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NancyLebovitz comments on Stupid Questions December 2014 - Less Wrong Discussion
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Did organized Objectivist activism, at least in some of its nuttier phases, offer to turn its adherents who get it right into a kind of superhuman entity? I guess you could call such enhanced people "Operating Objectivists," analogous to the enhanced state promised by another cult.
Interestingly enough Rand seems to make a disclaimer about that in her novel Atlas Shrugged. The philosophy professor character Hugh Akston says of his star students, Ragnar Danneskjold, John Galt and Francisco d'Anconia:
But then look at what Rand shows these allegedly "normal men" can do as Operating Objectivists:
Hank Rearden, a kind of self-trained Operating Objectivist who never studied under Akston, can design a new kind of railroad bridge in his mind which exploits the characteristics of his new alloy, even though he has never built a bridge before.
Francisco d'Anconia can deceive the whole world as he depletes his inherited fortune while making everyone believe that he spends his days as a playboy pickup artist, when he in fact he has lived without sex since his youthful sexual relationship with Dagny.
John Galt can build a motor which violates the conservation of energy and the laws of thermodynamics. Oh, and he can also confidently master Dagny's unexpected intrusion into Galt's Gulch despite his secret crush her, his implied adult virginity and his lack of an adult man's skill set for handling women. (You need life experience for that, not education in philosophy.) On top of that, he can survive torture without suffering from post-traumatic stress symptoms.
So despite Rand's disclaimer, if you view Atlas Shrugged as "advertising" for the abilities Rand's philosophy promises as it unlocks your potentials as a "normal man," then the Objectivist organizations which work with this idea implicitly do seem to offer to turn you into a "superhuman creature."
For what it's worth, Rand was an unusually capable person in her specialty (she wrote two popular, and somewhat politically influential novels in her second language), but still not in the same class as her heroes.
I'm not sure you've got the bit about Rearden right. I don't think there's any evidence that he came up with the final design for the bridge. There's a mention that he worked with a team to discover Rearden metal, and presumably he also had an engineering team. The point was that he (presumably) knew enough engineering to come up with something plausible, and that he was fascinated by producing great things enough to be distracted from something major going wrong that I don't remember.
I have no idea whether Rand knew Galt's engine was physically impossible, though I think she should have, considering that other parts of the book were well-researched. Dagny's situation at Taggart Transcontinental was probably typical for an Operations vice-president in a family owned business. The description of her doing cementless masonry matched with a book on the subject. Atlas Shrugged was the only place I saw the possibility of shale oil mentioned until, decades later, it turned out to be a possible technology.
The research fail that jumped out at me hardest in Atlas Shrugged was the idea that so many people would consider a metal both stronger and lighter than steel physically impossible. By the time the book was published, not only was titanium fairly well understood, it was also being widely used in military and (some; what could be spared from Cold War efforts) commercial purposes. Its properties don't exactly match Rearden Metal (even ignoring the color and other mostly-unimportant characteristic) but they're close enough that it should be obvious that such materials are completely possible. Of course, that part of the book also talks about making steel rails last longer by making them denser, which seems completely bizarre to me; there are ways to increase the hardness of steel, but they involve things like heat-treating it.
TL;DR: I'm not sure I'd call the book "well-researched" as a whole, though some parts may well have been.
The book exists in a deliberately timeless setting - it has elements of everything from about a century of span. Railroads weren't exactly building massive new lines in 1957, either.