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The best engineering practical jokes

September 7, 2006

Engineers often devise some great practical jokes. No doubt you've been involved in a technical practical joke more than once.

Perhaps the greatest practical joke that required some technology and some ingenuity came during a 1982 Harvard-Yale football game when MIT students inflated a balloon with their school letters on it. Here's what The Harvard Crimson reported about the incident and here's a photo of the balloon on the field.

Here's one I saw early in my career. An engineer in my department went on a business trip for a week. The office consisted of modular cubes with easy to remove panels. You could construct (or diassemble) a cube with just an Allen wrench. While this engineer was away, his colleagues removed a panel from another part of the office that just happened to be the right size to fill the opening in his cube. When in arrived on Monday morning, the engineer had to climb over the wall to reach his office.

OK, now tell us about your practical jokes.

Posted by Martin Rowe on September 7, 2006 | Comments (208)