10 Fun facts about engineering and technology that you probably didn’t know

So you're an engineer, or a tech buff. Step away from all of that hard work you do and indulge in 10 fun facts.

1. The word engineer comes from a Latin word meaning ‘cleverness’. (Source)

2. The fastest passenger train in the world is the Shanghai Maglev with a maximum operational speed of 267 mph. (Source)

3. The largest wind turbine in the world is in Denmark. It is 720 feet tall, has 260-foot blades, and can generate 8 megawatts of power (enough to supply electricity for 3,000 American homes). (Source)

Largest wind turbine.

4. The snowboard was invented by an engineer. Serman Poppen invented a toy for his daughter by tying two skiis together and attaching a rope to one end. This invention called the “snurfer” eventually evolved into the snowboard. With some engineering twists and turns along the way, the snowboard has become a marvel of geometry, chemistry, and biomechanics. (Source)

5. According to Moore's Law, microchips double in power every 18 to 24 months. Gordon E. Moore, a founder of Intel, proposed the concept in 1965. (Source)

6. Big Brutus is the second largest electric shovel in the world. The electric shovel constructed in 1963 took more than 150 railroad cars and over a year to build. It is 160 feet tall and operates at 15,000 horsepower. The shovel had to be shut down in 1974 because the cost of operation was twice that of the value of coal it recovered. (Source)

Big Brutus.

7. Although there is much debate about this fact, the first video game, called “Tennis for Two” was introduced in 1958 and created by William Higinbotham. (Source)

“Tennis for Two” on the left.

8. The first computer program was predicted by Ada Lovelace  in a paper she published in 1843. Ada suggested that plan for calculating Bernoulli numbers with a new calculating engine called the “Analytical Engine”. (Source)

9. The Atari Portfolio was released in 1989 and was the world’s first palmtop computer. Two years later it appeared in the film Terminator 2, where it was used by John Connor to hack an ATM and retrieve the key to the vault in the Cyberdyne lab. (Source)

Atari Portfolio.

10.  One Google search produces about 0.2 g of CO₂ . But since you hardly get an answer from one search, a typical search session produces about the same amount of CO₂ as does boiling a tea kettle. Google handles about 1 billion search queries per day, releasing some 200 tons of CO₂ per day. (Source)