7 Wonders Of The Industrial World Torrent
Anastacia Iacono
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The Industrial Revolution changed the world in countless ways - and produced many technical wonders in the process. Seven of the most notable are described here, each one proving that human creativity is as much alive in the modern world as it was in ancient times.
The period of over 125 years from the beginning of the 19th century saw the creation of some of the world's most remarkable feats of engineering. These are now celebrated as great wonders of the world - revealing as much about human creativity and the determination of the human spirit as they do of technological endeavour.
The wonders described here cover a great range. They include Isambard Kingdom Brunel's extraordinary ship - the Great Eastern, sometimes known as the Crystal Palace of the Seas - which its designer hoped would travel between the two farthest ends of the British empire, and the ground-breaking Panama Canal, which linked the Atlantic and Pacific oceans more than half a century later.
The slowly evolving industrial revolution was the fertile ground that gave life to these dreams in iron, cement, stone and steel. The pioneers of the age were practical visionaries, seeing beyond the immediate horizon, the safe and the known, as they cut a path to the future.
Yet their unique masterpieces could never have been built without an army of unsung heroes, the craftsmen and workers also willing to risk their lives as they laboured to bring each dream to life. Not to mention the financiers and shareholders hanging on for the ride, as reputations were lost and won.
The journey from the oldest 'wonder' described here, the Bell Rock Lighthouse, to the most recent, the Hoover Dam, illustrates the swiftly moving frontiers of technological progress in the 19th century. And each 'wonder' serves as a unique monument, a marker for what was known at the time it was created.
Robert Stevenson's Bell Rock Lighthouse was created off the east coast of Scotland between 1807 and 1811, when the world was very different from how it is today. Stevenson, the grandfather of Robert Louis Stevenson, had dreamed for years of making his mark on the world, by bringing light to the treacherous Scottish coast. He aimed to take on the most dangerous place of all, the Bell Rock, a large reef 11 miles out to sea, dangerously positioned in the approach to the Firth of Forth.
In 1799, over 70 ships went down in a violent storm that raged along the coast, yet still the authorities opposed his plan. How could anyone build a lighthouse 11 miles out to sea, on a rock that was submerged by up to 16 feet of water for most of the day? Battling against the odds, Stevenson did eventually build his lighthouse, and to this day it shines out across the North Sea, the oldest offshore lighthouse still standing anywhere in the world.
Isambard Kingdom Brunel's colossal ship, the Great Eastern, is the only wonder described here that has not survived to the 21st century. In the early 1850s, Brunel hoped the ship would be his masterpiece, and that it would provide an enduring link to even the most farflung parts of the empire.
At a time when most ships moored in the Thames were built to traditional designs in wood, and powered by sail, Brunel's 'Great Ship' was almost 700 feet long, a floating island made of iron. His vision was that it should carry 4,000 passengers, in magnificent style, as far as the Antipodes - without needing to refuel.
The design was revolutionary, incorporating a double hull that made the ship unsinkable, and enormous engines as high as a house. Brunel faced considerable criticism: his ship was too big, it was too expensive, it would sink, or break its back on the first big wave - if, that is, he could actually manage to launch it. In fact his concept became the blue print for ship design for years to come.
In the summer of 1858, while the Great Eastern was being fitted out for her maiden voyage, London was in the grip of a crisis known as the 'Great Stink'. The population had grown rapidly during the first half of the 19th century, yet there had been no provision for sanitation.
Three epidemics of cholera had swept through the city, leaving over 30,000 people dead. And sewage was everywhere, piling up in every gully and alleyway, in the cellars of houses in poor districts - and even seeping through cracks in floorboards.
Leading engineer Joseph Bazalgette proposed a bold scheme to build proper sewers: 82 miles of sewage superhighway, linked with over 1,000 miles of street sewers, to provide an underground network beneath the city streets.
