Lehigh University five-million-pound structural test machine

Cited as the largest tensile/structural test facility Holman has seen; full-scale bridge section testing to failure. Used to make the cost argument for computer simulation.

One thing is, full-scale physical testing costs a lot more. The video of the wire rope — that's a huge structure. The largest one I've seen is at Lehigh University, and it's a five million pound load. They were doing full-scale bridge sections, testing them to failure. These are very expensive. It costs a lot of money to make a mock-up, to use the equipment. So yes, you want to do as much computer simulation as you can, but at some point you have to benchmark it against an actual value to make sure you're not putting a false assumption into your model.