What you may not realise is that this healthy competition once spilled over into open warfare.
In retaliation for an insult at the 1987 Wiltshire Engineering Olympiad (something along the lines of "you’re just a bunch of civil engineers, you need to build a bridge and get over yourselves"), Bradford’s students constructed a cannon with which to bombard the Box Engineering common room. Having chosen a suitable location they set about calculating a firing solution. Obviously their mathematical skills were up to the job but, as luck would have it, they were helped by the fact that the common room had been placed on a pedestal that made its altitude the same as the firing site.
Other researchers have established that the acceleration due to gravity in West Wiltshire is standard gravity, g0 and a flat Earth geometry can be assumed. In addition, on the day, bizarrely, gusts of wind exactly cancelled out any forces on the cannonball in flight other than gravity.
The barrel’s diameter was 15 cm. (pi=3.14159).
The cannonball’s mass was 15kg.
The barrel length was exactly 4m.
It was known that the cannon exerted on the ball a pressure of P(x)=k/(x+1) where x is the distance in metres of the ball from the breech of the cannon as it travelled down the barrel.
(So, for a 4m barrel, x ranges from 0 to 4.)
k had been measured to be exactly 1.5×107N/m and all of this energy was transferred into kinetic energy of the ball.
The students calculated that the cannon’s angle to the horizontal needed to be 38.723°. For a while they were worried because the aiming mechanism kept jamming, sometimes in a very unfortunate position, but eventually they were all set.
With such high achievers on the job it was no surprise that the shot found its target at British Grid ST 82591 68625 (an easier format for calculations than WGS84) and subsequent forensic studies confirmed that it arrived on a trajectory on a bearing of 292.625° from the Box common room.
Major loss of life was only averted because the whole school was away on a field trip to learn about quarrying techniques in the nearby mine.
We wonder whether today’s crop of graduates or undergraduates will be able to find the site from which Bradford launched their attack. Those that can are hereby awarded a BoASE
When at GZ, please make a controlled initial retrieval. There is a small prize for the first group to pass the exam.