Reels tagged #engineering
Venice stands on millions of wooden piles
Its palaces rest on tree trunks driven into the lagoon mud. Starved of oxygen underwater, the wood petrified instead of rotting.
Reactor 4 sits under the largest moving structure ever built
The New Safe Confinement arch is 108 m tall and weighs 36,000 tonnes. It was assembled beside the reactor and slid into place over it — the biggest object ever moved on land.
The internet travels as pulses of light
Fibre optic cables carry data as laser light bouncing inside glass thinner than a hair, moving at roughly two-thirds the speed of light in vacuum.
Touchscreens sense your body's electricity
Capacitive screens hold a tiny electrical field; your conductive finger distorts it, and the phone calculates where. That is why gloves usually do not work.
Watering the gardens needed serious engineering
Lifting river water up terraces in a desert climate would have required chain pumps or an Archimedes-style screw, technology described centuries before Archimedes was born.
The Taj Mahal's minarets lean outward on purpose
Each of the four towers tilts slightly away from the tomb so that in an earthquake they would fall outward instead of collapsing onto the central dome.
A mirror on the Pharos could be seen 50 km away
Accounts say a polished bronze mirror at the lighthouse's summit reflected sunlight by day and firelight by night, visible far out to sea by approaching ships.