Mont-Saint-Michel could have stopped being an island by 2040
A causeway built in 1878 let silt choke the bay around Mont-Saint-Michel. France tore it out and dammed a river to flush the mud back to sea.
tag archive
#engineering-history.
Every story tagged #engineering-history.
Westinghouse underbid GE, and alternating current won
Westinghouse bid $399,000 against General Electric's $554,000 to light the 1893 Chicago fair, and the win helped settle the AC-DC rivalry.
Galloping Gertie sent bridge engineers into the wind tunnel
The Tacoma Narrows Bridge fell in a moderate wind in 1940. The inquiry told engineers to test suspension bridge models in wind tunnels.
Cyrus Field failed three times before the cable held
Cyrus Field spent nine years and three failed cable attempts trying to link Europe and America by telegraph, before a fourth attempt in 1866 finally held.
Why a blast furnace makes iron, not steel
A blast furnace strips oxygen from iron ore to make pig iron, which carries too much carbon to be steel until a second furnace treats it.
Panama Canal locks lift ships 85 feet above the sea
Gravity-fed water from Gatún Lake raises each ship in three steps. France's first attempt ended by 1889 and the United States finished the canal in 1914.
Bessemer's process made steel ten times faster
Henry Bessemer patented a way to turn molten iron into steel with a blast of air in 1855. It cut batch times tenfold and made cheap steel possible.
Chicago's steel frame, and the iron mill that came first
The Home Insurance Building carried its floors on a steel and iron skeleton, not its walls. That idea let Chicago build past five storeys.
A cat-food tin, and the invention of the hovercraft
Christopher Cockerell tested his hovercraft theory with a coffee tin, a cat-food can and a vacuum cleaner, on the mud floor of his own boatyard.
A steel arch now covers Chernobyl's wrecked reactor 4
Chernobyl's reactor 4 had no containment structure to stop its 1986 explosion. In 2017 engineers slid the New Safe Confinement, a steel arch, over the ruin.
Maeslantkering: the Dutch barrier that shuts in half an hour
The Maeslantkering swings two doors across a 360-metre channel into Rotterdam, part of the Delta Works the Dutch built after the 1953 North Sea flood.
A barrel vault carries a roof, and shoves its walls outwards
Builders used it from about 4000 BC. A barrel vault keeps its brick or stone in compression, but its base shoves sideways, so abutments must resist.