Engineering is not often billed as an adrenaline-infused profession.
Indeed, introducing yourself as an engineer at a party likely won’t earn you the admiring oohs and ahhs that, say, a fireman or US Navy Seal might get. But for anyone who has ever inadvertently burnt off their fingertip with a soldering iron (yep, four-printed wonder right here), you know that engineering can be, and often is, risky business. After all, done right, it’s a hands-on profession.
That’s why a recent thread over on Quora caught my eye this morning.
“What are the deadliest construction/engineering projects in history?” was the title, with the subheading “For each, did technology exist at the time that could have made the work safer?”
The author listed the building of the Great Wall of China, the Panama Canal, and the pyramids as probably the most risky engineering projects in history, resulting in thousands of deaths. Still, those somehow feel a little far back and grandiose. Also, in the case of the Panama Canal, most of the deaths occurred after workers contracted yellow fever or malaria, rather than engineering work accidents.
The building of the Hoover dam, the great railroads, and mining were also all cited as examples of high-risk engineering, but the answers all seemed to fall a bit short. After all, the perils of structural engineering seem fairly obvious. You build something massive out of bricks and/or steel, and there’s a high likelihood bits may fall off and bop people on the head.
But what of the disasters in electrical engineering? What are the big notable ones?
At the risk of sounding like one of those cheesy TV lawyers, have you yourself ever inadvertently electrocuted yourself, a family member, or your dog? Slipped with your soldering iron and have scars to tell the tale?
Anything and everything from exploding laptops, to spontaneous combustion of batteries, or bringing down the power of an entire area -- if you have a story, we want to hear it.
No, I’m not going to help you sue for damages, but I do want to hear your engineering horror stories, with photographic evidence, if possible. After all, what good is a scar if you can’t show it off?
Send your tales of engineering horror to me at Sylvie.Barak@ubm.com or post them in the comments section below.
Years ago I got back from a 2 month field job, wrote my trip report, and sent it to our shop typist/secretary. I then just gave it to my boss. The next day he brought it into my office and it looked like a term paper with red pencil "spelling", "restructure", "needs clarification", etc notes all over it. It was not a deliverable paper, but just for in-house future work. I wrote across the top in caps "SEND TO THE TECH WRITER SHOP INSTEAD OF ENGINEERING. THEY ARE MUCH LESS EXPENSIVE TO USE" and brought it into his office 5 minutes later, dropping it on his desk. I never saw the paper again. I think he just filed it.
Moral of story: Don't let English majors design electronic circuits (or manage engineers). You can't win in a battle of wits if you are half prepared. - Dilbert (paraphrased).
In the 1990's in Telecom, before LiIon batteries became the normal standard, NiCad and NiMetal Hydride cylindrical batteries were the cell-phone industry's power-source of choice. These cylindrical cells, just like Lead-Acid Duracells, were only 1.5V nominal, so typically, three were used to engineer a "cell pack" with a safety circuit.
The battery department design engineers would routinely measure length of these cells using a metal Vernier caliper. Guess what happens when you measure across (+) and (-) of a battery cylinder with a metal caliper-?
There was not a Vernier caliper in the entire department that didn't have arc-burns on them, and not an engineer in the department who didn't recognize the "pop" and burnt smell after the failed measurement. It got to be a running joke for the battery engineering department.
I loved my chemistry lab as a youngster, especially my alcohol lamp burner - you could really get reactions going with a little heat. One day I was trying to remove the protective metal cap off the top of the burner (i couldn't figure out why it would rust since it was full of "alcohol" and not water). Undaunted, I grabbed a pair of pliers, twisted for all I was worth and cracked the glass base severing my index finger down to the tendon. Yowtch! Five stitches later and a bandage the size of a golf ball on my finger - I returned home. Never did that again.
Ok so let me define pain in electrical engineering terms. 6 Joule cap charged at about 4kV (do the math if you want to know C I don't remember it) shorting it across my thumb and pointing finger. I had a hard time closing my hand for about a week and had no strength on it for a good two weeks. I know there was some nerve damage but then it went away and did not need therapy.... Of course had I shorted that from one arm to the other I might not be here to tell the story ;)?
Oh and then there is the time when I shorted a capacitor of the same kind that had been sitting in a shelf for over three months. Don't you love capacitors that always stay charged and in case you discharged them they go ahead and charge themselves? Only at a couple of hundred volts but still tickles you if you short it across your fingers...
Model-T spark coils could, under the right conditions of condensing humidity, energize the dashboard metal each time the #1 cylinder fired. This made for some very entertaining driving. While in the military, we had HF transmitters of various output power all going through one antenna patch panel. Connecting a 10KW transmitter to a whip-antenna with a 1KW tuning coil at its base usually caused the whip antenna to launch at fairly significant velocity. It also occasionally caused the transmitter power-supply to crow-bar and scare the heck out of anyone standing nearby.
Gigabit and PoE are two networking technologies moving ahead in tandem as industrial users power remote Ethernet devices such as IP security cameras at 1,000 Mbps over existing CAT5 cable.
New disc magnet motors fit into the design trend of stepping up to closed loop performance while maintaining the cost advantage of stepper motor technology.
At the Design News webinar on June 27, learn all about aluminum extrusion: designing the right shape so it costs the least, is simplest to manufacture, and best fits the application's structural requirements.
A new battery design, which replaces lithium with abundant and low-cost elemental sulfur, is still in its nascent stages but shows real promise for giving batteries more energy potential.
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