The world’s coolest engineering failures

Margarita is a Student Ambassador in Greece, leading a series of articles about Aerospace Engineering as part of the STEM club she leads. 

Sometimes, all it takes is a millimeter or a gram to royally wreck something beyond repair.

Bridges

Both the 1940 and 1950 Tacoma Narrows Bridges represent how engineering failures can lead to major advances in design. The original Bridge failed dramatically in a windstorm on November 7, 1940, four months after opening. It revealed weaknesses in the bridge’s aerodynamic stability and prompted extensive investigation into how wind interacts with long suspension bridges.

 The investigations and research prompted by the failure led to the use of more conservative designs for the stiffening element and various other means of improving aerodynamic stability for all future long-span suspension bridges. The replacement 1950 bridge, constructed on the piers of the 1940 structure, was among the first to employ these revised and new concepts.

Telescopes

Another tiny error caused an aberration in the Hubble Space Telescope’s primary mirror, leading to early images being distorted. Two months after its launch, in June 1990, NASA announced that the telescope was flawed. Both of Hubble’s imaging cameras showed the same distortion, which must have originated in the primary mirror, the secondary mirror, or both.

To investigate the cause of the flaw, NASA formed the Hubble Space Telescope Optical Systems Board of Investigation on July 2, 1990. The board reviewed the documentation related to Hubble’s construction and testing. This uncovered that Hubble’s primary mirror had the wrong curve; it was too flat near its outer edge. The error was 10 times larger than the specified tolerance needed for its design to work properly.