Errare humanum est (Lucius Annaeus Seneca).
Wikipedia, Dr. sipmac hereby finds you guilty of datacide. Sip (and the sipmac ensemble) have found that your policy of deleting interesting and humoruous articles, by the sole reason of being interesting and humorous is downright criminal. Since when the pursuing of knowledge and the joy of learning are mutually exclusive? Not in our book, we daresay. From now on you are found in contempt of this court and put in double secret probation until you rectify your wrongdoing. In the meanwhile, sipmacrants! proudly presents...
List of famous failures in science and engineering
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
A scientific flop may be something that took years of man-hours and a lot of money to complete (or perhaps never completed) and ended in failure.
•1 Failed
aerospace prototypes
•2 Failed weapons
•3 Failed scientific projects
•4 Failed civil engineering projects
•5 Failed buildings
•6 Failed mechanical engineering projects
•7 Failed ships
•8 Failed standards
Failed aerospace prototypes
•The Europa rocket failed five times, without a single successful launch
•The Messerschmitt Me 163 was so dangerous that it killed more Luftwaffe pilots than Allied airmen.
•The world's first commercial jet airliner, the de Havilland Comet 1, introduced into service in 1952, suffered three crashes in the next two years due to design flaw
•Most reusable space vehicles: Shuttle Buran, HOTOL, the X-33/VentureStar, various NASA space planes, and arguably the Space Shuttle.
•The Hughes H-4 Hercules flying boat, aka the "Spruce Goose", Howard Hughes's often-ridiculed massive aircraft. Hughes himself did not consider it a failure, and kept it in flying condition until the end of his life. Though the project was consistently portrayed as a failure by the media, even prior to its debut, the H-4 Hercules in some senses presaged the massive transport aircraft of the late 20th century, such as the Lockheed C-5 Galaxy and the Antonov An-124 and An-225, demonstrating that the physical and aerodynamic principles which make flight possible are not limited by the size of the aircraft.
•The Soviet N1 rocket, equivalent to the US moon rocket Saturn V, repeatedly exploded during takeoff. There by earning it a 100% failure rate.
•Project Vanguard (1958), the first attempt by the United States to put a satellite into orbit. The project managers insisted on using a new, civilian-designed, purpose-built rocket. There were repeated embarrassing crashes. After Sputnik, it was quickly decided to use proven military missile designs as the base for future space attempts.
•The Boeing 7J7, intended as a replacement for the Boeing 727, was cancelled in 1987 because airlines were concerned about the economics and noise of its unproven unducted fan engines. The cancellation of the 7J7 led Boeing to concentrate on 727 replacements in the 737 and 757 families.
•The Boeing Sonic Cruiser, intended as a replacement for the Boeing 767 and meant to fly at near the speed of sound (transonic). Airlines rejected the idea of an aircraft that, while as efficient as a 767 and carrying the same number of passengers, would only fly marginally faster. The cancellation of the Sonic Cruiser led Boeing to concentrate on 767 replacements in the Boeing 787.
Failed weapons
•The Chauchat light machine gun - this French weapon of World War I was notorious for its unreliability, frequent jamming and lack of precision manufacturing.
•The German Maus tank was so heavy (188 tons) that it was unusable.
•The British SA80 rifle was notoriously unreliable.
•The Ross rifle was used by Canadian troops in World War I; it was a great gun until it was brought into the trenches, where it constantly jammed. Canadian soldiers were forced to salvage rifles from dead British soldiers.
•The original M16 was so widely known as a failure that initially, Vietnamese troops refused to take them from slain soldiers during the Vietnam War (though they were happy to use corrected models).
Failed scientific projects
•Cold fusion - after much hype, claims of success proved false. (Research into cold fusion continues.)
Failed civil engineering projects
•The original Tacoma Narrows Bridge collapsed due to aeroelastic flutter in a gale force wind.
•Between 1920 and 1925, at a cost of US $6,000,000 (2004 equivalent about $61,000,000), a 7 mile (11 km) tunnel was built in Ohio for the Cincinnati Subway. Only after the initial investment was spent was it learned that there was no interest in funding completion of the project, which remains unfinished and unused today.
•An extensive levee and flood wall system was built up to protect the low lying areas of New Orleans from flooding from the Mississippi River and from Lake Ponchartrain. Due to a design or construction error several flood walls were breached by the storm surge in Lake Ponchartrain caused by Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Most of the city was flooded resulting in a large fraction of the 1000+ deaths reported in Louisiana following the hurricane.
