18 ms·

Animation of how bridges were built in Central Europe in the Middle Ages [video]

959 points by BerislavLopac 6y ago

coder1001 6y ago
Thank you! Seems very similar to the bridge in Córdoba: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_bridge_of_C%C3%B3rdoba https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_bridge_of_C%C3%B3rdoba
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- ainiriand 6y ago
  Really similar! To be honest I think I have seen many similar bridges all around Spain and Italy, not just Central Europe.
  - azepoi 6y ago
    this type of bridge is common throughout Europe. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_medieval_bridges_in_France https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_medieval_bridges_in_Fr... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_medieval_stone_bridges_in_Germany https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_medieval_stone_bridges... since antiquity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_bridge https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_bridge
- azepoi 6y ago
  there are many more https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puente_de_fábrica https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puente_de_fábrica
  - coder1001 6y ago
    yeah I imagine once a technique is mastered, it would be used all over the place! Not sure if one "company" started offering this service in many places, could explain the similarity.
    - prennert 6y ago
      These projects employed skilled journey men (level between apprentice and master). At some point they then traveled to work on the next project, spreading the know-how. Once something was working, it was often copied as modifications were risky.
      - pizzapill 6y ago
        To add to this: those were highly sought after specialists with a lot of privileges. This had consequences that sound strange to us nowadays. Stonemasons were heavily involved in medieval diplomacy, since everybody in power needed them to build or repair fortresses. They could travel freely between kingdoms that were at war with each other and exchange messages between the respective rulers.
        HPsquared 6y ago
        They were the tech aristocrats of their day.
        ayewo 6y ago
        That's a fascinating take but not strange at all since modern-day equivalents still exist in highly-skilled occupations like CPU design. Perhaps a comparable example would be an executive with a technical background: Jim Keller has highly sought-after skills desired by chip makers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Keller_(engineer) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Keller_(engineer)
    - usrusr 6y ago
      I'd rather call the knowledgeable entity in question "expert" than company, but I was wondering along similar lines: would they travel far to projects or would the knowledge be dispersed to enough people that most projects could just happen with local expertise? (plus temporarily imported capacity for big project, but not necessarily imported expertise?) What's clear is that knowledge transfer (from region to region and from generation to generation) was facilitated by traveling apprentices, a tradition that still lives on and (I believe) is documented to go back to that time. Their profession wouldn't be bridge builder but merely some contributing role (with the occasional exception of whatever the period-correct term for architect or project manager would be), but of all the masons involved, you'd have some whose learning circuit involved a bridge, of the woodworkers you'd have some who dabbled in cranes before and so on. But was that usually sufficient or was there also a pattern of on-demand traveling leadership? edit: post was lingering in the input form for some hours, some good answers already there!
_Microft 6y ago
Here is the video source [0]. Its description says "3D graphics and post-production: Tomáš Mustlek Professional cooperation: Ing. Arch. Ondřej Šefců Graphic cooperation: Mgr. Zdeněk Mazač More information about Charles Bridge can be found at http://praha-archeologicka.cz/p/212 http://praha-archeologicka.cz/p/212 The digital model "Charles Bridge - construction of a pillar and vault field in the 14th century" was created for the project of the virtual exhibition Prague of the Time of Charles IV. The project is supported by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Czech Republic as part of the National Celebrations of the 700th Anniversary of the Birth of Emperor Charles IV and is included in the AV21 Strategy programme." [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nJgD6gyi0Wk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nJgD6gyi0Wk [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Bridge https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Bridge
- yread 6y ago
  There is a lot more information in this article (in Czech, but there are pictures) http://praha-archeologicka.cz/p/212 http://praha-archeologicka.cz/p/212
- dredmorbius 6y ago
  Another video showing dioramas and construction techniques, from Muzeum Karlova most and other sources. https://youtube.com/watch?v=1TDhX6tu30M https://youtube.com/watch?v=1TDhX6tu30M
- dang 6y ago
  Ok, we've changed to the video from https://twitter.com/KiwiEV/status/1316493212605911040 https://twitter.com/KiwiEV/status/1316493212605911040. Thanks!
yread 6y ago
Note that the construction took 45 years.
- Animats 6y ago
  Those little intermediate piers were probably the slowest part of the on site work. And the most vulnerable part of the bridge, because that's what gets eroded. It's still the biggest cause of bridge failure.
  - TeMPOraL 6y ago
    Makes me wonder if they've been done in parallel or serially. Also, I'd love to know how the bridge was designed. How did they figure out the shapes of the supporting structure, or location of the piers? Etc. We have this knowledge systematized today, but we use mathematics in a form that was developed much later than those bridges.
    - BerislavLopac 6y ago
      They had it systematized as well; the mason guilds were very thorough in protecting and maintaining knowledge throughout centuries.
    - spenczar5 6y ago
      According to JE Gordon in “ Structures: Or Why Things Don't Fall Down,” the answer is surprisingly simple: everything was massively, tremendously overbuilt. Also, often builders would start with scale models, and then exaggerate proportions - that doesn’t require sophisticated math. Just do the modeling “analog”!
      - azepoi 6y ago
        To see how overbuilt they are, you have to compare to late masonry stone arch bridges that are more 'airy'. Like so https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_S%C3%A9journ%C3%A9#Gallery https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_S%C3%A9journ%C3%A9#Galler... https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viaduc_de_la_Roizonne https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viaduc_de_la_Roizonne https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pont_des_Pierres#/media/Fichier:Pont_des_pierres_-_Montanges-3.jpg https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pont_des_Pierres#/media/Fichie...
DoofusOfDeath 6y ago
I used to be tempted to think that our modern generations are extra smart because of the cool gadgets we have. Seeing stuff like this, and reading ancient political / philosophical writings, gives me a much-needed reality check.
- jacquesm 6y ago
  There is absolutely no difference between a human from 6000 years ago and one today. You could be an Einstein level genius back then, and likely unable to use any of those skills other than for the optimization of your environment. Also, you likely would not be able to use the bulk of it because your education would be non-existent, so your IQ compared to someone today would be much lower even though your raw intelligence would be higher. Essentially you'd be given an exquisitely crafted very blunt knife.
