The World’s First ICBBM

In 1957, members of U of T’s Engineering Society made news with the world’s first ICBBBM: the Intercontinental Beer-Burning Ballistic Missile. We had assembled a missile containing a great quantity of beer, packed with enough explosives to fake a convincing ‘takeoff.’ In fact, the thing was designed to disintegrate on detonation. But someone faked a photograph of it flying through the air above campus and sent it to the Toronto Star – which took us seriously enough to print it alongside a story about our ‘major scientific breakthrough.’