>The ancient Romans would have the civil engineer stand under the bridge they'd just built while a Legion marched over it. That's why Roman structures are still around today!

JFYI, it is most probably apocryphal: https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/18558/were-roma...

still it's a nice one, I have heard the same about engineers/architects in ancient Babylon and Egypt.

Can't speak for the romans, but his seems legit enough, and predates the romans by quite a bit:

Hammurabi's code:

> If a builder builds a house for a man and does not make its construction firm, and the house which he has built collapses and causes the death of the owner of the house, that builder shall be put to death.

> If it causes the death of the son of the owner of the house, they shall put to death a son of that builder.

https://www.fs.blog/2017/11/hammurabis-code/

Heard about it on Econtalk's recent episode with Nassim Taleb.

A more verifiable story in a similar vein would be Frank Lloyd Wright standing under an exemplar of his "dendriform" columns, developed for the Johnson Wax Headquarters in Racine, laughing and whacking it with a cane as it was undergoing a loading test for the building code enforcement officers.

That was one of Wright's famous leaky-roof buildings.

http://journaltimes.com/news/local/confronting-a-legacy-of-a...

I'm not saying he was good, just self-confident.

A similar story comes from World War II where an alarmingly high number of parachutes were failing to open when deployed. They started picking random chutes and their packer and sent them up for a test drop. The malfunction rate dropped to near zero.

Heard a similar myth about a Danish king. We was tired of cannons blowing up so he ordered the manufacturer to sit on top of the cannon when it was fired the first time.

Something similar, but self-imposed happened when they moved a whole building in Guadalajara: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jorge_Matute_Remus#Movement_of...

"In order to gain the trust of the employees he asked his wife to enter the building while the movement was taking place."

For anyone who is curious like I was, there's a related episode on 99percent invisible that links to a YouTube documentary, although it's in spanish:

https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/managed-retreat/2/

The comparison is odd to me. Somehow building bridges seems more of an exact science to me than making cars drive themselves. I sure wouldn't step on a bridge if its engineer doesn't dare going under it. Shit is supposed to stand up.

And yet didn't one collapse in Florida just the other day?

Isn't that just survival bias? The good ones didn't collapse?

Do you know if this is factual? I've read that it's only a myth.

May have been allegorical to describe what would happen to engineers if their bridges failed.

Would they do it enough times for such observation to have any statistical significance?

That misses the point. If you designed a bridge, and you died if it failed in one trial, how would this affect your design process?

I believe this method falls strictly under deterrence.

It is not possible to extract more punishment on an individual than their death, technically, unless you believe in an afterlife.

It is not punitive and meant to 'correct' the builder; it is meant to 'prevent' the builder from cutting corners.

"It is not possible to extract more punishment on an individual than their death, technically, unless you believe in an afterlife."

Not true at all. Not that I'd recommend it, but there's torture, and punishing family. They were far less outrageous in Ancient times.

Likely they were not familiar with the scientific method and statistics as we know it today.