  - WalterBright 6y ago
    > you likely would not be able to use the bulk of it Evolution rarely produces something useless, especially something that consumes a lot of precious energy like the brain. More likely these people were exquisitely knowledgeable about their environment. Either that, or their brains were the same size as ours, but far less efficient.
    - chmod775 6y ago
      The human brain has actually been shrinking since about 40k years ago. There is some correlation between brain size and intelligence, but admittedly it isn't too strong.
      - fumar 6y ago
        How much of a change? Citation?
        zo1 6y ago
        There is indeed a citation about this higher up in the thread.
prennert 6y ago
It looks similar to the description of the bridge being built in "World without End" by Ken Follett. One bit that is missing from this animation is that there is no rubble placed in the water around the piers. In the book this had the all important function of preventing the foundations from being washed out by the river. Maybe that was fiction or it was too much detail for the animators since the water is not transparent.
- SideburnsOfDoom 6y ago
  I expected there to be some kind of "foundations"? i.e. once the water is out of the enclosure, you have a surface that is likely to be soft wet mud or sand. Surely you want to scoop some out, dig down and lay some big blocks of stone under the river bed level? Or maybe that happens, but was just not shown. Or maybe, once you start building up, the sheer weight pushes the whole column down until it settles.
  - evgen 6y ago
    Dig to bedrock or drive in pilings to shore up your foundation if you can, it all depends on the local geography. Given the lateral forces on a bridge it seems unlikely that modern builders would float the footings of the arches in the riverbed, but in the case of this bridge I think that was what happened (a guess given the fact that three arches failed during a flood in 1890s when a pile-up of logs and debris forced a lot of water flow to push deeper to pass the bridge.)
  - prennert 6y ago
    In the book the issue was that the sand around, and eventually under, the foundations washed out over time so the piers started to be effectively suspended from the bridge rather than supporting it. Rubble around the actual foundations were needed to defuse the drag of the water around the foundations, preventing the washout.
- rimliu 6y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Bridge https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Bridge
pftburger 6y ago
So so very cool. Saving this in the reference pile, for when people argue “we are more advanced as a society” extrapolates to “I am more advanced as a person”
dalbasal 6y ago
Animations like this have amazing information density. Think how much harder it is to explain how they built these bridges using language.
- Terretta 6y ago
  Yet also convey false information in exchange for elegance of the animation. For instance, the first layer of stones across the arches builds up from one side, over the top, and down the other, rather than up from both sides to meet in the top with keystones.
dotancohen 6y ago
Seriously, why is the submission to a lower-quality, sped-up Twitter gif?
- _Microft 6y ago
  This GIF has been making rounds on Twitter for a few days already. I think if I had not searched Youtube for the video, I would not have seen any other version either. Among others, I'm quite certain that it was also shared by former NASA astronaut Mike Massimo [0] who has quite a few followers on Twitter [1]. (More people might know him from a (few?) cameo appearances in Big Bang theory though.) It is easy to have seen this on Twitter by now. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_Massimino https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_Massimino [1] https://twitter.com/Astro_Mike https://twitter.com/Astro_Mike
- TeMPOraL 6y ago
  As _Microft says, the gif is making rounds on the Internet (I've seen it last night on Mastodon). And to be honest, I'm not surprised that it beats the video - it communicates the exact same information, and the same sense of awe as the original video, but in a much more time-efficient manner. Watching the original now, I can't shake the feeling of how boringly slow it is.
  - 7sigma 6y ago
    For me its the opposite, I prefer the youtube version. The gif was way too fast and had to pause it several times because I was like "Hang on! what happened at this step?"
  - dmurray 6y ago
    If you think the 3-minute video was slow, the actual original took 45 years.
    - jdmichal 6y ago
      I imagine even just driving those (wooden?) pylons at the beginning to create the drainage areas took years. Even modern powered devices take a good day or so to pound in a single pylon around here.
smcl 6y ago
Great animation but they seem to have omitted a very key part of the construction process, without which the bridge would possibly not have been completed: https://isc.cvut.cz/czechculturecourse/?p=2274 https://isc.cvut.cz/czechculturecourse/?p=2274
- yread 6y ago
  I thought you meant the egg yolks http://medievalnews.blogspot.com/2010/01/eggs-not-used-to-build-medieval-bridge.html http://medievalnews.blogspot.com/2010/01/eggs-not-used-to-bu...
  - usrusr 6y ago
    Got a chuckle from the idea of having to write a project pitch for the science funding: "let's do some experiments to determine wether our bridge is vegan or not!"
khazhoux 6y ago
Great video, but could have used a scale reference. The pile driver at 00:21 looks to me to be about 30-40', but the wikipedia page for pile drivers suggests it's probably <25' tall. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pile_driver https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pile_driver It's also unclear how the piledriver gets re-positioned for each pile. It does not look readily movable.
- jacquesm 6y ago
  Pile driver could be as simple as an a-frame and a bunch of guys with a ropte, a pulley and a large rock. No need for such advanced gear, but it makes for a nice animation. https://www.1st-art-gallery.com/Maximilien-Luce/The-Pile-Drivers-Quai-De-La-Seine-At-Billancourt.html https://www.1st-art-gallery.com/Maximilien-Luce/The-Pile-Dri...
  - VBprogrammer 6y ago
    I recently came across a video of some middle Eastern guys digging a well using a similar technique. They added a little water down the well and repeatedly lifted and dropped a heavy pipe on it using an A-frame and a pulley. Was surprisingly interesting.
- Mr_T_ 6y ago
  TIL that pile drivers are a real thing and not just a sex position.
Rainymood 6y ago
This really blew my mind when I saw it for the first time. It still blows my mind. Amazing.
- philliphaydon 6y ago
  Yeah me too. Also how Julius Caesar crossed the Rhine river is amazing. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RNPnBVHSeZc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RNPnBVHSeZc https://the-augustus.com/2018/11/29/how-did-caesar-cross-the-rhine/ https://the-augustus.com/2018/11/29/how-did-caesar-cross-the...
  - aikinai 6y ago
    "The bridge would need to be four football fields long" Playing right into the stereotype; they didn't even start with a standard unit.
jiripospisil 6y ago
Fun fact: Charles bridge (depicted in the video) was damaged during a flood in 1890. With the water level risen, broken down rafts were beating its arches and two of them fell apart, along with three pillars that were undermined by the water. During the reconstruction of the pillars, they decided to make them hollow (to cut on the weight) and you can actually go inside! It's not open to the public but there's a video that shows the inside of a pillar number 6 [0]. [0] https://www.novinky.cz/domaci/clanek/jak-vypada-karluv-most-zevnitr-40039150 https://www.novinky.cz/domaci/clanek/jak-vypada-karluv-most-...
- aunlead 6y ago
