Longest elevator fall
In 1945 an Air Force bomber crashed into the side of the Empire State Building. An elevator cab carrying Betty Lou Oliver fell 75 floors straight down; she, incredibly, survived.
Category: Technology
Cow magnets
If you’re a bovine veterinarian, one of the tools in your arsenal might be the cow magnet.
Largest bell
The Tsar Bell in Moscow is the largest extant bell in the world – but it has never been rung.
Jet vs. airport terminal
The new terminal building of Ottowa’s international airport was supposed to open in 1959. After one pass by a US air force jet the day before the opening ceremony, it could not open until 1960.
Space junk
A bit of the Apollo 12 rocket from 1969 is still floating around out in space. It orbits the sun – but every thirty or forty years it comes back to orbit the Earth for a while.
Endless elevator
Imagine an elevator with no doors that never stops: this is the paternoster lift.
Underwater airport
At Barra Airport, in Scotland’s Outer Hebrides, you cannot land at high tide.
Flying submarine
In the mid-20th century, several countries had plans to construct a flying submarine.
The rail zeppelin
Germany’s 1930 Schienenzeppelin was a propeller-driven train that could pull forty passengers at speeds faster than 200 kilometres per hour.
Kiln cones
In a kiln, a set of three drooping cones can monitor the effects of temperature on the pottery items being fired.
Wittgenstein’s propellers
The famed philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein was also an early pioneer of jet-engine propellers.
Prehistoric tracks
The Sweet Track in Somerset, Britain, was built exactly 5,828 years ago.
The shadow of the volcano
What do the bicycle, Marmite, Mormonism, and Frankenstein have in common? A volcano in Indonesia.
Wind on the tower
In 1978 the structural engineer of the Citigroup Center skyscraper learned of a fatal flaw in the design that could cause the tower to topple in high winds. Over the next three months a team raced to secretly repair it at night.
Doomsday device
In 1950 Leo Szilard warned the world that a single device capable of annihilating all life on Earth was theoretically possible.
The strange death of Rudolf Diesel
The inventor of the diesel engine died at sea under mysterious and still unexplained circumstances.