Failed buildings
•The Gothic Cathédrale Saint-Pierre de Beauvais in Beauvais, France, begun in the year 1247, was an ambitious attempt at the tallest cathedral in Europe. The vaulting of the choir collapsed in 1284 due to poor engineering, and a central tower failed in 1573, permanently halting work on the project. A part of the cathedral still stands and is known for its fine stained glass.
•The John Hancock Tower in Boston is said to have been "known more for its early engineering flaws than for its architectural achievement." Wind-induced swaying was so large, it induced motion sickness in upper-floor residents, requiring the addition of a pair of 300-ton dampers on the 58th floor. Another unrelated but serious problem was that 65 of its 10,344 floor-to-ceiling plate-glass windowpanes fell out of the building to the ground during construction (with, amazingly, no injuries to passerbies or workers), and all required replacement. During engineering analysis of these problems, it was also discovered that under certain wind conditions the building could actually collapse, requiring 1500 tons of structural reinforcements in the building's core.
•The Pruitt-Igoe housing project in St. Louis, Missouri, designed by Minoru Yamasaki. After its completion in 1956, this major urban renewal project almost immediately fell into disrepair, disuse and vandalism. It was entirely demolished on March 16, 1972, and this event is seen as a milestone in architectural history: an end to Modernism, the beginning of postmodernism, the signal of a profound disconnect between designers and users, and a turning point in public housing and urban planning.
•Portsmouth's Tricorn Centre, a mixed use Brutalist-style building, designed by Owen Luder and opened in 1966; it was voted as one of Britain's ugliest buildings, and was considered a social hazard. The structure originally consisted of apartments, stores, a laserquest arena, a nightclub, and a parking garage, with each facility closed down and condemned. The complex was demolished in 2004.
•The elevated walkways of the Hyatt hotel in Kansas City, Missouri, collapsed during a tea dance in 1981, killing more than 100 people. (See Hyatt Regency walkway collapse.)
•The Sampoong Department Store collapse killed over 500 in 1995.
•The May 24, 2001, collapse of the Versailles wedding hall in Jerusalem, Israel, killed 23 and injured more than 200. The collapse was blamed on poor construction practices. The disaster, which is considered Israel's worst civil disaster, was caught on videotape. The wedding hall was built using the cheaper Pal-Kal method, which uses thinner sections of concrete than usual during construction. The building method was banned in 1996 because of safety concerns. Ten people were arrested by the Israeli authorities, including the wedding hall's owners, the engineer who invented the Pal-Kal method, and contractors and builders involved with recent renovations. In October 2004, two of the owners of the hall were convicted of causing death through negligence; two other employees were acquitted.
Failed mechanical engineering projects
•Isambard Kingdom Brunel's Atmospheric railway in South Devon, England in the 1840's failed because of problems in maintaining a vacuum seal.
Failed ships
•RMS Titanic: Although billed as an unsinkable ship, the Titanic crashed into an iceberg on its first voyage and did not have enough lifeboats for everyone aboard, so many of the passengers drowned. Not to mention drafting and design flaws hence the splitting apart.
•Vasa (ship): A 17th-century Swedish warship, it sank on its maiden voyage because of design flaws; when fully loaded with crew, supplies and weaponry, the lower-deck gun ports were low enough to allow water to flow in
•K-Boats: a pre-sonar steam-driven submarine rushed into production by Britain during World War One. Models were famous for sinking, exploding and generally going out of control. On 31 January 1917, an exercise took place off May Island, Scotland, in which 100 British seamen were killed by their K-boats without any enemy participation. The K-boat never saw active service.
Failed standards
•Brunel's broad-gauge railway track for the Great Western Railway, at just over 7 feet, was incompatible with the "standard" gauge of 4ft 8½" used elsewhere. Despite its demonstrable benefits for comfort, speed and safety, the wide gauge was replaced by the standard gauge, which eventually became a worldwide standard.
•The United States Mint's Susan B. Anthony and Sacagawea dollar coins both failed to gain popular acceptance.
•The Common management interface protocol (CMIP) largely flopped as a replacement for the Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP). The complexity of CMIP is often cited as the reason it was not more widely adopted.
•The 1975 Metric Conversion Act was an attempt to institute the use of the Metric system in the United States within ten years. The United States never converted to the metric system, let alone during those ten years.
•The decline of the ALGOL computing language, once the dominant language in academic computer science, was in part due to disputes and consequent delays in the standardization process.