  Normally I do not pay attention to ads but was curious to know - what was that Santa selling! And I can't speak a word of Czech. 1:26' into the video - Is that guy praying? Read there are statues of Saints on the bridge. Found an image of 1872 flood - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Bridge#/media/File:FFridrich,_Karluv_most,_Praha,_povoden_1872.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Bridge#/media/File:FFr...
  - xixixao 6y ago
    The river was used for centuries for transporting wood. https://cs.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voroplavba_v_%C4%8Cech%C3%A1ch https://cs.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voroplavba_v_%C4%8Cech%C3%A1ch https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9RRowvGeCJA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9RRowvGeCJA
  - jiripospisil 6y ago
    > Normally I do not pay attention to ads but was curious to know - what was that Santa selling! Haha, you mean the long bearded guy with a dog sitting next to him? That was a commercial for a search engine [0]. The premise of the commercial is that people come to this wise old man for advice and he seems to know everything, while in reality he just uses the search engine to look up the information. > 1:26' into the video - Is that guy praying? Read there are statues of Saints on the bridge. There's a lot of statues [1] but my first guess would be that the guy was simply begging for money. I could be wrong though. [0] https://search.seznam.cz https://search.seznam.cz [1] https://cs.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sochy_na_Karlov%C4%9B_most%C4%9B https://cs.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sochy_na_Karlov%C4%9B_most%C4%... (the English version of the page doesn't have that many pictures)
feralimal 6y ago
Nice animation, but I bear in mind that stuff that is presented like this is really just hearsay - we don't really know that it was built as presented. It could well have been built as shown - its a plausible hypothesis. But it is also plausible that the bridges were only built in the 18th century. Or maybe they were built 100's of years earlier. With any historical claims, we should have access to the source to be able to confirm. On the wiki page that was posted we read: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Bridge https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Bridge "Throughout its history, Charles Bridge has suffered several disasters and witnessed many historic events. Czech legend has it that construction began on Charles Bridge at 5:31am on 9 July 1357 with the first stone being laid by Charles IV himself. This exact time was very important to the Holy Roman Emperor because he was a strong believer in numerology and felt that this specific time, which formed a palindrome (1357 9, 7 5:31), was a numerical bridge, and would imbue Charles Bridge with additional strength.[4]" Where 4 is: "Frucht, Richard (2005). Eastern Europe : an introduction to the people, lands, and culture. 1. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO. pp. 251. ISBN 9781576078013." https://archive.org/details/easterneuropeint0000unse/page/251 https://archive.org/details/easterneuropeint0000unse/page/25... When you search that book on archive.org though, there are no references to "1357", "5:31", "numerology". There is a single reference to "numerical" but this relates to 1944. So we have a paragraph in wiki, that has some very specific information, that it claims is from a book that doesn't seem to contain that info. This is to say that 'we' don't know anything about this bridge - the sources do not check out. I was hoping to get a little further than this. I wanted to track the primary or secondary source for this claim about the bridge build date. But I couldn't even get that far. What should one conclude, when the detailed information being provided does not check (or should that 'Czech') out?
- TeMPOraL 6y ago
  > This exact time was very important to the Holy Roman Emperor because he was a strong believer in numerology and felt that this specific time, which formed a palindrome (1357 9, 7 5:31), was a numerical bridge, and would imbue Charles Bridge with additional strength. This smells like horse manure, not just because it's unlikely anyone measured time that precisely in 1357, but also the Y/D/M date notation looks distinctively American.
microtherion 6y ago
Other places may have done it that way, but the Swiss simply subcontracted their bridges to Satan: https://www.andermatt.ch/en/discover/holidays-for-culture-lovers/schoellenen https://www.andermatt.ch/en/discover/holidays-for-culture-lo...
- azepoi 6y ago
  medieval trope https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devil's_Bridge https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devil's_Bridge
  - microtherion 6y ago
    Awesome! I figured there was more than one, but I had no idea how many there were, and how closely related the legends.
    - BerislavLopac 6y ago
      If you have seen the TV series Hinterland, the one in Ceredigion in Wales plays an important role. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devil%27s_Bridge,_Ceredigion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devil%27s_Bridge,_Ceredigion
- b0rsuk 6y ago
  Someone should make a video game about that. You play as the devil and construct bridges!
geogra4 6y ago
Is this similar to how the romans would have built bridges 1000 years earlier?
woadwarrior01 6y ago
I was in Rimini, Italy a couple of years ago and came across an ancient bridge called Ponte di Tiberio[1]. It's mind blowing to see modern cars plying on a bridge that was built nearly 2000 years ago. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ponte_di_Tiberio_(Rimini) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ponte_di_Tiberio_(Rimini)
- rjtavares 6y ago
  Roman bridges have their own list article on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Roman_bridges https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Roman_bridges Also relevant: Hardcore History's "Thor Angels" episode has some great insights over the post-roman life in Europe.
mncharity 6y ago
Construction timelapses can have a similar vibe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KuAvFDGED3k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KuAvFDGED3k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7BC5GmT--I8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7BC5GmT--I8
mncharity 6y ago
How about reactive informal learning? Informal learning, at places (eg museums) and on the web (education and outreach sites), is a recognized and institutionalized part of public education and outreach. And when something, like this gif, catches public attention, related resources will be linked. A little bit. In an unprepared, ad hoc, shallow, and unfunded kind of way. A "teachable moment" is an transient opportunity to offer insight. And unplanned opportunity, but one a teacher trains and prepares for. With viral content reaching so many, are we missing an opportunity by not being organized to exploit them as teachable moments? To rapidly and reactively link related content? History, transport, economics, construction. Might not a spike of viral be broadened, by better facilitating people following up on whatever aspect of the spike tickled their interest? The compressed timescale makes things harder. But also easier - coping with the severe content-creation bottleneck of copyright is easier in a transient context. How might we explore this space? Perhaps strengthen the existing "here's something related and interesting" pattern by aggregating and propagating such? A tweet "here are some links from HN", and an HN comment "here are some links from the twitter discussion"? Those are variously suboptimal, so what else?
dylan604 6y ago
Were the cranes human powered? It looks like giant hamster wheels that several humans would be needed to operate?
- Kuinox 6y ago
  Yes, they use these to build Guédelon.
