The Falkirk Wheel

Via Daily Pundit, here's a post by Brian Mickelthwait on the Falkirk Wheel, an ingeniously-designed boat lift that uses Archimedes' Principle so that both sides are always perfectly balanced.

What a fascinating object.  I had no idea that such things even existed.  This one reminds me vaguely of the front of a combine harvester.

The Falkirk Wheel, named after the nearby town of Falkirk in central Scotland, is a rotating boat lift connecting the Forth and Clyde Canal with the Union Canal, which at this point differ by 35 metres in height.

It consists of two diametrically opposed caissons which always weigh the same whether or not they are carrying their capacity of 600 tonnes of floating canal barges. According to Archimedes’ principle floating objects displace their own weight in water. This keeps the wheel balanced and so, despite its enormous mass, it rotates through 180° in less than four minutes while using very little power.

One of the nice things, if you think about it, about engineering things of this kind is that if is often quite hard to tell at a glance when they were built.  After all, what does the job does the job, no matter when.  Anyway, it turns out that this Falkirk Wheel is very recent, having been opened only in 2002.

It's also great to see that some people still recognize the value of Wikipedia in spite of its faults.

Comments

[jiadiannan]

We pursue and thinking only save each lived, complaint or regret is the true meaning of life. Life is life itself, a picture in the salad, but when we are reading, painting, and the view of the storm, many things juicy jewelry us, we identify and become the protagonist in the book, in the play.