Technology Facts About Engineering

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

A small airplane can fly backwards.

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

More than a billion transistors are manufactured every second.

Castor oil is used as a lubricant in jet planes.

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.

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.

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.

The Bobcat is the loader on every job site. Louis and Cyril Keller, two welders in Rothsay, Minnesota, built it for a turkey farmer who needed his barn cleaned - from junkyard scrap, in six weeks. Neither brother went past 8th grade. The manure fork was bars off the old Rothsay jail. A farm-equipment maker, Melroe, saw it at the state fair and named it Bobcat. Louis's son Joe says it replaced the pitchfork and the wheelbarrow.

The yellow barrels at every highway exit were invented by John Fitch, a Le Mans driver who once shot down a German jet in WWII. After his co-driver died at Le Mans in 1955, Fitch filled liquor barrels with sand and crashed into them at up to 70 mph in his own driveway. He climbed out grinning every time. Highways adopted them in the late 1960s. An estimated 17,000 lives saved. Every one started in his driveway.

In the 1840s, Charles Babbage designed a mechanical calculator with 8,000 parts to compute error-free mathematical tables. The project was too ambitious for Victorian-era resources and was never completed. Over 150 years later, the Science Museum in London built it to his exact specifications — and it worked perfectly.

Union Pacific's Big Boy No. 4014 is the largest steam locomotive running anywhere on Earth: 1.2 million pounds, 133 feet long. Only 8 of the 25 ever built survive, and only this one still runs. For 51 years it just sat as a park exhibit in Pomona, California. Union Pacific rebuilt it and put it back on the rails. This summer it crossed 14 states and 7,145 miles for America's 250th birthday. It is still running.

Every January, thousands of high school teams open the same box: the same kit of parts, the same rules for everyone. They get six weeks to build a working robot from scratch. It started in 1992 with 28 teams in a New Hampshire gym. More than 3,700 teams compete now, mentors giving up nights and weekends in the shop. Every year, thousands of teams still finish and put a robot on the field.

Hot Wheels came out in 1968 built to outrun every other toy car. Mattel handed the problem to its head of research. He had come from Raytheon, where he worked on the Sparrow and Hawk missiles. The fix was a thin music-wire axle spinning in low-friction plastic bearings. Rival Matchbox cars were still rolling on nail axles. Mattel still makes 22.5 Hot Wheels a second.

Case built nine 150-horsepower steam tractors between 1905 and 1907, and all nine were scrapped. Kory Anderson grew up in Andover, South Dakota, population 91, dreaming of rebuilding one. He copied the factory drawings, had more than 250 parts cast at his foundry and lit its first fire in 2018. It weighs about 37 tons. He brings it back to the Andover show every September and plows with it.