  - dylan604 6y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gu%C3%A9delon_Castle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gu%C3%A9delon_Castle Wow. That's a cool project to show how the alien's were not necessarily needed. I've seen attempts at this for the construction of pyramids, but those only really show how moving large stones with human motors were possible.
    - Kuinox 6y ago
      I visited it a couple of times. The only modern things they use are safety 'tools': Helmet, harness, and ropes are modern, to avoid casualties that were not uncommon when these things were built.
- dredmorbius 6y ago
  Yes, similar to shown here: https://youtube.com/watch?v=pu3O70GeQFY https://youtube.com/watch?v=pu3O70GeQFY
- sergeykish 6y ago
  Video in action https://youtu.be/SURsW7BpCNc?t=1447 https://youtu.be/SURsW7BpCNc?t=1447 Secrets of the Castle, BBC
daveslash 6y ago
Is it weird that this makes me want to build a middle-age bridge? The part where the water is fully drained and the base layer of rock is being laid is really appealing to me....
wrnr 6y ago
Very cool, if you like stuff like this check out the building of the Brooklyn Bridge, that's just insane: https://youtu.be/dyckL6HuLRU?t=162 https://youtu.be/dyckL6HuLRU?t=162
mooreds 6y ago
This twitter commentary on the same video is worth reading too: https://twitter.com/bcantrill/status/1316830833508904961 https://twitter.com/bcantrill/status/1316830833508904961
dredmorbius 6y ago
An etymological note. I'd known that most in Slavic means "bridge" dating back to the destruction of the famed Stari Most ("Old Bridge") in Mostar (named for the bridge, or its keepers), Bosnia and Herzegovina, in November 1993 during the Croat–Bosniak War.[1] The bridge was rebuilt in 2004. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stari_Most https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stari_Most A related English word is mast: > "long pole on a ship, secured as the lower end to the keel, to support the yards, sails, and rigging in general," Old English mæst, from Proto-Germanic masta (source also of Old Norse mastr, Middle Dutch maste, Dutch, Danish mast, German Mast), from PIE mazdo- "a pole, rod" (source also of Latin malus "mast," Old Irish matan "club," Irish maide "a stick," Old Church Slavonic mostu "bridge"). https://www.etymonline.com/word/mast https://www.etymonline.com/word/mast This is also probably the source for Mosul, the city in present-day Iraq, from the Arabic al-Mawsul, literally "the joined," refering to the bridge there. https://www.etymonline.com/word/Mosul https://www.etymonline.com/word/Mosul Bridge itself comes from proto-Germanic brugjo, "log, beam". https://www.etymonline.com/word/bridge https://www.etymonline.com/word/bridge The French pont is from Latin pons, bridge, earlier "connecting gallery, walkway". https://www.etymonline.com/word/pons https://www.etymonline.com/word/pons ________________________________ Notes: 1. Also called Mostar Bridge, which since the city was named for the bridge-keepers, is a double and self-referential toponym: bridge-keeper-city bridge.
chubot 6y ago
It's interesting that this bridge is still around. It seems like most of that society's energy was concentrated on building this bridge, and physical infrastructure of that nature. Its best minds and hands were at work. Similarly, in San Francisco, many people live in 100 year old houses. It's not like we discovered better "must have" ways of building houses that made the old ones obsolete. I honestly think things like the Linux kernel (going on 25 years) and LLVM (going on nearly 20 years) will still be around in 100 or 500 years, and basically nobody will have the time or a reason to rebuild them. Kind of like the PC BIOS is still around. People won't really be working much in those areas, but rather on top. Just like we kind of build "on top" of houses now. It's infrastructure that we can use to make progress in other areas. It reminds me of "How Buildings Learn" by Stewart Brand.
- messe 6y ago
  > Kind of like the PC BIOS is still around. Not any more. The BIOS has been replaced with UEFI on most new machines for about a decade now.
  - chubot 6y ago
    Yeah that is the thing that runs an entire OS right :) Like Minix or Linux. Still I bet the BIOS will still be around in many places. What about QEMU? Does it present a machine that contains a BIOS? A google search turns this up: http://funwithbits.net/blog/dissecting-the-rom-bios-shipped-with-qemu-for-fun/ http://funwithbits.net/blog/dissecting-the-rom-bios-shipped-... Which means that OSes still have BIOS support. It's not my area of expertise, but it seems like turtles all the way down. BIOS may not have been the best example, but Linux itself or Minix may be a good one. If 100 years from now there's a new dominant OS, there's probably going to still be UEFI with some legacy operating system booting it up ... Or something emulating UEFI, etc.
- jeffbee 6y ago
  A weird example since a 1920s San Francisco house was really a local nadir of domestic architecture, slapdash work that was adequate in a time of abundant wool and heating fuels. Most 1920s SF houses aren't worth what it would cost to dismantle them, or at least they wouldn't be if there wasn't a land use and planning crisis in that city. A modern house would have a tiny fraction of the energy demanded by 1920s SF tract housing, and 100% less interior mold.
irrational 6y ago
The one thing I don't understand is how the original posts were driven into the river bed. You have to deal with the current, deal with the fact that wood floats, deal with a long post, have to have a means of driving it down far enough, etc. I imagine that nowadays they'd use a pile driver on a huge barge with engines that can automatically compensate for the current, but I can't imagine what the equivalent was back then.
- baq 6y ago
  The thread mentions wooden piers and low tech pile drivers.
- nyghtly 6y ago
  Maybe the original posts didn't need to be that deep--just deep enough to be used as scaffolding for the wooden version of the pile driver to be set up. They may have also taken advantage of fair weather and seasonal changes. During the dry season, the river would be lower and easier to work with.
  - m4rtink 6y ago
    IIRC the water under the bringe is actually behind a weir (to aid river navigation). If the weir was already there back then, they could temporarily open it up and significantly lower the water level.
- sradman 6y ago
  Good question. The video shows the first posts floating in air across the river and dropping magically in-place. These posts are then connected into a kind of scaffolding for the caisson [1]. A pile driver is built on top of the scaffolding that is used to drive the remaining posts that make up the caisson wall but they don't show what powers the pile driver (men?) nor how it is moved post to post along the scaffolding. A water wheel is used to lift the water out of the caisson. The posts are small compared to modern piles so they will not be overly buoyant. Modern piles are core structural components that are used instead of a caisson so they are quite big. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caisson_(engineering) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caisson_(engineering)
billconan 6y ago
at the 14th second, the video shows something like a hammer, https://youtu.be/nJgD6gyi0Wk?t=14 https://youtu.be/nJgD6gyi0Wk?t=14 I don't understand it. the hammer seems to ram down wooden pillar at the same location. I think for it to work, the hammer needs to move around the wooden rail .
vivekd 6y ago
They used the water currents itself as a pump to empty out the water and create a space to build on - that's brilliant!!
TheGrassyKnoll 6y ago
Building a Leonardo da Vinci Bridge https://imgur.com/0lpS9k3
mbank 6y ago
I think the story goes that there were less than 10 people in medieval Europe that could do a division on paper at the time the great gothic cathedrals were build. Gets you thinking...(no source provided)

