[HN Gopher] Historic Engineering Wonders: Photos That Reveal How...
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Historic Engineering Wonders: Photos That Reveal How They Pulled It
Off
Author : dxs
Score : 114 points
Date : 2025-11-25 14:04 UTC (6 days ago)
(HTM) web link (rarehistoricalphotos.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (rarehistoricalphotos.com)
| NathanielBaking wrote:
| Fascinating! I would buy this in a "coffee table" style book.
| Barathkanna wrote:
| Cool to see how much engineering relied on intuition and
| improvisation before modern tools existed. These methods look
| primitive now, but they worked because people understood
| materials so well. Makes me wonder how much of that hands-on
| knowledge we're losing today.
| Arainach wrote:
| It was often neither intuition nor improvisation, but rules.
| Bill Hammack's "The Things We Make" goes into a number of
| examples.
|
| For a slightly more modern example, take European Gothic
| Cathedrals. People weren't guessing, they weren't improvising,
| and they weren't relying on intuition - if they did most of
| them would have collapsed long ago.
|
| These structures were made without blueprints, and often many
| of the head masons may have been illiterate, but a knowledge of
| forms and rules such as "the thickness of the wall of an arch
| should be a bit more than a fifth the span of the arch" allowed
| for reliably producing stable structures.
|
| These rules were less precise than modern engineering math and
| mean that many of the structures are overengineered / have
| higher margins of error than are considered necessary in modern
| construction, but they are not based on intuition or guessing.
| hamdingers wrote:
| Where did the rules come from?
| bilbo0s wrote:
| The deaths of masons and builders. All the way back to
| Hammurabi.
|
| BTW, Hammurabi was particularly dastardly in his building
| code specifications. You could, of course, be put to death
| if a building or wall collapsed and killed someone. But
| that was just table stakes. Even Ur-Nammu had that much
| figured out.
|
| Hammurabi added on to the punishment by forcing you to
| rebuild the wall..
|
| to the specifications of _reputable_ builders..
|
| at your own expense..
|
| and _then_ be put to death.
|
| Don't even get me started on Asian "building codes" back in
| the day.
|
| HN user Arainach is right, no one was guessing, or
| intuiting, while building in a lot of these empires. It was
| wayyy too risky. Pretty much everyone was following rules
| passed down by the builders for centuries. In some cases,
| millennia. Only an actual ruler would dare even consider
| deviating from the known good building forms.
| potato3732842 wrote:
| Life was worth a lot less back then. If they were putting
| people to death over every construction accident that
| claimed a life nothing would've got built. And back then
| they weren't building skyscrapers and suspension bridges
| where one key joint fails and the rest falls over with no
| warning. They were building simple fairly short
| structures that can only really kill you if the roof hits
| you on its way down and gave a whole lot of warning
| before that happened. Castles and cathedrals and city
| walls and the like don't fall down unless you
| intentionally ignore or obfuscate a ton of cracking a
| slumping and things moving, etc, etc. The people who'd
| have faced consequences like specified in these code are
| people who've actually done malicious things.
| Arainach wrote:
| >Castles and cathedrals and city walls and the like don't
| fall down unless you intentionally ignore or obfuscate a
| ton of cracking a slumping and things moving, etc, etc.
|
| There are many failure modes other than gradually
| cracking and eventually failing. Even in that case, by
| the time you notice such cracking, the cost of repair -
| if it can be repaired - is dramatically higher, and has
| tons of effects.
| potato3732842 wrote:
| Yes, technically there are other ways things can fall
| down but they're generally exceptional. You can probably
| write off 100yr+ weather events let alone any
| consideration of seismic loading as issues for god.
| Nowhere did I mention cost. That things cost more to fix
| after construction is kind of a given.
| IAmBroom wrote:
| > They were building simple fairly short structures that
| can only really kill you if the roof hits you on its way
| down and gave a whole lot of warning before that
| happened.
|
| So, you don't believe roofs were invented until very
| recent times? The only building I've ever been in where
| roof collapse couldn't be fatal is my neighbor's chicken
| coop.
