“Hang on a minute lads – I’ve got a great idea.” We hung on a minute. We then hung on a further forty years.
After all that waiting, you can finally know what Charlie Croker was thinking in the most famous cliffhanger in film history.
Our Italian Job competition has been teetering on the hillside for a few months now, but finally we’ve pulled a winner from the balancing bus and rewarded them with a trip to Turin!
Our judges, RSC Chief Executive Dr Richard Pike and William Edgar CBE, Interim Chief Executive of the Institute of Mechanical Engineers, had a tough time picking from the five excellent shortlisted entries. They rated them on feasibility, scientific clarity and ingenuity.
We had around 2000 entries, so a huge thank you to everyone who entered. We’re so pleased that the army of armchair scientists rose to the challenge and tackled a problem we’ve all debated down the pub for 40 years.
Here you can download the five shortlisted entries for our Save the Italian Job Gold competition. Also available below is a gallery of some of the more interesting diagrams we received.
And in no particular order:
Fri 23 Jan 2009 at 11:45
[...] Royal Society of Chemistry have announced their winner for their Italian Job [...]
Fri 23 Jan 2009 at 23:51
[...] of Chemistry and John Godwin, we now have a solution! Mr. Godwin submitted the winning entry in the RSC’s contest to solve the decades-old physics challenge. And it’s quite [...]
Sat 24 Jan 2009 at 11:31
[...] but finally we’ve pulled a winner from the balancing bus and rewarded them with a trip to Turin! Gold saved! RSC Italian Job competition is won | RSC Blog Frankly, I was surprised Theo hadn’t already solved the [...]
Mon 26 Jan 2009 at 09:09
[...] Institution wie die Royal Society of Chemistry einen Wettbewerb ausschreiben wie die Italian Job competition? Die Teilnehmer sollten praktikable Lösungsvorschläge einsenden, wie die Gangster am Ende von The [...]
Mon 26 Jan 2009 at 19:26
The ‘winning’ solution is incorrect.
According to the solution, the first step is to release the air from the front tires / tyres.
unfortunately, since the bus is balanced somewhere between the front and rear tires, releasing the air will not cause the bus to kneel forward since there is little to no weight on the front tires. Instead, releasing the air from the front tires, means the weight of the air in these tires is being released (probably about 50 lbs of air by estimate – i’m guessing here – but any loss of weight would be significant)
and the bus would tilt back and slide off the cliff.
Tue 27 Jan 2009 at 13:48
You could never shatter a toughened glass window of a coach with a shoe,that’s why they sell escape tools to cars as the windows also will not break easily only from a very localised blow i.e. with a pointed tool .
If the fuel tank were accessible via a hatch in the floor then it would be just a small hatch to get at the fuel pickup and sender for the fuel level with no means of draining the tank only by removing the pipes and siphoning it with would involve the use of tools.
If they let the tyres down to ’stabilise’ the vehicle the flat tyres would then be lighter as an inflated tyre is heavier than a flat one,as an example the weight of air and moisture in it on top of your head if 15.4 lbs per square inch.
Smashing the front windows would also be impossible with a shoe but even if you did and knocked the glass inside the coach that would also make the front lighter due to the weight of glass moving closer to the pivot point.
The solution would be to get everyone as far forward as possible even to working around the outside of the coach standing on the front bumper.
then the lightest one on there crawl to the gold remove one bar and slide it to the front of the coach,repeat that a few times and it would get more stable with every one .
Perhaps the royal society of physics would have been a better place to vet the results .
Regards
Tue 27 Jan 2009 at 23:11
[...] – the Royal Society of Chemistry. It (no person is identified) has been talking about the Italian Job competition which I also caught on the BBC Breakfast [...]
Wed 28 Jan 2009 at 19:28
Actually no. I took another look at the movie in slowmo today and counted two pallets of gold bars, each carrying seven layers of some nine cages. Each cage seems to hold four bars, so there are just over 250 gold bars, which according to standards weigh 12.5 kg each. So the two pallets together weigh just over 3 tonnes.
There are 12 guys on the coach, each weighing maybe 80 kg max each – just under a tonne in total. Initially, the bus is shown as pretty evenly balanced with both pallets near the fulcrum and the men about a quarter of the bus length from the front. The men move right to the front, but as the bus rocks, first one pallet then the other slides to the rear (about twice the distance the men moved from the fulcrum). The endpoint result approaches six times the original imbalance in favour of going over the cliff. So there would have been no problem to solve in any case. But the solution offered by the “winner” has a major flaw in failing to explain how the man who is lowered down to empty the fuel tank becomes self-levitating and does not contribute to the rearward mass beyond the fulcrum. Shame on the RSC for sloppy thinking.
Wed 28 Jan 2009 at 19:35
The solution offered by the “winner” fails to explain how the man who is lowered down to empty the fuel tank becomes self-levitating and does not contribute to the rearward mass beyond the fulcrum. Shame on the RSC for sloppy thinking.
But in any case I took another look at the movie in slowmo today and counted just over 250 gold bars, which according to standards weigh 12.5 kg each, making just over 3 tonnes.
There are 12 guys on the coach, each weighing maybe 80 kg max each – just under a tonne in total.
Initially, the bus is shown as pretty evenly balanced with both pallets near the fulcrum and the men about a quarter of the bus length from the front. The men move right to the front, but as the bus rocks the pallets slide to the rear (about twice the distance the men moved from the fulcrum). The endpoint approaches six times the original imbalance in favour of going over the cliff. So there would have been no problem to solve.
Fri 30 Jan 2009 at 01:25
[...] thorough treatment, or check out the some of the other 2,000 entries and diagrams at the RSC site. So now that we've got that taken care of, what's next… what really happened to [...]
Fri 30 Jan 2009 at 07:46
this guy messed up his unit conversion. He has 1N as a unit of torque instead of force. 9.8 is supposed to be m/(s^2) not m/s. And of course, the final unit is supposed to be Nm, not just N. So instead of letting this guy win, you should let me go to Turin.
Fri 30 Jan 2009 at 10:15
[...] thorough treatment, or check out the some of the other 2,000 entries and diagrams at the RSC site. So now that we’ve got that taken care of, what’s next… what really happened [...]
Fri 30 Jan 2009 at 10:22
[...] thorough treatment, or check out the some of the other 2,000 entries and diagrams at the RSC site. So now that we’ve got that taken care of, what’s next… what really happened [...]
Thu 5 Feb 2009 at 23:06
[...] {via RSC Blog} [...]
Wed 11 Feb 2009 at 16:17
They need to somehow to get some rocks into the coach, to allow the lightest to go to the gold and get a bar. Would it be possible to lean out the door and pick some up?
Fri 27 Feb 2009 at 22:46
Could they not have just bailed from the bus very quickly and let the bus and the gold fall. After the bus had fallen go and collect the gold at the bottom from the wreckage. Although there is a risk that the gold will be dispersed by an explosion and the logistics of recovering the gold will be tricky given the terrain. But surely a more safe and logical solution given the time frame in which to operate. Throwing a shoe to break a window is not really going to work, easier said than done.
But then again it is only a bit of fun.
Fri 6 Mar 2009 at 04:22
[...] Read | Permalink | Email this | CommentsBy Jonathon Ramsey Yaab [...]