959 points by BerislavLopac 6y ago

Thank you! Seems very similar to the bridge in Córdoba: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_bridge_of_C%C3%B3rdoba https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_bridge_of_C%C3%B3rdoba

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
ainiriand 6y ago
Really similar! To be honest I think I have seen many similar bridges all around Spain and Italy, not just Central Europe.
- azepoi 6y ago
  this type of bridge is common throughout Europe. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_medieval_bridges_in_France https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_medieval_bridges_in_Fr... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_medieval_stone_bridges_in_Germany https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_medieval_stone_bridges... since antiquity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_bridge https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_bridge
azepoi 6y ago
there are many more https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puente_de_fábrica https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puente_de_fábrica
- coder1001 6y ago
  yeah I imagine once a technique is mastered, it would be used all over the place! Not sure if one "company" started offering this service in many places, could explain the similarity.
  - prennert 6y ago
    These projects employed skilled journey men (level between apprentice and master). At some point they then traveled to work on the next project, spreading the know-how. Once something was working, it was often copied as modifications were risky.
    - pizzapill 6y ago
      To add to this: those were highly sought after specialists with a lot of privileges. This had consequences that sound strange to us nowadays. Stonemasons were heavily involved in medieval diplomacy, since everybody in power needed them to build or repair fortresses. They could travel freely between kingdoms that were at war with each other and exchange messages between the respective rulers.
      - HPsquared 6y ago
        They were the tech aristocrats of their day.
      - ayewo 6y ago
        That's a fascinating take but not strange at all since modern-day equivalents still exist in highly-skilled occupations like CPU design. Perhaps a comparable example would be an executive with a technical background: Jim Keller has highly sought-after skills desired by chip makers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Keller_(engineer) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Keller_(engineer)
  - usrusr 6y ago
    I'd rather call the knowledgeable entity in question "expert" than company, but I was wondering along similar lines: would they travel far to projects or would the knowledge be dispersed to enough people that most projects could just happen with local expertise? (plus temporarily imported capacity for big project, but not necessarily imported expertise?) What's clear is that knowledge transfer (from region to region and from generation to generation) was facilitated by traveling apprentices, a tradition that still lives on and (I believe) is documented to go back to that time. Their profession wouldn't be bridge builder but merely some contributing role (with the occasional exception of whatever the period-correct term for architect or project manager would be), but of all the masons involved, you'd have some whose learning circuit involved a bridge, of the woodworkers you'd have some who dabbled in cranes before and so on. But was that usually sufficient or was there also a pattern of on-demand traveling leadership? edit: post was lingering in the input form for some hours, some good answers already there!

_Microft 6y ago

Here is the video source [0]. Its description says "3D graphics and post-production: Tomáš Mustlek Professional cooperation: Ing. Arch. Ondřej Šefců Graphic cooperation: Mgr. Zdeněk Mazač More information about Charles Bridge can be found at http://praha-archeologicka.cz/p/212 http://praha-archeologicka.cz/p/212 The digital model "Charles Bridge - construction of a pillar and vault field in the 14th century" was created for the project of the virtual exhibition Prague of the Time of Charles IV. The project is supported by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Czech Republic as part of the National Celebrations of the 700th Anniversary of the Birth of Emperor Charles IV and is included in the AV21 Strategy programme." [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nJgD6gyi0Wk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nJgD6gyi0Wk [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Bridge https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Bridge

yread 6y ago
There is a lot more information in this article (in Czech, but there are pictures) http://praha-archeologicka.cz/p/212 http://praha-archeologicka.cz/p/212
dredmorbius 6y ago
Another video showing dioramas and construction techniques, from Muzeum Karlova most and other sources. https://youtube.com/watch?v=1TDhX6tu30M https://youtube.com/watch?v=1TDhX6tu30M
dang 6y ago
Ok, we've changed to the video from https://twitter.com/KiwiEV/status/1316493212605911040 https://twitter.com/KiwiEV/status/1316493212605911040. Thanks!

yread 6y ago

Note that the construction took 45 years.

Animats 6y ago
Those little intermediate piers were probably the slowest part of the on site work. And the most vulnerable part of the bridge, because that's what gets eroded. It's still the biggest cause of bridge failure.
- TeMPOraL 6y ago
  Makes me wonder if they've been done in parallel or serially. Also, I'd love to know how the bridge was designed. How did they figure out the shapes of the supporting structure, or location of the piers? Etc. We have this knowledge systematized today, but we use mathematics in a form that was developed much later than those bridges.
  - BerislavLopac 6y ago
    They had it systematized as well; the mason guilds were very thorough in protecting and maintaining knowledge throughout centuries.
  - spenczar5 6y ago
    According to JE Gordon in “ Structures: Or Why Things Don't Fall Down,” the answer is surprisingly simple: everything was massively, tremendously overbuilt. Also, often builders would start with scale models, and then exaggerate proportions - that doesn’t require sophisticated math. Just do the modeling “analog”!
    - azepoi 6y ago
      To see how overbuilt they are, you have to compare to late masonry stone arch bridges that are more 'airy'. Like so https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_S%C3%A9journ%C3%A9#Gallery https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_S%C3%A9journ%C3%A9#Galler... https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viaduc_de_la_Roizonne https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viaduc_de_la_Roizonne https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pont_des_Pierres#/media/Fichier:Pont_des_pierres_-_Montanges-3.jpg https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pont_des_Pierres#/media/Fichie...

DoofusOfDeath 6y ago

I used to be tempted to think that our modern generations are extra smart because of the cool gadgets we have. Seeing stuff like this, and reading ancient political / philosophical writings, gives me a much-needed reality check.

jacquesm 6y ago
There is absolutely no difference between a human from 6000 years ago and one today. You could be an Einstein level genius back then, and likely unable to use any of those skills other than for the optimization of your environment. Also, you likely would not be able to use the bulk of it because your education would be non-existent, so your IQ compared to someone today would be much lower even though your raw intelligence would be higher. Essentially you'd be given an exquisitely crafted very blunt knife.
- WalterBright 6y ago
  > you likely would not be able to use the bulk of it Evolution rarely produces something useless, especially something that consumes a lot of precious energy like the brain. More likely these people were exquisitely knowledgeable about their environment. Either that, or their brains were the same size as ours, but far less efficient.
  - chmod775 6y ago
    The human brain has actually been shrinking since about 40k years ago. There is some correlation between brain size and intelligence, but admittedly it isn't too strong.
    - fumar 6y ago
      How much of a change? Citation?
      - zo1 6y ago
        There is indeed a citation about this higher up in the thread.

prennert 6y ago

It looks similar to the description of the bridge being built in "World without End" by Ken Follett. One bit that is missing from this animation is that there is no rubble placed in the water around the piers. In the book this had the all important function of preventing the foundations from being washed out by the river. Maybe that was fiction or it was too much detail for the animators since the water is not transparent.

