![]() (“These cases are hard to prosecute,” Vancouver police constable Jana McGuinness told me. University engineers have never let an outsider in on the details of a stunt before, typically taking implicit responsibility as a student body to ward off charges-any one stunt can earn several local and federal indictments-against any single student. He even put a PR strategy in place when he e-mailed Popular Science early last year offering a chance to document a stunt in action. Johnson assembled a crew, took measurements of the bridge, drew up elaborate plans, and practiced the deployment over and over on campus. Using the polite, measured language of their profession, the students pumped their fists in tribute to engineers everywhere. 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. 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). The students made it back across the Canadian border before anyone could stop them. authorities stopped bridge and seaport traffic for hours. They crawled out, clipped the car to the cable, and threw it over. Accomplices then hid underneath the bridge for hours before the car arrived in a moving van. Students hung a cable from the bridge span one day before. The last great stunt took place under the Golden Gate Bridge in February 2001. 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 first Beetle appeared on the UBC campus in 1980, when students put one atop the school’s 121-foot clock tower. 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. Check out the full roundup of great collegiate capers at /prankĬaltech, MIT’s greatest rival, tapped into the Rose Bowl scoreboard in 1984 and hooked up a wireless controller. UBC isn’t the only school known for its merry pranksters. It’s a rare chance for engineers to show off their skills in a very public way, so much so that some of the greatest pranks resemble performance art. But only schools with rich engineering cultures put such awkward objects in such unlikely places. At many campuses, students play a prank or two-steal a rival’s mascot or move a roommate’s furniture to the quad. “E” stands for “engineers.” University of British Columbia engineers. ![]()
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