Mightier than the Sword

The Ride of a Lifetime

The words of the operator crackle through the speaker as you step down into the brightly colored car.

Please lower the lap bar and buckle the seat restraint as you enter the car.

You are embarking on the end result of several years of work-- ideas flash through your head as a crazed montage. Pages and pages of calculations, evaluations of stress and strain, design and redesign concepts sketched on bar napkins, late nights full of black coffee and fluorescent lights, haggling with contractors over this and that, dynamic force equations...

Secure all loose articles. We are not responsible for items lost while riding.

The rhythmic clanking of the chain starts suddenly as the train of cars begins its slow ascent. Potential energy is growing. You think back to the ME 270 lecture class you had during your third semester of college and wonder how you could have known where it would take you: over 200 feet skyward on a roller coaster you helped create. Engineering, by definition, is a universally undertaken and never-ending journey to make something better, quieter, faster, smarter or smoother. And what couldn't use an upgrade once in a while?

Please keep arms and legs inside the vehicle at all times.

An engineering degree gives incredible freedom and allows for mind-bending creativity in its application. Some graduates find career satisfaction through industrial research and design while others use their problem solving skills in the fields of business and economy. There are still others who find a way to apply their hard-sought knowledge in ways perhaps even they never imagined: improving special effects for a Broadway show, programming a smarter computer opponent for your child's electronic checkers game, or possibly even designing a stomach-churning roller coaster. Bungee jumping pioneer and former Litton Industries employee Peter Kockelman explained his sudden career change as something he had to do. "The saddest thing I ever saw," he says, "were the engineers at Litton who had stayed 30 years beyond the time when they should have gone out and pursued a dream, so I had to do it."

The sudden silence around you brings you back to reality with a snap. As the train crests the steel wave, the ominous clanking is replaced only by the wind whooshing in and out of the support structures you helped design. The front car's nose sinks and points toward the track snaking out ahead of you, a dizzying knot of twists, loops and turns. Scientific laws and equations race through your head as you plunge toward the ground, but you can think only of the operator's final instructions:

Enjoy the ride.

Roller coasters

Legend says they were invented to give Russian Empress Catherine the Great a thrill in 1610, but it was not until the Roaring Twenties that roller coasters reached their frenzied heyday along with flappers, speakeasies and the Chicago gangster scene. North America had nearly two thousand coasters in operation during the decade often referred to as the golden age of roller coasters.

Today's coasters boast sleek layouts, high-tech control systems and precise safety standards, a far cry from 1927's Cyclone which required a full-time nurse to care for injured riders. The popularity of thrill rides plummeted until industrial engineer Ed Morgan brought the Matterhorn Bobsled to life in 1955. Featured in the world's original theme park, Disneyland, the Matterhorn was the first in a new breed of roller coasters equipped with tubular steel tracks and polyurethane wheels, which replaced the flat steel rails and flanged wheels of the past. Paired with smarter car construction, the advancements made the new coaster smoother and quieter, as well as expanding the possibilities for track layouts.

Before long, the Disney outfit called upon Ron Toomer, a mechanical engineer from the University of Nevada, to help design bigger and better roller coasters. Toomer's contributions to the industry include suspension cushioning, ductile iron axles, air-actuated braking systems, the first track with a corkscrew turn and the U-shaped passenger restraints used on such coasters. According to Toomer, the track construction for the corkscrew was not as difficult as the new restraint concept for which it called. Polyurethane foam-covered steel formed the harness, and the engineers attached that to the seat shaft with a bell crank. "At first we used hydraulic cylinders as the locking mechanisms, but leakage problems led us to use ratchets, which are standard today," said Toomer.

Materials science provides many of the enabling technologies that lead to faster rides. Advancements in polyurethane compounds allow for better heat resistance in wheels, and new brakes utilizing bronze and aluminum instead of woven-asbestos are water-resistant which enhances safety and performance. Computers enter the equation in two separate capacities: Advanced stress and strain software allow for more creativity in the initial design phases and computerized control systems monitor the location of cars on the track and prevent backups. "When we started work on the Runaway Train [Toomer's first coaster], we only had slide rules to work with. Now, finite element analysis has enabled us to analyze the vehicles and structures, as well as the forces they will both generate and be subjected to, before we construct our first model of a proposed ride," said Toomer.

The roller coaster business took another unexpected turn when Six Flags Great Adventure in Jackson, New Jersey, announced the opening of Batride, one of the first inverted roller coasters. Trains of cars hang below the track and passengers are harnessed into chairlift-style seats that allow their legs to swing free. Because the track has to be supported from above, cantilever structures are needed to deal with loads that are in tension rather than compression. Batride's designers also connected the wheel assemblies directly to the top of the cars, bringing the riders' center of gravity, or heartline, closer to the track. The heartline plays a central role in the design of all coasters in that all dynamic forces must balance around it. As the passenger's heartline moves closer to the track, as in the Batride, the dynamic forces become easier to control and wilder maneuvers become possible.

