A European writer with an avian logo was awarded a medal for pioneering the use of an object. In the US, they were created by coating a familiar object in tar and first used during a record breaking engineering project. Which author, objects and project am I referring to?

22crows

Franz Kafka, safety helmet, building of Hoover Dam. See under heading Work http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franz_Kafka Apr 15 07, 8:53 AM

gmackematix

Yay, Crows, and with your corvine name it is appropriate that you should have got this as "kavka" is Czech for jackdaw. I see from the Wiki article, I was a little mistaken in that it was the father, Hermann Kafka who used that as a logo. It was the famous surreal author who was given a medal by the King of Bohemia in 1912 for insisting that steel workers wore hard hats (and possibly invented them). In the US the first recorded hard hats are those made by dipping two baseball caps in tar, used in the construction of the Hoover Dam. The Hoover Dam was the largest concrete structure at the time and created the US's largest reservoir, Lake Mead. According to Wikipedia, if the concrete hadn't been internally refrigerated, it would have taken 125 years to set. Apr 15 07, 4:35 PM