New records on Wendelstein 7-X

You could probably summarize the history of bridge-building as "keep subtracting things until they don't stand up anymore."

Building bridges (and large structures in general) has always been about the tension between over-engineering (for safety) and under-engineering (for cost/aesthetics).

The Brooklyn Bridge is massive; they'd never built a bridge like that so they over-engineered it. But once they saw that it was more than strong enough to stand up, the next bridge was lighter. And the next one after that was even lighter. And so on, until a bridge collapses because some new factor came into play (e.g., harmonic resonance).

Source: To Engineer Is Human by Henry Petroski--one of my favorite engineering books.

Not read the book but I thought the Brooklyn Bridge was over specified on the wire strength because they knew the corrupt supplier would circumvent quality control to supply them with substandard material.

When I was an engineering summer intern at HP, they had all the interns do a side project of building a bridge (model sized). The designs would be judged by stacking bricks on the bridges and then dividing the max count of bricks before failure by the weight of the bridge. Most interns, myself included, over engineered our designs. One intern “got it” and submitted a bridge that was built out of just a few pieces of balsa wood. It only held one or two bricks before snapping, but it was ultra-light and won the competition. That exercise always stayed with me. Engineers always need to focus on the correct priorities and understand when “enough is enough.”