Engineering Marvels

One of the important things that makes an engineer is their problem-solving ability and I personally feel that it’s this quality of engineers that makes them stand out from the rest of the people and helps them in taking a different and out of the box approach towards a problem. Engineers apart from looking at a problem from the obvious point of view are not afraid of tackling it in a way that just might seem absurd and impractical to others, but sometimes, impractical thinking is what a problem needs. It is this impractical thinking which has given us the wow moments when we look at some of the world’s best Engineering Marvels including the Three Gorges Dam, the Hadron Collider, Hoover Dam, and Pearl Bridge, which has made me believe that the only limitation that I have in today’s world is my own imagination and if I can imagine something I can definitely do it, and I mean it.

Engineering marvels certainly cannot be completed without the use of the main and the most important ingredient: teamwork. When a certain job is to be completed, engineer’s do know what to be done and how to be done but it is workers they require to do what needs to be done, and the coordination between the workers, engineers and other people present at the site of the project is what makes the structure a marvel.

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Let me share a fact, the world’s largest bridge was located in China before they decided to make a bridge bigger than that and now they can boast of the fact that the world’s three largest bridges are located in China, yes,  I am talking about the Danyang–Kunshan Grand Bridge. The bridge in itself is a wonder, with a length of about 164.15 kilometers crossing the Yangcheng Lake having a length of about 9.65 kilometers, the bridge is made up of 45,000 tons of steel structure and almost 10,000 workers is what it took to complete the project.

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The Three Gorges Dam is another Chinese marvel, and since the start of its construction, approximately 16 million tons of concrete has been poured in the Yangtze River and is the world’s biggest hydro-power plant with 26 turbines and with a power output of 18,200 MW.

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Up next is the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), a massive scientific instrument in Geneva, located 100 meters below the ground, the LHC is a massive particle accelerator in which subatomic particles which are either protons or lead ions are accelerated in circular paths in opposite directions and are allowed to gain sufficient energy so that their collision produces other sub-atomic particles which can be detected with the help of special detectors. The sole purpose of the LHC is to gain knowledge about particle physics which still remains unknown or to further establish the facts about particle physics that have served science for so many years.

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I have often wondered about the genius of the man who got the idea to create the longest underwater pipeline (yes that means below water) to heat homes in the United Kingdom all the way from Norway. The Langeled Pipeline is about 1200 kilometers long and cost nearly 10 million US Dollars for construction and a total of 3000 workers were involved to make this dream become a reality.

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When the population of a region starts to grow, electricity becoming a necessity and that too in a period when jobs are scarce, a single idea can change the complete scenario and that’s what happened during the great recession, when thousands of families came together to build a dam (Hoover Dam) on the Colorado River, starting construction in 1931 the final touch came in the year 1936, where once Colorado River used to flow now become Lake Mead.

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When I was a teen I used to imagine what fun would it be if buildings could be constructed on water bodies, and come November 2011, my dream had become a reality. The project for the construction of three artificial islands Palm Jebel Ali and Deira Islands on the coast of Dubai started in 2001 and by November 2011 the construction of Palm Jumeirah had been completed, the islands are in the shape of a palm tree with a crescent around them, just think how amazing it would it feel to be surrounded by calm waters and to do all of the things that you could when you were not on an artificial island.

When I think about it I personally feel that we have come a long way, from stone houses to space stations, from covering distances on foot to rockets, from letters to smartphones, the examples are endless and all I can say is that Engineering Marvels, never cease to amaze.

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