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Very interesting information. I hadn't known about the late-19thC cranes; compared to them, contemporary ones look a bit under-engineered. Of course, that does
by clock_tower 11y ago
Very interesting information. I hadn't known about the late-19thC cranes; compared to them, contemporary ones look a bit under-engineered.
Of course, that doesn't mean that we should go back to manually-powered treadmill cranes -- there's some discussion of that in the comments -- but it sounds like we could build engine-driven cranes that would perform much better than the ones we currently have.
- HeyLaughingBoy 11y agoModern cranes look under-engineered precisely because they are properly engineered. We have the ability today to do much better structural analysis than in the 19 century so a device can be built with much less material than required then. We can build a mechanism with just enough material to provide a known 10x safety factor. Back then they had no choice but to overbuild to be sure that there was adequate margin.