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MIT Students Show How the Inca Leapt Canyons
PCOL writes "When Conquistadors came to Peru from Spain in 1532, they were astonished to see Inca suspension bridges achieve clear spans of at least 150 feet at a time when the longest Roman bridge in Spain had a maximum span of 95 feet. The bridges swayed under the weight of traffic terrifying the Spanish and their horses, even though, as one Spaniard observed, they were almost as "sturdy as the street of Seville." To build the bridges, thick cables were pulled across a river with small ropes and attached to stone abutments on each side. Three of the big cables served as the floor of the bridge, two others served as handrails and pieces of wood were tied to the cable floor before the floor was strewn with branches to give firm footing for beasts of burden. Earlier this year students at MIT built a 70-foot fiber bridge in the style of the Incan Empire. The project used sisal twine from the Yucatan Peninsula and anchored it by wrapping it around massive concrete blocks. The weekend's burst of activity was preceded by 360 hours of rope-twisting as the 50 miles of sisal twine was turned into rope. Working together as a group was part of the exercise. "A third of the time was spent learning to work together," one of the students said. "But after a while, we were banging those cables out.""
Don't even bother replying to those cretins. Slashdot needs a semantic analyzer to weed out the obvious gibberish.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Precisely. History has always been extremely biased (the winner writes the books) and tended to show ancient people as stupid compared to us, especially the ancient non-European people (here in the US at least, I'd guess that other countries have similar slants). Yet again we're shown that ancient people had a grasp of the world that is surprisingly advanced, and that non-European cultures were just as advanced even if they didn't use gunpowder or some of the other things the Europeans had.
Good article, I always enjoy learning about these sorts of things where someone tries to recreate an ancient feat, using authentic technology. They're almost always informative and teach us that we're not so far advanced beyond older cultures, and no one group has ever known the sum knowledge of the world, one group always seems to know more about one thing, and other groups about other things.
There are two kinds of fool One says 'This is old therefore good' Another says 'This is new therefore better'- Dean Ing
It's one of those "how the heck did they do that" things.
... how?
Take the Pyramides. Yes, it's trivial for us today to build something like that (ok, trivial... but take a few machines and you'll have one of those heaps of stones assembled quite quickly). But we're talking something around 3000 BC, so
Here some group sat down and showed us just how they did it back then. It's where archeology meets engineering... archeoengineering, if you want.
Ok, maybe it doesn't give us any new insight for our bridges of today. But it sure closes yet another gap and answers yet another question in our quest to find out about former civilisations and cultures.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I was wondering the same thing. I would assume that if it's across water, they'd use a boat, and if it were across land, they'd take a looooong hike. Of course, once they had one bridge in across a particular obstacle, future bridges would be easier since you could just cross the existing one(s).
Yep, hence the country 'Argentina'.
I'm not sure how building a bridge displays knowledge of the science... Trial and error will suffice...
Um... Trial and error *IS* science.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
The Inca apparently didn't use the wheel, and they had no system of writing. With thousands of miles of road and no good way to share knowledge I'd basically guarantee that the Incas figured out how to build these bridges by trial and error. They'd throw a bridge across a ravine and it would work, and so next they would try and throw one across a wider ravine and it would fail (probably throwing people to their death). They would then take a good hard look at where it failed, and they would try something else next time.
Heck, I've lived in the mountains of Peru, and I would argue that Peruvians are still designing their road ways more by trial and error than through any sort of rigorous engineering. Seriously, you absolutely wouldn't believe what passes for a road in the Andes.
Of course, even in the modern first world we still do the same thing to this day. We understand a lot more about engineering than the Incas did, but that just means that when our bridges fail we probably throw more people into the ravine.
Okay, a lot of people are already saying this, but they're not being modded up, and I don't have mod points, so I'll just join in:
But it's more revealing about the fact that non-western civilizations had an advanced grasp of the physics/science behind this stuff.There is absolutely no reason to think the Incas knew anything of the sort, any more than "nature" knows how to fly, because there are birds. It's evolutionary. Ideas that work stick around and propagate. Ideas that don't result in smashed Incas at the bottom of a ravine. Those ideas don't stick around.
Most good cooks can't tell you the complex series of chemical reactions that result in deliciousness; they just learned via trial, error, and someone showing them what to do.
How's your understanding of English grammar? Do you know how to diagram sentences down to the morphological level? Do you know how the tense/aspect system works in English? Do you know about semantic features, etc? I do, but I had to go to grad school to learn it. I have, however, been successfully speaking English for at least 31 years!
Success at any task is not necessarily indication of an understanding of the theory behind it.
I get so tired of people praising stone-age cultures as though they were so much more advanced than we like to think just because they could pile some damn rocks really high or, given several millennia of sky-watching, could notice patterns in the night sky. None of this is special and none of it is indicative of the kind of detailed, theoretical knowledge that the modern, largely Western, world has developed and is continuing to develop. If these filthy savages had been so great, they would have colonized us and our stupid hunter-gatherer lifestyles would have been destroyed (which, of course, did happen, when the Roman Empire came all the way up to the hellhole that was the British Isles, from whence my family originally hails).
It's just simple evolution. Useful ideas that strengthen communities survive, others do not. That doesn't mean that the willful genocide of various primitive peoples the Europeans ran into was the "right" thing to do, but the destruction of their cultures and the re-appropriation of their resources was inevitable. I have no "white guilt," and I'm not sorry that I grew up on land my ancestors stole from people who had no written language, lived in animal-skin huts, and hadn't even developed farming. I don't feel any need to pretend any of these cultures were anything more than Paleo- to Neolithic cultures lost in time while the rest of the world (i.e. the cultures of Eurasia, each leading during different epochs) went on without them.
Is the ability to build such bridges cool? Hell, yes! But it is not particularly special.
From Red Dwarf:
Rimmer: No, Lister, I mean like the pyramids. How did they move such massive pieces of stone without the aid of modern technology?
Lister: They had massive whips, Rimmer. Massive, massive whips.
I cried real tears when Li Mu Bai died.
Forget shooting rope-laden arrows across wide windy gaps. Just have another person down in the canyon to tie the ends thrown down by both sides.