Extreme Engineering

Canadian student pranksters have turned city lights into Morse code, covered the mayor’s house in fake paint, and dangled a car beneath the Golden Gate Bridge—just to show they can. Our writer risked injury and arrest to join the cult

By Bob Parks Posted 08.19.2008 at 3:39 pm 7 Comments

Caltech, MIT’s greatest rival, tapped into the Rose Bowl scoreboard in 1984 and hooked up a wireless controller. During the big UCLA/Illinois game, when the score played across the screen during the fourth quarter, the names had been replaced: “Caltech 38; MIT 9.” And in 2006, MIT students got Caltech’s 1.7-ton ornamental cannon onto a trailer in broad daylight, partly through savvy social engineering: MIT student actors impersonated Caltech students and grilled the phony movers so passersby wouldn’t feel the need to do so.

Feat of Imagination: Team members [whose faces are obscured here to protect their identity] had less than six minutes to get the Beetle onto the bridge and over the side.

In this arms race, UBC is the third superpower. One of its most sophisticated feats also took place on the Lions Gate Bridge, in 1988. Electrical engineer Johan Thornton, now a contract engineer in his late 30s, decided that he wanted to make the bridge lights —all of them—blink. Thornton will only broadly describe the hack, but he hints that the low current of the bridge’s daylight sensor was crucial. For hours, people assumed that the blinking bridge lights were broken. Then the crew of a passing cargo ship reported that the pattern was Morse code: “UBC engineers do it again.”

The first Beetle appeared on the UBC campus in 1980, when students put one atop the school’s 121-foot clock tower. Since then, at least 14 cars have shown up in such places as the Massey Tunnel in Vancouver, on top of the wooden roller coaster at a city amusement park, and suspended between the Granville Street and Burrard Street bridges. The last great stunt took place under the Golden Gate Bridge in February 2001. Students hung a cable from the bridge span one day before. Accomplices then hid underneath the bridge for hours before the car arrived in a moving van. They crawled out, clipped the car to the cable, and threw it over. U.S. authorities stopped bridge and seaport traffic for hours. The students made it back across the Canadian border before anyone could stop them.

Roughly two hours after the Golden Gate incident, at 5:48 a.m., the pranksters sent a press release to major news outlets, marking the 20th anniversary of the first car suspension from the Lions Gate Bridge (in their excitement, they made a rare miscalculation; it was actually the 19th anniversary). It hailed the value of engineers, “from building crop irrigation systems to designing better wheelchairs,” and noted that UBC’s engineering courseload is 30 percent higher than for science or art students. Using the polite, measured language of their profession, the students pumped their fists in tribute to engineers everywhere.

So Galambos knows that he’s up against a long legacy. And despite his understandable safety concerns, he accepts that pranks are part of the culture and education of young engineers. If anything, he’s become a reluctant connoisseur of their work. But as a result, when Galambos’s team reports that the steel cable holding the car was attached to the handrails, he explodes. To Galambos’s mind, the handrails are not structural elements of the bridge and thus might not have the same strength. “If you do something that’s an example of true engineering intelligence—well, that’s not such a bad thing,” he says. “But you need some foresight about safety. Did they take any time to calculate the strength of the handrail, or did they just hang it up?”

He has no idea.

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7 Comments

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jacubious

08/19/08 at 6:02 pm

Haha, I think its funny that I had just written a comment about how UBC was left out of the other prank article.....

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Zilchy Zup

08/21/08 at 6:33 pm

Great inspirational article for people like me, who love to play pranks and think outside the box.

I mean, what's life without the thrill of doing adding fun? We, the next generation, must take back our world!!!

Hint: try buying 100 gift cards, and filling each one with 1 cent. Then use couple pounds of plastic that you just got for $1 and make something useful!

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cup c

09/21/08 at 3:42 pm

Come on, this "prank" has been done before, get a life guys...also just in case anyone is curious, there planning the same stunt for same time same place next year.

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seamountie

11/02/08 at 11:48 am

This was an interesting article, but either the editor or the author (or both) need to have their typing fingers rapped. Only in one place in this article did the author get the name of the bridge right. Not every suspention bridge in the world is called Golden Gate. The bridge in the article is the LIONS GATE BRIDGE. To get such a basic fact messed up not only throws the article but the whole site/magazine into disrepute. Not good for an journal that avers the title 'Scientific'.

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bobbyparks

01/26/09 at 11:16 am

We know our bridges.

Seamountie -- thanks for calling my article interesting. But on your criticism, you're way off -- my typing digits are fine. This article describes an incident that occurred in Feb., 2008 on the Lion's Gate Bridge. At one point, the article mentions that the same band of merry pranksters pulled off a high-profile stunt in 2001 at the Golden Gate bridge. Nowhere else do we reference the Golden Gate prank. Perhaps you read the article too fast?

PopSci has over a dozen copyeditors and fact-checkers on staff. The editors comb the story in five different stages over three months. The fact checkers call everyone mentioned in the story and read them back the content. Then they call their own secondary sources to double check that work. They called me at 10 pm one night to challenge something I wrote. It's a huge pain in the rear for the writer. But that's probably why there has never been a glaring error that ended up in a PopSci feature I've written (OK, a few wayward commas.) Despite the hassle, it's a great system.

While interviewing this top-secret British Columbia crew, it was hard not to become inspired by their good spirit. They remind me of a quote in an old Tom Robbins book: "Humanity has advanced, when it has advanced, not because it has been sober, responsible, and cautious, but because it has been playful, rebellious, and immature."

Does anyone have any questions about standing around on a cold bridge at 4 a.m. waiting for some rowdy college students to drive up?

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cml

02/02/09 at 11:40 am

Hello....the title of your article says that Canadian students hung a car from the Golden Gate Bridge. Ummm... I think you mean the Lion's Gate Bridge!!!!!!! You really should fix this mistake, it really kinda looks bad.

Thanks.

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cml

02/02/09 at 11:46 am

oops, sorry, I too read the article too quickly. it's just that it looks bad to have "Golden Gate Bridge" in the title and then immediately below there is a picture of the Lion's Gate Bridge. But if Canadians indeed hung a car from the Golden Gate Bridge, that's good!!