Engineering Facts

The Space Shuttle main engine weighs 1/7th as much as a train engine but delivers as much horsepower as 39 locomotives.

Today's top fuel dragsters take off with more force than the space shuttle.

The 426 escalators in the London Underground cover a distance every week equivalent to traveling around the world more than twice.

There are 2,500,000 rivets in the Eiffel Tower.

Car airbags kill 1 person for every 22 lives that they save.

NASCAR teams use nitrogen instead of regular air to fill their tires because it maintains more consistent pressure under extreme heat.

A small airplane can fly backwards.

The purpose of the indentation at the bottom of a wine bottle is to strengthen the structure of the bottle.

Because heat expands the metal, the Eiffel Tower always leans away from the sun.

The oil used by jewelers to lubricate clocks and watches costs about $3,000 a gallon.

If you took a standard slinky and stretched it out it would measure 87 feet.

More than a billion transistors are manufactured every second.

The world's first genetically-engineered bioluminescent (glow-in-the-dark) house plants have been created and could eventually be used as a functional light source.

Castor oil is used as a lubricant in jet planes.

A pipe 2 feet in diameter will allow four times more fluid to pass through it than a pipe 1 foot in diameter.

Approximately 25,000 workers died during the building of the Panama Canal, and approximately 20,000 of them contracted malaria and yellow fever.

The hole in a soda can tab can be rotated to hold a straw in place, preventing it from rising up due to carbonation bubbles.

Samsung is also a full time weapons manufacturer.

Michael Jackson used a special shoe to perform his "Smooth Criminal" lean trick.

The force of a suction cup is calculated using F=AP.

Japanese engineers were asked to redesign the front end of the Bullet Train because it carried enough speed to create a sonic boom whenever it exited a tunnel. Residents could feel the blast from miles away.

The inventor of the Super Soaker squirt gun was a NASA Scientist who also helped develop the Stealth Bomber and the Galileo mission to Jupiter.

Scientists in China have developed maglev train technology that could eventually reach speeds of 620 mph (1,000 km/h), more than twice as fast as current high-speed rail.

On Hubble's last repair mission, astronaut Mike Massimino stripped one screw. It held a handrail blocking a dead instrument behind 111 more screws. The ground team tested a fix and sent up the plan: brute force. So Massimino, who later played himself on The Big Bang Theory, tore the handrail off by hand. The instrument he helped fix still measures starlight.