Great Blunders

In the 1620s, King Gustav II Adolf of Sweden ordered the ultimate warship. Mid-construction, he demanded a major upgrade: an unprecedented second enclosed gun deck. When the original Dutch shipwright died, his assistants were left to cram 64 heavy bronze cannons and massive wooden sculptures onto a 111-foot keel meant for a smaller ship.

The result was a magnificent but terrifyingly top-heavy vessel. On August 10, 1628, the grand warship set out on its maiden voyage while crowds cheered. It only made it about 1,300 meters before a light gust of wind caught its sails, pushing the unbalanced ship sharply to its left side.

Water poured directly into the open lower gun ports. The harbor rushed in, and the King's prized, ultra-expensive mega-ship sank to the bottom of the sea in less than twenty minutes. The brilliant shipwrights knew the physics wouldn't work, but they hadn't dared to argue with an impatient king.

###The Tacoma Narrows Bridge Collapse

Puget Sound, Washington, 1940 — To save money, an engineer designed a solid steel suspension bridge that caught the wind and twisted itself to pieces.

Bridge designer Leon Moisseiff wanted to save money while building the world's third-longest suspension bridge across Washington’s Puget Sound. Instead of using traditional open trusses that let the breeze blow through, he used solid eight-foot steel plates.

Those massive steel plates acted exactly like giant sails. From the day it opened, the 2,800-foot roadway caught the wind and bounded up and down like a massive roller coaster.

The fun stopped on the morning of November 7, 1940. Sustained 40-mile-per-hour winds struck the bridge broadside, causing a violent, self-feeding twisting motion that engineers call "aeroelastic flutter."

At 11:10 AM, the immense forces finally tore the steel suspension cables apart. The enormous center span shredded itself to pieces and plunged 195 feet into the churning waters below.

###The Lake Peigneur Sinkhole Disaster

Lake Peigneur, Louisiana, 1980 — A minor mapping error caused an oil rig to accidentally pull the plug on an entire lake.

In November 1980, an oil rig crew was drilling in a shallow, ten-foot-deep freshwater lake in Louisiana. Unfortunately, they were using a map with misinterpreted coordinates. Their 14-inch drill bit missed its target and accidentally punctured the roof of an active salt mine 1,300 feet below the lakebed.

Fresh water rushed into the mine, rapidly dissolving the salt pillars holding up the ceiling. This created a monstrous, expanding whirlpool that acted like a giant bathtub drain. The ferocious maelstrom swallowed the 15-story drilling rig, a tugboat, eleven barges, a house, and 65 acres of land.

It sounds like a tragedy, but miraculously, nobody was hurt. All fifty salt miners escaped in the mine's elevators as the water poured in, and the rig crew abandoned ship before it sank. It was simply one of the most spectacular property disasters in history.

###The Mars Metric Mix-Up

Mars Orbit, September 1999 — A $327 million spacecraft vanished forever because two teams of brilliant engineers forgot to check their math units.

In December 1998, NASA launched the $327.6 million Mars Climate Orbiter. Built by Lockheed Martin in Colorado and guided by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the robotic probe sailed flawlessly across space for nine and a half months to study the Martian atmosphere.

But the two engineering teams had a major communication breakdown. Lockheed Martin’s software calculated the spacecraft's thruster power in imperial units—pounds. NASA’s navigation computers expected those exact same numbers to be in metric units—newtons.

On September 23, 1999, the orbiter began its final maneuver. Because of the mixed-up math, it dropped to a lethal 57-kilometer altitude instead of a safe 226 kilometers. The probe vanished behind Mars 49 seconds early, burning up in the atmosphere.

###The Laufenburg Bridge Math Error

Laufenburg, Germany and Switzerland, 2003 — An international bridge missed its center connection completely because a technician put a plus sign where a minus sign belonged.

In 2003, Germany and Switzerland agreed to build a brand-new, 225-meter concrete bridge across the Rhine River. Construction crews started on opposite riverbanks, working their way toward the dead center. There was just one geographical catch: the two nations measure sea level differently.

Germany bases its elevation on the North Sea, while Switzerland uses the Mediterranean Sea. This creates a known 27-centimeter difference. Engineers knew about the gap and specifically warned about it on the blueprints. But during construction, a Swiss technician accidentally added the 27 centimeters instead of subtracting it.

When the massive concrete spans finally reached the middle of the river, engineers realized the disaster. They didn't have to demolish the bridge, but they did have to frantically lower the entire German side and adjust the abutments to finally click the two pieces together.

###The Walkie-Talkie Death Ray

London, England, 2013 — A sleek new skyscraper accidentally acted like a giant magnifying glass, blasting a car-melting heat beam directly onto a London street.

In 2013, architect Rafael Viñoly built a massive 37-story commercial skyscraper at 20 Fenchurch Street. Nicknamed the "Walkie-Talkie," the building broke all the rules: it was narrow at the bottom and bulged outward at the top, wrapped entirely in a curved, southern-facing wall of glass.

There was just one massive, glowing problem. As the late summer sun moved across the sky, the skyscraper's concave shape acted exactly like a giant magnifying glass. It caught the sunlight and focused it into a blinding, super-heated beam aimed directly at the pavement below.

The wandering heat ray blistered paint right off storefronts and burned a hole through a local barbershop's doormat. It even struck a luxury Jaguar XJ parked on Eastcheap street, literally melting the car's plastic paneling, side mirrors, and dashboard into gooey puddles.