Last week RCFC member (and frequent presenter) Bob Meroney shared Famous Mistakes (And Some Not-so-famous Mistakes). Starting with “prehistory” - did Adam and Eve eat an apple? No apple is mentioned in the Bible and scholars believe it was more likely a fig or pomegranate. The Bible again appeared (the so-called Wicked Bible translation) containing such gems as “Thou shall commit adultery”.
Architectural errors appeared frequently in the talk starting with early Egyptian pyramids (from collapses to excess angles of repose). Many Rotary members have visited the Leaning Tower of Pisa (built on unstable earth in 1178) which has leaned as far as 5.5 degrees but has been stabilized at 3.97 degrees. Not surprisingly, the proposed 30-story Leaning (15 degrees) Tower of Pizza was never built. There is, however, a 50-foot model at Domino headquarters.
Civil engineering (specifically bridge construction) seems especially hard to get right. In November 1940 the Tacoma Narrows Bridge collapsed because engineers did not factor in torsion instability and flutter. The Millenium Pedestrian Bridge across the Thames was built with suspension below instead of above. This design led to sway and the bridge is now known as Wibbly-Wobbly bridge. Bridge sides between Laufenburg, Germany and Laufenburg, Switzerland did not meet in the middle because of 2 different definitions of sea level (1,7 feet off). The load hum of the Golden Gate Bridge started because of an upgrade using thinner rail slats. Its correction is still ongoing.
Confusion between metric and English units of measurement resulted in the loss of a Mars lander and near loss of an Air Canada plane. Even Einstein made mistakes. A “cosmological constant” was added, removed, and revised as the understanding of our universe has changed.
Well-known disasters have been investigated. The sinking of the Titanic may have been avoided if a radio message about icebergs was delivered to the bridge. To make matters worse the helmsman mistakenly turned the ship into the iceberg rather than away from it. On May 6, 1937, the LZ129 Hindenburg airship caught fire and was destroyed (too many mistakes to record here). On January 28, 1986, the Challenger space Shuttle exploded. This was blamed on the failure of the O-rings to seal solid fuel and an irregular (not circular) booster tank.
The last slide that time allowed showed examples of “recent” political gaffes from Gerald Ford to Joe Biden. Other slides catalogue the many mistakes made in medicine and the legal system.
For those who would like to read about more mistakes Bob suggested – Humble Pi by Matthew Park.