Online shared intelligence

You can only love good design

I have no idea how it is that I never heard of the Falkirk Wheel… it looks to me like the sheer ingenuity, scale and novelty of this engineering beauty should by now have converted it into an icon of these, so highly mediated, times. I found about it in a total serendipitous manner, a snapshot of a Mac product in versiontracker…

I was immediately drawn to the design questions that the endeavor must have created… Just think about it, connecting two channels that run at 115 feet difference in height, how would you do it? What if somebody told you you can’t spend more than 1.5KW of electricity to operate it?

I can imagine that the first mental image somebody would have when thinking about the problem would be lifting and lowering boats in a mechanical way (image of the self, picking up a boat from a tub, moving it to another), but I can also imagine it being discarded immediately, just because of the magnitude of the issues facing the model (weight, passengers and content stability, energy, safety, and many more). Other “good enough” ways come to mind (why not do it as with the Panama or Suez Canals?), and yet that was the PREVIOUS solution, which for reasons I have not researched yet used to take one mile to do the trick but was destroyed in the 1930’s… I can only speculate of how many other ideas were proposed, each one with its doses of problems and achievements… And yet, each and all of those issues was resolved by the initial model without extraordinary contortions, through subsystems that “just make sense”, mostly a series of cogs and the breakthrough idea of lifting/lowering the water together with the boats, and therefore leveraging Archimedes displacement theorem to do it with very, very minimal energy. Check this film out:

The overall design is quite simple, very ingenious nonetheless:

Operational diagram

Neat, uh?

This entry was posted on Saturday, August 23rd, 2008 at 3:48 pm and is filed under design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.