A self-taught US engineer built truck refrigeration from scrap
Frederick McKinley Jones left school at 12, then designed a truck cooling unit from junkyard parts. It closed the last gap in the cold chain.
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Engineering.
Making things work, understanding constraints and designing for reality.
What is materials science and engineering?
Three US university departments explain the field behind batteries and artificial skin. Its engineers test materials, pick them, and work out why parts fail.
Chile's building code: crack, tilt, but never fall
Chile's code lets a building crack or tilt in a magnitude 9.0 quake, but never collapse. That and regular drills kept an 8.3 quake's toll low in 2015.
Galloping Gertie sent bridge engineers into the wind tunnel
The Tacoma Narrows Bridge fell in a moderate wind in 1940. The inquiry told engineers to test suspension bridge models in wind tunnels.
Desalination boils or filters the salt out of seawater
A desalination plant strips salt from seawater by boiling it or forcing it through a membrane, leaving drinkable water and a salty waste called brine.
Why a blast furnace makes iron, not steel
A blast furnace strips oxygen from iron ore to make pig iron, which carries too much carbon to be steel until a second furnace treats it.
Panama Canal locks lift ships 85 feet above the sea
Gravity-fed water from Gatún Lake raises each ship in three steps. France's first attempt ended by 1889 and the United States finished the canal in 1914.
A blowout preventer failed to stop the Deepwater Horizon well
A blowout preventer is a seabed stack of valves built to seal a runaway well. On Deepwater Horizon in 2010 it failed. A capping stack later stopped the flow.
A cat-food tin, and the invention of the hovercraft
Christopher Cockerell tested his hovercraft theory with a coffee tin, a cat-food can and a vacuum cleaner, on the mud floor of his own boatyard.
A steel arch now covers Chernobyl's wrecked reactor 4
Chernobyl's reactor 4 had no containment structure to stop its 1986 explosion. In 2017 engineers slid the New Safe Confinement, a steel arch, over the ruin.
George de Mestral turned burrs stuck to his dog into Velcro
De Mestral copied the hooks on burrs he studied under a microscope. Designers turned Velcro down, and the aerospace industry became its first customer.
Maeslantkering: the Dutch barrier that shuts in half an hour
The Maeslantkering swings two doors across a 360-metre channel into Rotterdam, part of the Delta Works the Dutch built after the 1953 North Sea flood.