He drove himself to the limits of endurance as he struggled to realise his subterranean vision - a task made particularly difficult by his need to compete with the new underground railway, a network of roads, and emerging overland railway systems. But his grand design for a sewer system did eventually transform the city into the first glittering modern metropolis, setting a standard that was quickly copied the world over.
By the middle of the 19th century, the benefits brought by the host of advances of the industrial age were gradually beginning to reach America, which soon developed a spectacular achievement of its own - the Transcontinental Railway, reaching right across the continent.
With two teams, one building from the east and the other from California in the west, they battled against hostile terrain, hostile inhabitants, civil war and the Wild West. Yet in 1869, the two teams' tracks were joined, shrinking the whole American continent, as the journey from New York to San Francisco was reduced from months to days.
That same year, a brilliant engineer, John Roebling from Germany, won the contract to build the largest bridge in the world, the Brooklyn Bridge in New York. It was to stretch 1,600 feet, in one giant leap, across the wide and turbulent East River that separates New York from Brooklyn.
The foundations were to sink 70 feet below the river. The two mighty towers would dwarf much of New York. At the time such a bold design seemed almost miraculous, and all to be built out of a new material - steel.
Yet Roebling's ambitious dream was to cost him his life, and unknowingly he also condemned his son, Washington, to a shadow life. Determined to continue with his father's vision, Washington Roebling and his team laboured deep beneath the East River, but this led them to develop a mysterious new disease, Caisson disease - nowadays known as 'the bends'.
Washington was so badly affected, he could not continue with his work. Suffering great pain and paralysis, could only watch through a telescope from his window, when the great network of cables was eventually spun across the great East River.
With the growth in travel and trade, by the late 19th century shipping had become big business. Having completed the building of the Suez Canal in 1869, a Frenchman, Vicomte Ferdinand de Lesseps, dreamed of an even bolder scheme: the Panama Canal.
Lesseps decided he would cut a path across the isthmus of Panama,and thus unite the great oceans of the Atlantic and Pacific. He knew that the long journey around South America's Cape Horn would then become unnecessary for ships carrying cargo across the world, and the world itself would seem a smaller place.
Once out in the tropical heat of Panama, however, the French found themselves facing impenetrable jungle, dangerous mudslides and deathly tropical diseases, as the project proved to be an undertaking of nightmare proportions. The extravagant dream eventually came true, but in the process it stole over 25,000 lives, and 25 years had to elapse before the oceans were finally united.
In the early 1900s, however, engineers began to realise that even here it would be possible to make the desert bloom, by building a dam across the Colorado River. Some 60 storeys high, and of a larger volume than the Great Pyramid at Giza, the Hoover Dam was soon to break all records.
At the height of the depression of the 1930s, poverty-stricken workers on the dam, earning just a few dollars a day, died from horrific explosions, carbon monoxide poisoning and heat exhaustion as it slowly came to fruition. The chief engineer, Frank Crowe, did nevertheless get it built ahead of schedule and under budget - notching up one more extraordinary piece of evidence for the ingenuity and tenacity of man.
Robert Stevenson had given his labourers 1 a week to work a twelve-hour day, seven days a week, wet or dry - but by the time the Hoover Dam was lighting up the western deserts of America, this amount had been turned into a wage that a working man, increasingly backed by unions, could live on more comfortably.
In one sense these stories present a romantic view of man - as an individual who struggles to realise his dream and make a mark on the world. As the 19th century progressed these men of genius took the stage in quick succession, each engrossed in his own creation to the exclusion of all else.
Each in turn gave so much of himself, often to the detriment of relationships, sleep, basic human comforts - some even gave their lives in the pursuance of their dream. And the legacy of their great ambition and talent remains to this day.
With the exception of Brunel's 'Great Ship', all the wonders described here have survived to this day, and are now celebrated as powerful symbols of the modern world. The wealth of inspiration and energy of the 19th century was the catalyst for the huge progress that marked the 20th century, as the industrial giants of the future stood on the shoulders of an earlier generation.
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