Coaster enthusiasts will continue to enjoy the exhilarating terror of roller coasters as theme parks everywhere work harder, spend more and search for more aggressive engineers to make their worst nightmares into carefully-calculated realities.

Music industry

Big jewelry, loud clothes and unisex make-up might typify the music scene of the 1980's, but the breakthrough of industrial-strength hair spray wasn't the only thing on the rise. The advent of the electronic synthesizer permanently changed the music the world listens to, and the influence of technology has not slowed since. The synthesizer craze was short-lived, but innovations in the way music was produced, recorded and presented visually quite literally rocked the industry.

Artists began using more sophisticated equipment to pre-record, loop and sample sound bites in hopes of producing richer and more textured music. Recording engineers also felt the pressure for better performance and responded with a boom in digital recording. "Where major developments used to come mainly from old-line console and tape manufacturers, a whole generation of computer oriented professionals has bypassed these old hardware dinosaurs and developed brilliant new equipment at low prices," said audio engineer Hamilton Brosious.

More and more musicians take their work home with them in the form of privately owned recording studios where the artists have more creative authority. Russ Hamm, co-chairman of the Audio Engineering Society's 1995 convention, noted that the majority of emerging equipment emphasized a move toward more intimate studios. "There have been huge changes in our industry versus five years ago," he said. "Smaller studios and in-home facilities now can do true digital recording at a very low cost."

Computers have also found their way into the music impression video business. The Cars' hit video "You Might Think," which required about three manhours for each second of video produced, and ZZ Top's computer-animated "Money for Nothing" began an era of one-upmanship in video special effects. The premier of Michael Jackson's 1991 "Black or White" was viewed by an audience estimated at nearly 500 million people world-wide. Introducing a technique that would come to be known as "morphing," Jackson's video featured an endless array of people, animals and objects undergoing seamless transformations from one to the next. Morphing software has since popped up on the retail market and given amateurs the power to change man into beast and back again.

The most recent fad in the music business thrives in the world of multimedia. Enhanced CDs give music lovers the chance to sort through images, watch real-time music videos, read lyrics and learn more about an artist via the same CD that yields an album when placed in a traditional audio CD player. "There are more new dollars from video games than all the Hollywood films, and with more artists getting involved with their music in both games and other entertainment projects, every studio operator has to learn about all the 'new media' tools to get more of this exploding busness for their operation," said Murray Allen, director of audio and video operations for Electronic Arts.

As the MTV generation produces its own style of engineers, the keen awareness of music and its influence on society may bring about more technology geared toward the enjoyment of music. What was once a purely auditory experience has taken root in the multimedia-driven world of technology and now encompasses much more than just the melodies and rhythms of yesteryear.

Bungee adventures

Automotive brakes and braking technologies represent a substantial field for engineers, but when General Motors approached brothers John and Peter Kockelman, it wasn't a typical brake job they were looking for. The Kockelmans created a bungee cord capable of supporting the weight of a GMC truck as it dropped from a bridge. The two brothers also orchestrated the highly publicized and quickly banned Reebok commercial which featured them bungee jumping side by side. The closing shot showed John, wearing Reebok Pumps, bouncing gently to a stop as Peter's empty shoes swing into the shot. A voice-over then pointed out that Pumps fit a little better than the average athletic shoe.

The Kockelmans didn't start out doing macabre shoe commercials. John Kockelman graduated from California Polytechnic State University with a computer engineering degree and began work as a design engineer for IBM. Peter's mechanical engineering degree from the same university led him to Litton Guidance and Control Systems where he worked as a manufacturing engineer. In 1989, John phoned his brother and convinced him that stability and upward mobility should not be his only goals. "I was comfortable, had a good job, and John's telling me... 'That's not what you're on earth for- to sit there and be calm, to sit there and die slowly,'" said Peter. The brothers soon after began the world's first commercial bungee-jumping outfit and have since rigged over 50,000 jumps from cranes, bridges and hot-air balloons.