SideburnsOfDoom 6y ago
I expected there to be some kind of "foundations"? i.e. once the water is out of the enclosure, you have a surface that is likely to be soft wet mud or sand. Surely you want to scoop some out, dig down and lay some big blocks of stone under the river bed level? Or maybe that happens, but was just not shown. Or maybe, once you start building up, the sheer weight pushes the whole column down until it settles.
- evgen 6y ago
  Dig to bedrock or drive in pilings to shore up your foundation if you can, it all depends on the local geography. Given the lateral forces on a bridge it seems unlikely that modern builders would float the footings of the arches in the riverbed, but in the case of this bridge I think that was what happened (a guess given the fact that three arches failed during a flood in 1890s when a pile-up of logs and debris forced a lot of water flow to push deeper to pass the bridge.)
- prennert 6y ago
  In the book the issue was that the sand around, and eventually under, the foundations washed out over time so the piers started to be effectively suspended from the bridge rather than supporting it. Rubble around the actual foundations were needed to defuse the drag of the water around the foundations, preventing the washout.
rimliu 6y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Bridge https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Bridge

pftburger 6y ago

So so very cool. Saving this in the reference pile, for when people argue “we are more advanced as a society” extrapolates to “I am more advanced as a person”

dalbasal 6y ago

Animations like this have amazing information density. Think how much harder it is to explain how they built these bridges using language.

Terretta 6y ago
Yet also convey false information in exchange for elegance of the animation. For instance, the first layer of stones across the arches builds up from one side, over the top, and down the other, rather than up from both sides to meet in the top with keystones.

dotancohen 6y ago

Seriously, why is the submission to a lower-quality, sped-up Twitter gif?

_Microft 6y ago
This GIF has been making rounds on Twitter for a few days already. I think if I had not searched Youtube for the video, I would not have seen any other version either. Among others, I'm quite certain that it was also shared by former NASA astronaut Mike Massimo [0] who has quite a few followers on Twitter [1]. (More people might know him from a (few?) cameo appearances in Big Bang theory though.) It is easy to have seen this on Twitter by now. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_Massimino https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_Massimino [1] https://twitter.com/Astro_Mike https://twitter.com/Astro_Mike
TeMPOraL 6y ago
As _Microft says, the gif is making rounds on the Internet (I've seen it last night on Mastodon). And to be honest, I'm not surprised that it beats the video - it communicates the exact same information, and the same sense of awe as the original video, but in a much more time-efficient manner. Watching the original now, I can't shake the feeling of how boringly slow it is.
- 7sigma 6y ago
  For me its the opposite, I prefer the youtube version. The gif was way too fast and had to pause it several times because I was like "Hang on! what happened at this step?"
- dmurray 6y ago
  If you think the 3-minute video was slow, the actual original took 45 years.
  - jdmichal 6y ago
    I imagine even just driving those (wooden?) pylons at the beginning to create the drainage areas took years. Even modern powered devices take a good day or so to pound in a single pylon around here.

smcl 6y ago

Great animation but they seem to have omitted a very key part of the construction process, without which the bridge would possibly not have been completed: https://isc.cvut.cz/czechculturecourse/?p=2274 https://isc.cvut.cz/czechculturecourse/?p=2274

yread 6y ago
I thought you meant the egg yolks http://medievalnews.blogspot.com/2010/01/eggs-not-used-to-build-medieval-bridge.html http://medievalnews.blogspot.com/2010/01/eggs-not-used-to-bu...
- usrusr 6y ago
  Got a chuckle from the idea of having to write a project pitch for the science funding: "let's do some experiments to determine wether our bridge is vegan or not!"

khazhoux 6y ago

Great video, but could have used a scale reference. The pile driver at 00:21 looks to me to be about 30-40', but the wikipedia page for pile drivers suggests it's probably <25' tall. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pile_driver https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pile_driver It's also unclear how the piledriver gets re-positioned for each pile. It does not look readily movable.

jacquesm 6y ago
Pile driver could be as simple as an a-frame and a bunch of guys with a ropte, a pulley and a large rock. No need for such advanced gear, but it makes for a nice animation. https://www.1st-art-gallery.com/Maximilien-Luce/The-Pile-Drivers-Quai-De-La-Seine-At-Billancourt.html https://www.1st-art-gallery.com/Maximilien-Luce/The-Pile-Dri...
- VBprogrammer 6y ago
  I recently came across a video of some middle Eastern guys digging a well using a similar technique. They added a little water down the well and repeatedly lifted and dropped a heavy pipe on it using an A-frame and a pulley. Was surprisingly interesting.
Mr_T_ 6y ago
TIL that pile drivers are a real thing and not just a sex position.

Rainymood 6y ago

This really blew my mind when I saw it for the first time. It still blows my mind. Amazing.

philliphaydon 6y ago
Yeah me too. Also how Julius Caesar crossed the Rhine river is amazing. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RNPnBVHSeZc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RNPnBVHSeZc https://the-augustus.com/2018/11/29/how-did-caesar-cross-the-rhine/ https://the-augustus.com/2018/11/29/how-did-caesar-cross-the...
- aikinai 6y ago
  "The bridge would need to be four football fields long" Playing right into the stereotype; they didn't even start with a standard unit.

jiripospisil 6y ago

Fun fact: Charles bridge (depicted in the video) was damaged during a flood in 1890. With the water level risen, broken down rafts were beating its arches and two of them fell apart, along with three pillars that were undermined by the water. During the reconstruction of the pillars, they decided to make them hollow (to cut on the weight) and you can actually go inside! It's not open to the public but there's a video that shows the inside of a pillar number 6 [0]. [0] https://www.novinky.cz/domaci/clanek/jak-vypada-karluv-most-zevnitr-40039150 https://www.novinky.cz/domaci/clanek/jak-vypada-karluv-most-...

