An automatic lubricator
Despite his mechanical engineering training, the Michigan Central Railroad would only hire him as a fireman and oiler; the phrase 'the real McCoy' is often, and wrongly, tied 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
Henry Bessemer's 1855 process made it cheap in bulk; 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
Reinforced concrete dates to Joseph Monier in 1849; concrete is the second-most-used substance on Earth after water.