>The ancient Romans would have the civil engineer stand under the bridge they'd just built while a Legion marched over it. That's why Roman structures are still around today!
Can't speak for the romans, but his seems legit enough, and predates the romans by quite a bit:
Hammurabi's code:
> If a builder builds a house for a man and does not make its construction firm, and the house which he has built collapses and causes the death of the owner of the house, that builder shall be put to death.
> If it causes the death of the son of the owner of the house, they shall put to death a son of that builder.
A more verifiable story in a similar vein would be Frank Lloyd Wright standing under an exemplar of his "dendriform" columns, developed for the Johnson Wax Headquarters in Racine, laughing and whacking it with a cane as it was undergoing a loading test for the building code enforcement officers.
JFYI, it is most probably apocryphal: https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/18558/were-roma...
still it's a nice one, I have heard the same about engineers/architects in ancient Babylon and Egypt.