Hacker News Reader

Dunno if true, but resonance frequency is the reason German military always avoided making goose step military marches across bridges. I suppose it would depends on the bridge anyway... But would have been fun to watch.

View on HN

Breaking stride on bridges has been known to (some) militaries since the Roman times iirc.

Mythbusters did an episode on this! I totally cannot remember what they concluded

They did and if I remember correctly they concluded it was busted. I remember this episode in particular because I didn’t feel like their tests were completely sound and didn’t accurately model a civil engineered life-size bridge so at best the result should have been inconclusive.

The machines they built to simulate the marching was entirely inadequate. A much better way to test it would've been a weight on a voice coil, and a contact microphone to monitor echoes. They'd still probably be unable to tear down the bridge model they built, as that thing seemed to be way overbuilt.

It was later re-tested and re-classified as plausible (for some reasons the particualr episode was aired in EU but not in the US):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MythBusters_(2004_season)#Epis...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com