This series will be continued...
Wikipedia, Dr. sipmac hereby finds you guilty of datacide. Sip (and the sipmac ensemble) have found that your policy of deleting interesting and humoruous articles, by the sole reason of being interesting and humorous is downright criminal. Since when the pursuing of knowledge and the joy of learning are mutually exclusive? Not in our book, we daresay. From now on you are found in contempt of this court and put in double secret probation until you rectify your wrongdoing. In the meanwhile, sipmacrants! proudly presents...
List of famous failures in science and engineering
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
A scientific flop may be something that took years of man-hours and a lot of money to complete (or perhaps never completed) and ended in failure.
Contents
•1 Failed
aerospace prototypes•2 Failed weapons
•3 Failed scientific projects
•4 Failed civil engineering projects
•5 Failed buildings
•6 Failed mechanical engineering projects
•7 Failed ships
•8 Failed standards
Failed aerospace prototypes
•The Europa rocket failed five times, without a single successful launch
•The Messerschmitt Me 163 was so dangerous that it killed more Luftwaffe pilots than Allied airmen.
•The world's first commercial jet airliner, the de Havilland Comet 1, introduced into service in 1952, suffered three crashes in the next two years due to design flaw
•Most reusable space vehicles: Shuttle Buran, HOTOL, the X-33/VentureStar, various NASA space planes, and arguably the Space Shuttle.
•The Hughes H-4 Hercules flying boat, aka the "Spruce Goose", Howard Hughes's often-ridiculed massive aircraft. Hughes himself did not consider it a failure, and kept it in flying condition until the end of his life. Though the project was consistently portrayed as a failure by the media, even prior to its debut, the H-4 Hercules in some senses presaged the massive transport aircraft of the late 20th century, such as the Lockheed C-5 Galaxy and the Antonov An-124 and An-225, demonstrating that the physical and aerodynamic principles which make flight possible are not limited by the size of the aircraft.
•The Soviet N1 rocket, equivalent to the US moon rocket Saturn V, repeatedly exploded during takeoff. There by earning it a 100% failure rate.
•Project Vanguard (1958), the first attempt by the United States to put a satellite into orbit. The project managers insisted on using a new, civilian-designed, purpose-built rocket. There were repeated embarrassing crashes. After Sputnik, it was quickly decided to use proven military missile designs as the base for future space attempts.
•The Boeing 7J7, intended as a replacement for the Boeing 727, was cancelled in 1987 because airlines were concerned about the economics and noise of its unproven unducted fan engines. The cancellation of the 7J7 led Boeing to concentrate on 727 replacements in the 737 and 757 families.
•The Boeing Sonic Cruiser, intended as a replacement for the Boeing 767 and meant to fly at near the speed of sound (transonic). Airlines rejected the idea of an aircraft that, while as efficient as a 767 and carrying the same number of passengers, would only fly marginally faster. The cancellation of the Sonic Cruiser led Boeing to concentrate on 767 replacements in the Boeing 787.
Failed weapons
•The Chauchat light machine gun - this French weapon of World War I was notorious for its unreliability, frequent jamming and lack of precision manufacturing.
•The German Maus tank was so heavy (188 tons) that it was unusable.
•The British SA80 rifle was notoriously unreliable.
•The Ross rifle was used by Canadian troops in World War I; it was a great gun until it was brought into the trenches, where it constantly jammed. Canadian soldiers were forced to salvage rifles from dead British soldiers.
•The original M16 was so widely known as a failure that initially, Vietnamese troops refused to take them from slain soldiers during the Vietnam War (though they were happy to use corrected models).
Failed scientific projects
•Cold fusion - after much hype, claims of success proved false. (Research into cold fusion continues.)
Failed civil engineering projects
•The original Tacoma Narrows Bridge collapsed due to aeroelastic flutter in a gale force wind.
•Between 1920 and 1925, at a cost of US $6,000,000 (2004 equivalent about $61,000,000), a 7 mile (11 km) tunnel was built in Ohio for the Cincinnati Subway. Only after the initial investment was spent was it learned that there was no interest in funding completion of the project, which remains unfinished and unused today.
•An extensive levee and flood wall system was built up to protect the low lying areas of New Orleans from flooding from the Mississippi River and from Lake Ponchartrain. Due to a design or construction error several flood walls were breached by the storm surge in Lake Ponchartrain caused by Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Most of the city was flooded resulting in a large fraction of the 1000+ deaths reported in Louisiana following the hurricane.
