When Was The Last Time A Roller Coaster Visited You?
Exhibit Of Engineering Wonders Continues Nationwide Tour 

How does a roller coaster manage to make riders feel like it's about to jump off the track without really doing it? How do you program a spacecraft to adjust itself millions of miles away from earth? How do you suspend a dam?

Engineers know how because that's what they do, but for everybody else, a traveling exhibit now making its way across America is helping to open people's eyes to the entertaining -- yes, entertaining -- side of engineering. Breaking Through: The Creative Engineer, showcasing the wonders and marvels of engineering, has reached the halfway point of its successful tour of the country. The exhibition opened at the National Building Museum in Washington during National Engineers Week in 1998, has toured since January 1999 and now continues on to four more cities over the next year and a half.  

Most people don't readily associate engineering with entertainment, but the exhibit proves that, behind the scenes, many seemingly commonplace things are anything but common. The sweep of Breaking Through reflects a modern engineering panorama ranging from roller coaster design to the daring construction of Colorado's Hanging Lake Viaduct to the delicate finessing of the Voyager 2's maneuvers, from Earth, as it charts a path to distant planets.

The exhibit is currently housed at the Museum of Discovery in Little Rock, Arkansas, where it opened June 1 after spending three months at the Kirkpatrick Science Museum at Omniplex in Oklahoma City. After the exhibit closes in Little Rock on August 31, next stop is the Cincinnati Museum Center October 1 through December 31, and then on to Rochester, New York, Alamogordo, New Mexico, and Lubbock, Texas in 2001. (Editors please note: A complete listing of venues and contact phone numbers can be found at the end of this release.  Color slides from the exhibition are also available.)

Breaking Through: The Creative Engineer examines, through a series of eight case studies, the role and process of creativity in the field of engineering.  The exhibit blends these engineering wonders with traditional examples of creativity, such as visual art, music, architecture and literature. Visitors then exercise their own creativity with interactive displays, games and puzzles that reveal how engineering creativity constantly remakes the world.

Besides offering a look at engineering wonders, the exhibit also investigates how these wonders are made. The exhibit demonstrates how challenging preconceptions, connecting different fields, improvising, defying convention, visualizing new possibilities, reorienting priorities, and other creative processes contribute to the engineer's work. 

Breaking Through is supported by National Engineers Week, a coalition of major engineering societies and U.S. corporations. More information on the Breaking Through traveling exhibit is available through the individual host centers, or from the Association of Science-Technology Centers, Exhibition Services at (202) 783-7200 or exhibits@astc.org.

Breaking Through: The Creative Engineer / Itinerary

June 1 - August 31, 2000 
Museum of Discovery
Little Rock, AR / (501) 396-7050

October 1 - December 31, 2000 
Cincinnati Museum Center
Cincinnati, OH / (513) 556-5435

February 1 - April 30, 2001 
Rochester Museum & Science Center
Rochester, NY / (716) 271-4552

June 1 - August 31, 2001
Space Center
Alamogordo, NM / (505) 437-2840

October 1 - December 31, 2001
Science Spectrum
Lubbock, TX / (806) 748-1040