Subject: Ancient bridges
From: Adam Stinchcombe (Stinchca@acc.sunyacc.edu)
Date: Wed May 03 2000 - 13:25:59 EDT
At
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/lostempires/china/miracle2.html
I found :
Bamboo Bridges
Some of the earliest of
all suspension bridges
were ones constructed
with cables woven from
bamboo strips.
Throughout their long
history, the Chinese
have built suspension
bridges to span
fast-flowing rivers and
deep ravines, and the
Incas also designed
hanging bamboo bridges as marvelous as those of the
Chinese, Janssen notes.
In "China Bridge," a team of experts brought together by
NOVA constructed a suspension bridge using bamboo cables
to hang the draping structure. Cabled bamboo strips once
held up the great Anlan bridge on the Min River, which
historians consider one of the engineering marvels of the
ancient world. The bridge hung from bamboo cables from
roughly the third century until 1975, when steel cables replaced
the bamboo.
I suppose the ancient Chinese of the third century could have had a good
understanding of cosh(x), and other, transcendental solutions to differential
equations, but I have not heard tale of this yet.
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