Bungee jumping originated as a ritual to ensure a large crop in the South Pacific village of Bunlap where men dive off eighty-foot towers with vines tied to their ankles. While modern bungee-jumping may not ensure a healthy harvest, it is said to deliver quite an adrenaline rush. The Kockelmans' company, Bungee Adventures, manufactures its own cords and is the largest bungee cord supplier in the United States. Each cord features dual helical binding of rubber threads, a patent-pending static line and safety ratings that are among the highest on the market. "John and I did a lot of R&D before we started our company," said Peter. "We figured out the spring constant of the cords, made the calculations, tested them, built in a safety factor of ten, made all our systems redundant. A lot of people have imitated us, but the trouble with the copycat approach is that you can only copy particular circumstances. If anything changes-- like the height of the jump or the length of the cords or the weight of the jumper-- you have to know how to factor that in, adjust to the new dynamics of the situation."

The Kockelmans also produced a computer program capable of tracking a jumper's velocity, acceleration, air-drag, distance and force throughout the bounce cycle. NASA has also commissioned Bungee Adventures to computer model a moon-lander bungee-jump in order to simulate a zero-gravity atmosphere.

The duo's bungee know-how has also spawned an invention known as the Human Slingshot Machine which sends passengers zooming skyward in a sort of "reverse bungee." Riders board an "ejection seat" and are then catapulted into the air by recoiling bungee cords attached to twin towers. Earlier efforts by other entrepreneurs had only a single anchor point which found riders either getting tangled in the slackened cord or striking the bottom of the single platform. The Kockelmans' dual anchor points and twin tower design eliminated such possibilities and made the ride marketable.

The Kockelmans continuously look for greater heights from which to dive and new ways to cheat death. In their search for the ultimate thrill, safety remains the top priority. "I am pushing the edge, but I'm very careful," said John. "I take these things extremely seriously. I'm a daredevil, not a raving lunatic."

Imagineering

While the phrase "mickey mouse" is used to describe something trite or commercially slick in character, the ideas put forth by the Walt Disney Imagineering group are anything but trite. According to Variety writer Katherine Stalter, the engineers behind Disneyland and its sibling theme parks are among the creative leaders of the theme park business. Entertainment industry genius Walt Disney surrounded himself with creative, artistic and highly motivated people when he decided to launch what would become the first theme park in existence.

Disneyland opened its doors in July of 1955 and now sees over nine million visitors yearly. The park was the birthplace of audio animatronics and remains a hotspot of emerging roller coaster and entertainment technologies in fields like motors, drives, fluid power and electronics. The Imagineers blend fantasy and reality by taking imaginative and seemingly far-fetched ideas and molding them into a concrete possibility within the laws of science. Some of the notable creations of the Disney Imagineers include hydraulically actuated audio animatronic figures, Circle-Vision camera technology and the first three-degrees-of-freedom motion base on a variable moving vehicle. They also improved roller coaster control systems and track layouts to allow up to four times as many vehicles to run simultaneously as conventional roller coasters.

In 1995 the Engineers' Council recognized The Twilight Zone Tower of Terror thrill ride with the Engineering Project Achievement Award. Featuring an elevator that drops visitors thirteen stories, this state-of-the-art vehicle system is packed with innovations. Design News writer Paul Teague summarized the design brainstorms that made this terrifying tower possible: "Use of a winch drive instead of a typical elevator traction system. The winch provides the solid connection required for the acceleration and torque in the ride. A traditional slip-traction system would experience slippage in the same conditions. A closed-loop hoist rope arrangement to provide for cabin pull down that achieves an 8g per second change of acceleration and a 0.18 negative g in the fall zone. Unlike a simple elevator system in which a cabin is suspended by a hoist rope, the Tower of Terror hoist ropes also extend below the cabin and return back up the shaft to terminate at the top. That arrangement enables the entire roping system to be preloaded, allowing downward acceleration rates exceeding that of a free fall without generating slack in the hoist ropes. A drive motor that develops 110,000 ft. lbs of torque, 4,000 hp, and uses regeneration for deceleration control. This is not a standard elevator motor. Imagineers had tested the elevator motor models used in some of the world's tallest buildings, but found their performance met less than 25% of the acceleration and torque requirements of the ride."

The problem solving capacity and creative brilliance of the Disney Imagineers reflect the emphasis on teamwork and topflight recruiting within the corporation. The president of Walt Disney Imgineering, Martin Sklar, explained the unparalleled successes of his crew this way: "They say there's two ways of looking at a blank piece of paper. One way, it's the most frightening thing in the world because there's nothing on it. You have to put the first mark on it. And the other way to look at it is that it's the most exciting thing in the world, because there's nothing on it, and you get to let your imagination fly in many directions and create whole new worlds."

Mechanical Engineering, August 1993: "Roller Coasters," Anonymous

The Saturday Evening Post, May/June 1991: "Jurassic Park: The Ride," Maria L. Chang

TCI, October 1995: "Profile: Martin Sklar," David Barbour

Design News, March 1996: "How they put the terror in the Tower," Paul Teague