4of5 Modern Marvels: Engineering Disasters 4

Sinking bridges, deadly fires and sickening collapses serve as lessons to generations of engineers to create a safer future. In engineering, it is a rare disaster that does not hold a valuable lesson within its wreckage. The latest installment in the popular MODERN MARVELS® series examining catastrophes heads from America’s highways, where the Corvair was famously dubbed “unsafe at any speed” and a floating bridge sank in Seattle, to the skies, where crashes of the world’s first commercial jet pointed the way to a simple design change that made the modern air transportation industry possible. Each segment features interviews with experts like Asif Siddigi (author of Challenge to Apollo) and auto safety consultant Byron Bloch, along with compelling footage of disasters, re-creations and laboratory tests demonstrating the failures and analysis of the changes they helped spur. Dark clouds with silver linings, engineering disasters are the tragic, yet invaluable, handmaidens of technological progress.

Video Rating: 5 / 5