aunlead 6y ago
Normally I do not pay attention to ads but was curious to know - what was that Santa selling! And I can't speak a word of Czech. 1:26' into the video - Is that guy praying? Read there are statues of Saints on the bridge. Found an image of 1872 flood - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Bridge#/media/File:FFridrich,_Karluv_most,_Praha,_povoden_1872.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Bridge#/media/File:FFr...
- xixixao 6y ago
  The river was used for centuries for transporting wood. https://cs.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voroplavba_v_%C4%8Cech%C3%A1ch https://cs.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voroplavba_v_%C4%8Cech%C3%A1ch https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9RRowvGeCJA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9RRowvGeCJA
- jiripospisil 6y ago
  > Normally I do not pay attention to ads but was curious to know - what was that Santa selling! Haha, you mean the long bearded guy with a dog sitting next to him? That was a commercial for a search engine [0]. The premise of the commercial is that people come to this wise old man for advice and he seems to know everything, while in reality he just uses the search engine to look up the information. > 1:26' into the video - Is that guy praying? Read there are statues of Saints on the bridge. There's a lot of statues [1] but my first guess would be that the guy was simply begging for money. I could be wrong though. [0] https://search.seznam.cz https://search.seznam.cz [1] https://cs.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sochy_na_Karlov%C4%9B_most%C4%9B https://cs.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sochy_na_Karlov%C4%9B_most%C4%... (the English version of the page doesn't have that many pictures)

feralimal 6y ago

Nice animation, but I bear in mind that stuff that is presented like this is really just hearsay - we don't really know that it was built as presented. It could well have been built as shown - its a plausible hypothesis. But it is also plausible that the bridges were only built in the 18th century. Or maybe they were built 100's of years earlier. With any historical claims, we should have access to the source to be able to confirm. On the wiki page that was posted we read: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Bridge https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Bridge "Throughout its history, Charles Bridge has suffered several disasters and witnessed many historic events. Czech legend has it that construction began on Charles Bridge at 5:31am on 9 July 1357 with the first stone being laid by Charles IV himself. This exact time was very important to the Holy Roman Emperor because he was a strong believer in numerology and felt that this specific time, which formed a palindrome (1357 9, 7 5:31), was a numerical bridge, and would imbue Charles Bridge with additional strength.[4]" Where 4 is: "Frucht, Richard (2005). Eastern Europe : an introduction to the people, lands, and culture. 1. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO. pp. 251. ISBN 9781576078013." https://archive.org/details/easterneuropeint0000unse/page/251 https://archive.org/details/easterneuropeint0000unse/page/25... When you search that book on archive.org though, there are no references to "1357", "5:31", "numerology". There is a single reference to "numerical" but this relates to 1944. So we have a paragraph in wiki, that has some very specific information, that it claims is from a book that doesn't seem to contain that info. This is to say that 'we' don't know anything about this bridge - the sources do not check out. I was hoping to get a little further than this. I wanted to track the primary or secondary source for this claim about the bridge build date. But I couldn't even get that far. What should one conclude, when the detailed information being provided does not check (or should that 'Czech') out?

TeMPOraL 6y ago
> This exact time was very important to the Holy Roman Emperor because he was a strong believer in numerology and felt that this specific time, which formed a palindrome (1357 9, 7 5:31), was a numerical bridge, and would imbue Charles Bridge with additional strength. This smells like horse manure, not just because it's unlikely anyone measured time that precisely in 1357, but also the Y/D/M date notation looks distinctively American.

microtherion 6y ago

Other places may have done it that way, but the Swiss simply subcontracted their bridges to Satan: https://www.andermatt.ch/en/discover/holidays-for-culture-lovers/schoellenen https://www.andermatt.ch/en/discover/holidays-for-culture-lo...

azepoi 6y ago
medieval trope https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devil's_Bridge https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devil's_Bridge
- microtherion 6y ago
  Awesome! I figured there was more than one, but I had no idea how many there were, and how closely related the legends.
  - BerislavLopac 6y ago
    If you have seen the TV series Hinterland, the one in Ceredigion in Wales plays an important role. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devil%27s_Bridge,_Ceredigion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devil%27s_Bridge,_Ceredigion
b0rsuk 6y ago
Someone should make a video game about that. You play as the devil and construct bridges!

geogra4 6y ago

Is this similar to how the romans would have built bridges 1000 years earlier?

woadwarrior01 6y ago

I was in Rimini, Italy a couple of years ago and came across an ancient bridge called Ponte di Tiberio[1]. It's mind blowing to see modern cars plying on a bridge that was built nearly 2000 years ago. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ponte_di_Tiberio_(Rimini) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ponte_di_Tiberio_(Rimini)

rjtavares 6y ago
Roman bridges have their own list article on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Roman_bridges https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Roman_bridges Also relevant: Hardcore History's "Thor Angels" episode has some great insights over the post-roman life in Europe.

mncharity 6y ago

Construction timelapses can have a similar vibe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KuAvFDGED3k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KuAvFDGED3k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7BC5GmT--I8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7BC5GmT--I8

mncharity 6y ago

How about reactive informal learning? Informal learning, at places (eg museums) and on the web (education and outreach sites), is a recognized and institutionalized part of public education and outreach. And when something, like this gif, catches public attention, related resources will be linked. A little bit. In an unprepared, ad hoc, shallow, and unfunded kind of way. A "teachable moment" is an transient opportunity to offer insight. And unplanned opportunity, but one a teacher trains and prepares for. With viral content reaching so many, are we missing an opportunity by not being organized to exploit them as teachable moments? To rapidly and reactively link related content? History, transport, economics, construction. Might not a spike of viral be broadened, by better facilitating people following up on whatever aspect of the spike tickled their interest? The compressed timescale makes things harder. But also easier - coping with the severe content-creation bottleneck of copyright is easier in a transient context. How might we explore this space? Perhaps strengthen the existing "here's something related and interesting" pattern by aggregating and propagating such? A tweet "here are some links from HN", and an HN comment "here are some links from the twitter discussion"? Those are variously suboptimal, so what else?

dylan604 6y ago

Were the cranes human powered? It looks like giant hamster wheels that several humans would be needed to operate?