|
| > Castles and cathedrals and city walls and the like
| don't fall down unless you intentionally ignore or
| obfuscate a ton of cracking a slumping and things moving,
| etc, etc.
|
| Easily disproven. Here's one refutation:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erfurt_latrine_disaster
|
| Seriously: your lack of knowledge about historical
| architecture is impressive.
| dtgriscom wrote:
| The article lists a "Snake Bridge on the Macclesfield Canal".
| Here's a spiral bridge on that canal, but not the same one:
|
| https://www.google.com/maps/place/Spiral+Bridge/@53.2849203,...
|
| https://www.google.com/maps/place/Spiral+Bridge/@53.2850202,...
| froddd wrote:
| There are 2 in quick succession in Marple ([1] and [2]), very
| near the Marple Lock Flight ([3]). This happens to be at the
| very start of Macclesfield Canal.
|
| [1] https://maps.app.goo.gl/tYBvtfJwSSo6nBm29
|
| [2] https://maps.app.goo.gl/nYoCxPmDRpM9ADfFA
|
| [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marple_Lock_Flight
| vjust wrote:
| This article seems to focus mainly on Western civilization. Not
| saying they aren't wonders. There were many engineering feats in
| the South/East Asian subcontinents that are not covered.
| greenpizza13 wrote:
| Syria, China, and Iran are 3 of the examples.
| FlyingSnake wrote:
| It also features many examples from pre-Colombian South
| American cultures
| unsignedchar wrote:
| Interesting collection but mostly focused on western world and
| mixing different eras so feels incoherent, like a low-effort
| 'content creation'
| sanjayjc wrote:
| When visiting Bath[1] in UK (mentioned in the article), I learned
| the Romans used a clever contraption, the "three legged lewis",
| to lift heavy stones[2].
|
| Referring to the diagram[3] on Wikipedia, a concave hole is first
| cut into the stone. Parts 1 and 2 of the lewis are inserted, one
| at a time. Inserting part 3 between 1 and 2 results in all three
| locking into place. A pin and ring at the top keeps the 3 parts
| from separating.
|
| [1] https://www.romanbaths.co.uk
|
| [2]
| https://bathgeolsoc.org.uk/journal/articles/2021/2021_Moving...
|
| [3]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewis_(lifting_appliance)#/med...
| pugworthy wrote:
| Though really amazing engineering, I'd say not all of them show
| "how they pulled it off". I'd like to know how the Byzantine
| geared mechanical calendar was "pulled off", especially those
| gears.
| jcoby wrote:
| Clickspring on YouTube has a whole series into construction
| methods likely used with the Antikythera mechanism:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dRXI9KLImC4&list=PLZioPDnFPN...
|
| And another on building a working reproduction:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BGHq4O-ib2U&list=PLZioPDnFPN...
|
| https://www.youtube.com/@Clickspring
| humanpotato wrote:
| The gear teeth are cut with a file. For the angularity, draw a
| circle with a compass and subdivide it by measuring linearly
| with a measuring tool. This can be done larger than the part,
| and the teeth locations marked with a straightedge. By cutting
| the teeth where marked, you avoid a stack-up of error.
| IAmBroom wrote:
| Quibble: I hate, despise, loathe the dilution of the word "rare"
| to mean, well, in this case "somewhat interesting and not
| commonly known".
|
| Photos cannot be rare. Physical copies of a photograph might be.
| Photos are by their nature singular instances of artistic or
| technical action, so all of them are equally rare.
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| > Photos cannot be rare. Physical copies of a photograph might
| be.
|
| "Photo" means both the image itself and a physical copy of said
| image. So if you agree that physical copies can be rare, then
| either you agree that photos can be rare or you are
| idiosyncratically using a different definition of "photo" than
| everyone else.
| buellerbueller wrote:
| unique is pretty rare, i'd say
| cfraenkel wrote:
| >Photos cannot be rare
|
| BS. Only if you pedantically define 'photo' as collecting an
| image at xyz location at a particular instant. I'm quite
| certain that photos of the Eiffel Tower are NOT rare.
| agumonkey wrote:
| the iranian windmills were not expected, neither the absorbing
| layers of south american cultures brilliant
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