Updated: Thu, 14 Aug 2014 06:00:00 GMT The world’s greatest feats of engineering The Panama Canal turns 100 on August 15 When it opened on August 15, 1914, the Panama Canal linked the Atlantic and Pacific oceans and cut thousand of kilometres from a perilous sea voyage. 100 years on, its still a brilliant piece of engineering. The sea level and high tides are different on each coast, so three enormous sets of locks had to be built into the design to raise or lower the canal between one end of its 77km (48-mile) course and the other. It was built to handle 80 million tonnes of shipping a year. Today it handles three times as much, and the new Panama Canal expansion project (pictured here under construction in August 2014) is intended to double the canals capacity by 2015. Click or swipe to see more monumental acts of human engineering. The Three Gorges Dam in China - built on the Yangtze River and designed to reduce the risk of flooding during the peak rainfall season - is the worlds largest hydropower project. Working at full capacity, the dam creates as much energy as 15 nuclear power stations, from water power alone. In 1953 nearly 2,000 people were killed by a flood that overwhelmed coastal Holland. The Dutch response was - and is - spectacular. The Delta Works is a series of dams (13), dikes (16,000km / 10,000 miles worth) and storm-surge barriers that changed the face of the coastline and together make probably the most complex flood defence mechanism in the world. The earliest version of the Great Wall was built 400 years before the birth of Christ. Even the more complex version we see today - really a series of walls that were built and rebuilt over centuries - is between 700 and 500 years old. So without diesel engines or computers, the Chinese built a solid defensive wall that winds its way across 6,500 km (4,000 miles) of forbidding, often mountainous, terrain. It is housed in a tunnel below the Alps and furnished with ultra powerful magnets and all the liquid helium needed to keep them cool. And if it is to solve some of the most fundamental mysteries of the universe, the Large Hadron Collider at CERN had to be designed and built with a level of accuracy rarely required for large building projects. If youre firing subatomic particles at other subatomic particles at huge speeds to see what happens after they crash, there really is little margin for error. Spanning the Tarn river valley in southern France, the Millau Viaduct is the tallest road bridge in the world, and rests on huge concrete pylons that can be as tall as the Eiffel Tower (one is taller). But with its slender masts and sweeping curves, the Millau Viaduct is as attractive as it is impressive. The Pyramid of Khufu is the largest of the pyramids in the Giza Necropolis in Egypt, and for nearly 4000 years of its history was the tallest building in the world. Its most awe-inspiring aspect is the precision required to get each stone block in perfect alignment with every other one. At 829.8m (2,700ft), the Burj Khalifa in Dubai is the tallest man-made structure in the world. Whats impressive is that when you go that high, you cant just keep adding floors and hope for the best. As well as wind and gravity - what experts call primary effects - its creators had to take on board secondary effects, like slight temperature and moisture changes that can add stress to the structure. The narrow gauge track of the Darjeeling Himalayan Railway was completed in 1881 in Indias West Bengal, and climbs from about 100 metres above sea level at New Jalpaiguri to about 2,200 metres at Darjeeling. The steepness of the climb forced the ingenious construction of a series of loops and Z-Reverses (zig zag tracks) that allow the locomotives to climb steep mountainsides. The Hoover Dam was completed in the 1930s on the border of Arizona and Nevada. The dam is 60-storeys high, generates huge amounts of electricity and its lake provides water for eight million people in Arizona, Nevada and California. The dome of Florence cathedral, completed in around 1436, is an engineering marvel. Architect Filippo Brunelleschi won the contract to build it by saying he would use no internal scaffolding to keep the dome intact. Instead, Brunelleschi found a way to share the load equally around the dome so that no part of the intricate brickwork cracked or collapsed, an engineering feat unheard of at the time. The dome still stands proud in the Florence skyline, a monument to Brunelleschis genius.
Posted on: Thu, 14 Aug 2014 14:09:42 +0000
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