Failed buildings
•The Gothic Cathédrale Saint-Pierre de Beauvais in Beauvais, France, begun in the year 1247, was an ambitious attempt at the tallest cathedral in Europe. The vaulting of the choir collapsed in 1284 due to poor engineering, and a central tower failed in 1573, permanently halting work on the project. A part of the cathedral still stands and is known for its fine stained glass.
•The John Hancock Tower in Boston is said to have been "known more for its early engineering flaws than for its architectural achievement." Wind-induced swaying was so large, it induced motion sickness in upper-floor residents, requiring the addition of a pair of 300-ton dampers on the 58th floor. Another unrelated but serious problem was that 65 of its 10,344 floor-to-ceiling plate-glass windowpanes fell out of the building to the ground during construction (with, amazingly, no injuries to passerbies or workers), and all required replacement. During engineering analysis of these problems, it was also discovered that under certain wind conditions the building could actually collapse, requiring 1500 tons of structural reinforcements in the building's core.
•The Pruitt-Igoe housing project in St. Louis, Missouri, designed by Minoru Yamasaki. After its completion in 1956, this major urban renewal project almost immediately fell into disrepair, disuse and vandalism. It was entirely demolished on March 16, 1972, and this event is seen as a milestone in architectural history: an end to Modernism, the beginning of postmodernism, the signal of a profound disconnect between designers and users, and a turning point in public housing and urban planning.
•Portsmouth's Tricorn Centre, a mixed use Brutalist-style building, designed by Owen Luder and opened in 1966; it was voted as one of Britain's ugliest buildings, and was considered a social hazard. The structure originally consisted of apartments, stores, a laserquest arena, a nightclub, and a parking garage, with each facility closed down and condemned. The complex was demolished in 2004.
•The elevated walkways of the Hyatt hotel in Kansas City, Missouri, collapsed during a tea dance in 1981, killing more than 100 people. (See Hyatt Regency walkway collapse.)
•The Sampoong Department Store collapse killed over 500 in 1995.
•The May 24, 2001, collapse of the Versailles wedding hall in Jerusalem, Israel, killed 23 and injured more than 200. The collapse was blamed on poor construction practices. The disaster, which is considered Israel's worst civil disaster, was caught on videotape. The wedding hall was built using the cheaper Pal-Kal method, which uses thinner sections of concrete than usual during construction. The building method was banned in 1996 because of safety concerns. Ten people were arrested by the Israeli authorities, including the wedding hall's owners, the engineer who invented the Pal-Kal method, and contractors and builders involved with recent renovations. In October 2004, two of the owners of the hall were convicted of causing death through negligence; two other employees were acquitted.
Failed mechanical engineering projects
•Isambard Kingdom Brunel's Atmospheric railway in South Devon, England in the 1840's failed because of problems in maintaining a vacuum seal.
Failed ships
•RMS Titanic: Although billed as an unsinkable ship, the Titanic crashed into an iceberg on its first voyage and did not have enough lifeboats for everyone aboard, so many of the passengers drowned. Not to mention drafting and design flaws hence the splitting apart.
•Vasa (ship): A 17th-century Swedish warship, it sank on its maiden voyage because of design flaws; when fully loaded with crew, supplies and weaponry, the lower-deck gun ports were low enough to allow water to flow in
•K-Boats: a pre-sonar steam-driven submarine rushed into production by Britain during World War One. Models were famous for sinking, exploding and generally going out of control. On 31 January 1917, an exercise took place off May Island, Scotland, in which 100 British seamen were killed by their K-boats without any enemy participation. The K-boat never saw active service.
Failed standards
•Brunel's broad-gauge railway track for the Great Western Railway, at just over 7 feet, was incompatible with the "standard" gauge of 4ft 8½" used elsewhere. Despite its demonstrable benefits for comfort, speed and safety, the wide gauge was replaced by the standard gauge, which eventually became a worldwide standard.
•The United States Mint's Susan B. Anthony and Sacagawea dollar coins both failed to gain popular acceptance.
•The Common management interface protocol (CMIP) largely flopped as a replacement for the Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP). The complexity of CMIP is often cited as the reason it was not more widely adopted.
•The 1975 Metric Conversion Act was an attempt to institute the use of the Metric system in the United States within ten years. The United States never converted to the metric system, let alone during those ten years.
•The decline of the ALGOL computing language, once the dominant language in academic computer science, was in part due to disputes and consequent delays in the standardization process.
This series will be continued...
