Month: July 2026

I’m reminding you that I have an Engineering Zen group on Facebook and Telegram. In recent days, there have been posts about:

– Why a fridge magnet sticks only on one side, and barely on the other. It turns out, this is the same trick used to focus beams in particle accelerators. It has a name and a very unobvious “inside out”.

– A skyscraper in New York that could have been toppled by wind — and which was secretly fixed “live,” at night, while during the day offices went about business as usual. It all started with a student doubting the calculations. The story was then classified for almost 20 years.

– The fact that trolleybuses, electric cars, faxes, drones, video calls, and even humanoid robots are much older than you think. One of these robots, by the way, walked, talked about 700 words, counted on fingers, and smoked. In 1939.

– “Kelvin’s Thunderstorm” — dripping water that pumps thousands of volts and strikes with a spark. Completely without a power source. It is assembled on a kitchen table, and the energy comes not from what you might think (and it’s not a perpetual motion machine).

– A fax machine that became commercially successful before the telephone. A two-meter-tall eight-kilogram pendulum with a needle, 1860s. Guess who was the main customer.

– A simple soap film, which instantly “solves” a problem still unsolved by mathematicians in general terms. Without performing a single computation.

– Hoover Dam, inside which nearly 1000 km of pipes are hidden — otherwise, the concrete would have taken 125 years to set and would have cracked. How exactly they cooled it is a separate attraction with an ice plant right on the site.

– Those very same rusty “rusty” iron pieces sticking out in every fashionable square. They rust deliberately, and that is precisely what makes them almost eternal. Of course, they were not designed for beauty.

– Why memory cannot be erased by force of will — and why it’s so easy to inadvertently rewrite it. Also explains why so many people want to go back to the USSR.

– Benford’s Law: the first digit of a random number does not appear haphazardly — a one is at the forefront in almost a third of cases. It is used to catch fraudsters, and is even accepted as evidence in court.

– And for dessert — the world’s best mechanical calculator the size of a can, designed by a Buchenwald concentration camp prisoner. It was this work that saved his life.

Join us to not miss out on many more interesting things. “Engineering Zen”, @engineersdzen