Slashdot Mirror
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.""
Haha, talk about a late story at a completely random time. I was one of the leaders on the project, lots of late nights twisting twine together. If anyone has any questions feel free to ask.
You gotta find first gear in your giant robot car
I think that you missed the point. Enough of us are not so ethnocentric that we think that every other culture is backwards and stupid. When their injunuity is presented to us as "news" it only points out the stupidity of those who think that it's neat. People have been smart and solving problems since we came out of the trees and became people. Modern culture does not have a monopoly on intelligence or ingenuity. Their rope-bridge is as an impressive feat as our landing on the moon, and I don't need some snots to tell me so. If they want to recreate it, then great for them (and I hope they learn the science behind it and that people of the past were pretty smart), but it isn't news to the enlightened.
They knew how to take advantage of rope tension... ...But to come up with the design is the hard part.
Meh, trial and error becomes easy if you have countless slaves to practice with. What the Inca were REALLY famous for was their ability to direct and control the flow of water. Their canals were really impressive, apparently.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
I was walking around campus one day and saw the cement pillars going up. They were BIG concrete boxes, about 4 stacked up taller than me and about 2-3 feet on a side. I'm not sure what happened to that concrete but it seemed wasteful to make _just_ rectangular prisms. No offense, especially since I'm a 'utility-focused' engineer, myself, but I did think-- wow, these are harsh. It might have been fun to paint, or sculpt them (before being set, or with plaster afterwards), with Incan designs or information about the construction process.
The rope bridge itself looked fun to walk on, but it had a sign saying no trespass. That sign was up the whole time the bridge was there, though it is possible people might have walked around the bridge for fun and jumped around to see how it swayed and bubbled. At that point the bridge might have been up a while and losing tension and so the sides of the shallow creek interfered with the hanging bridge aspect.
It's great to see thought provoking structures go up around campus. Rock on.
Actually, the engineering of the pyramids is still surprising us; not only was the construction of the pyramid incredible, but the actual quarrying and shaping of the stones is still unsurpassed. Sheets of paper won't fit through the gaps between blocks, and there's no mortar.
Attempting to build a duplicate pyramid today would still be a massive undertaking that would take years; hardly a trivial task.
This happened years ago at IIT Madras, India http://www.civil.iitm.ac.in/events/paper-bridge.html
Trajan's bridge over the Danube (built between 103 and 105) was over a thousand meters long and 15 meters wides. Each individual arch that made up the bridge was over 35 meters long. Roman bridges in Spain that still exist extend over 800 meters. And then there are the various Byzantine bridges ...
Not to mention the two mile long pontoon bridge built by the Persians so that their foot soldiers and cavalry could cross the Hellespont prior to the battle of Thermompylae.
Sure, a 150 foot rope bridge is a neat design, but it doesn't really compare in scale of engineering to the bridges of the ancient world.
It doesn't take a genius to understand "wrap more rope, me not fall". As for "invading their arse", millions died from European diseases which is not really testament to your superior intellect.
Yeah I know you wrote flamebait on purpose.
29 mpg. YMMV.
Yep. Just look at the Neanderthals. Based on the evidence we have to go on (brain size), they were a lot smarter than us. Yet look how we portray them.
Admittedly part of this may be because they were discovered very shortly after the success of Darwin, and so automatically became the "missing link," and remained that way in the public consciousness. Maybe if they had only been discovered today, the general view of them would be less slanted. But maybe not. There seems to still be a strong bias against the idea that they were a more advanced species that went extinct, as we want to see ourselves as the end product of a continuous increase in advancement.