Swans on Tea

The practical joke arms race of Caltech, MIT and … UBC? Extreme Engineering

In this arms race, UBC is the third superpower. One of its most sophisticated feats also took place on the Lions Gate Bridge, in 1988. Electrical engineer Johan Thornton, now a contract engineer in his late 30s, decided that he wanted to make the bridge lights —all of them—blink. Thornton will only broadly describe the hack, but he hints that the low current of the bridge’s daylight sensor was crucial. For hours, people assumed that the blinking bridge lights were broken. Then the crew of a passing cargo ship reported that the pattern was Morse code: “UBC engineers do it again.”

I had no idea. I spent two and a half years at TRIUMF, on the edge of the UBC campus, but don’t recall hearing about any adventures in my time there.