Kuinox 6y ago
Yes, they use these to build Guédelon.
- dylan604 6y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gu%C3%A9delon_Castle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gu%C3%A9delon_Castle Wow. That's a cool project to show how the alien's were not necessarily needed. I've seen attempts at this for the construction of pyramids, but those only really show how moving large stones with human motors were possible.
  - Kuinox 6y ago
    I visited it a couple of times. The only modern things they use are safety 'tools': Helmet, harness, and ropes are modern, to avoid casualties that were not uncommon when these things were built.
dredmorbius 6y ago
Yes, similar to shown here: https://youtube.com/watch?v=pu3O70GeQFY https://youtube.com/watch?v=pu3O70GeQFY
sergeykish 6y ago
Video in action https://youtu.be/SURsW7BpCNc?t=1447 https://youtu.be/SURsW7BpCNc?t=1447 Secrets of the Castle, BBC

daveslash 6y ago

Is it weird that this makes me want to build a middle-age bridge? The part where the water is fully drained and the base layer of rock is being laid is really appealing to me....

wrnr 6y ago

Very cool, if you like stuff like this check out the building of the Brooklyn Bridge, that's just insane: https://youtu.be/dyckL6HuLRU?t=162 https://youtu.be/dyckL6HuLRU?t=162

mooreds 6y ago

This twitter commentary on the same video is worth reading too: https://twitter.com/bcantrill/status/1316830833508904961 https://twitter.com/bcantrill/status/1316830833508904961

dredmorbius 6y ago

An etymological note. I'd known that most in Slavic means "bridge" dating back to the destruction of the famed Stari Most ("Old Bridge") in Mostar (named for the bridge, or its keepers), Bosnia and Herzegovina, in November 1993 during the Croat–Bosniak War.[1] The bridge was rebuilt in 2004. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stari_Most https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stari_Most A related English word is mast: > "long pole on a ship, secured as the lower end to the keel, to support the yards, sails, and rigging in general," Old English mæst, from Proto-Germanic masta (source also of Old Norse mastr, Middle Dutch maste, Dutch, Danish mast, German Mast), from PIE mazdo- "a pole, rod" (source also of Latin malus "mast," Old Irish matan "club," Irish maide "a stick," Old Church Slavonic mostu "bridge"). https://www.etymonline.com/word/mast https://www.etymonline.com/word/mast This is also probably the source for Mosul, the city in present-day Iraq, from the Arabic al-Mawsul, literally "the joined," refering to the bridge there. https://www.etymonline.com/word/Mosul https://www.etymonline.com/word/Mosul Bridge itself comes from proto-Germanic brugjo, "log, beam". https://www.etymonline.com/word/bridge https://www.etymonline.com/word/bridge The French pont is from Latin pons, bridge, earlier "connecting gallery, walkway". https://www.etymonline.com/word/pons https://www.etymonline.com/word/pons ________________________________ Notes: 1. Also called Mostar Bridge, which since the city was named for the bridge-keepers, is a double and self-referential toponym: bridge-keeper-city bridge.

chubot 6y ago

It's interesting that this bridge is still around. It seems like most of that society's energy was concentrated on building this bridge, and physical infrastructure of that nature. Its best minds and hands were at work. Similarly, in San Francisco, many people live in 100 year old houses. It's not like we discovered better "must have" ways of building houses that made the old ones obsolete. I honestly think things like the Linux kernel (going on 25 years) and LLVM (going on nearly 20 years) will still be around in 100 or 500 years, and basically nobody will have the time or a reason to rebuild them. Kind of like the PC BIOS is still around. People won't really be working much in those areas, but rather on top. Just like we kind of build "on top" of houses now. It's infrastructure that we can use to make progress in other areas. It reminds me of "How Buildings Learn" by Stewart Brand.

messe 6y ago
> Kind of like the PC BIOS is still around. Not any more. The BIOS has been replaced with UEFI on most new machines for about a decade now.
- chubot 6y ago
  Yeah that is the thing that runs an entire OS right :) Like Minix or Linux. Still I bet the BIOS will still be around in many places. What about QEMU? Does it present a machine that contains a BIOS? A google search turns this up: http://funwithbits.net/blog/dissecting-the-rom-bios-shipped-with-qemu-for-fun/ http://funwithbits.net/blog/dissecting-the-rom-bios-shipped-... Which means that OSes still have BIOS support. It's not my area of expertise, but it seems like turtles all the way down. BIOS may not have been the best example, but Linux itself or Minix may be a good one. If 100 years from now there's a new dominant OS, there's probably going to still be UEFI with some legacy operating system booting it up ... Or something emulating UEFI, etc.
jeffbee 6y ago
A weird example since a 1920s San Francisco house was really a local nadir of domestic architecture, slapdash work that was adequate in a time of abundant wool and heating fuels. Most 1920s SF houses aren't worth what it would cost to dismantle them, or at least they wouldn't be if there wasn't a land use and planning crisis in that city. A modern house would have a tiny fraction of the energy demanded by 1920s SF tract housing, and 100% less interior mold.

irrational 6y ago

The one thing I don't understand is how the original posts were driven into the river bed. You have to deal with the current, deal with the fact that wood floats, deal with a long post, have to have a means of driving it down far enough, etc. I imagine that nowadays they'd use a pile driver on a huge barge with engines that can automatically compensate for the current, but I can't imagine what the equivalent was back then.

baq 6y ago
The thread mentions wooden piers and low tech pile drivers.
nyghtly 6y ago
Maybe the original posts didn't need to be that deep--just deep enough to be used as scaffolding for the wooden version of the pile driver to be set up. They may have also taken advantage of fair weather and seasonal changes. During the dry season, the river would be lower and easier to work with.
- m4rtink 6y ago
  IIRC the water under the bringe is actually behind a weir (to aid river navigation). If the weir was already there back then, they could temporarily open it up and significantly lower the water level.
sradman 6y ago
Good question. The video shows the first posts floating in air across the river and dropping magically in-place. These posts are then connected into a kind of scaffolding for the caisson [1]. A pile driver is built on top of the scaffolding that is used to drive the remaining posts that make up the caisson wall but they don't show what powers the pile driver (men?) nor how it is moved post to post along the scaffolding. A water wheel is used to lift the water out of the caisson. The posts are small compared to modern piles so they will not be overly buoyant. Modern piles are core structural components that are used instead of a caisson so they are quite big. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caisson_(engineering) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caisson_(engineering)

billconan 6y ago

at the 14th second, the video shows something like a hammer, https://youtu.be/nJgD6gyi0Wk?t=14 https://youtu.be/nJgD6gyi0Wk?t=14 I don't understand it. the hammer seems to ram down wooden pillar at the same location. I think for it to work, the hammer needs to move around the wooden rail .

vivekd 6y ago

They used the water currents itself as a pump to empty out the water and create a space to build on - that's brilliant!!

TheGrassyKnoll 6y ago

Building a Leonardo da Vinci Bridge https://imgur.com/0lpS9k3

mbank 6y ago

I think the story goes that there were less than 10 people in medieval Europe that could do a division on paper at the time the great gothic cathedrals were build. Gets you thinking...(no source provided)