Engineering Students at Work

Although dominos are intended to be pieces of a board game, setting them up and knocking them down is arguably a great deal more fun.

Despite the simplicity of it, some people go to great lengths to set up elaborate designs that often put on quite a display of clever engineering and design. 

After years of collecting and a full year of careful planning, 16-year-old Max Poser’s design was finally ready to be destroyed on August 8, 2008 and 8:08 p.m. in Berlin, Germany.

The team of 10 young people from Germany and Holland spent three days painstakingly setting up 55,555 dominos, each 0.7 cm apart, to his exact specifications in the sports hall of the Gottfried-Kinkel High School.

The result was an awesome 15-minute display that saw the dominos sink the Titanic, used other devices like wooden arms and a weight hung from a string as transitions between sections, and ended by revealing and knocking down the words “The End.”

Poser was also the architect of a 17, 560-domino Independence Day display that is featured on YouTube.

After personally collecting the thousands of dominos through birthday and Christmas gifts, Poser was inspired to put them to use by the annual event in the Netherlands, called Domino Day, where over four million dominos are set up in an attempt to set world records.

Domino Day 2008 will be held on November 16, where 4.5 million dominos will be set up.