Picture taken from: c’était au temps où bruxelles brusselait. More low-tech cars.
The End of the Line
June 2, 2009 by Filed Under: Fish
Wooden Bridges
June 2, 2009 by Filed Under: Bridges, Civil engineering, Construction, Random, Travel, Wood
This wooden bridge (length 32 metres, width 12 metres, height 16 metres) was inaugurated on April 15th in Sneek, the Netherlands. The “Krúsrak” is the first wooden bridge in the world that can support the heaviest load class of 60 tons. Its life expectancy is 80 years.
Thanks to a chemical treatment of the softwood, the bridge can withstand insects, fungi and the harsh weather conditions in the most northern province of the Netherlands (Friesland). Wooden bridges require much less energy to construct than steel or concrete bridges.
Only the road-surface of the “Krúsrak” is made of steel – originally it was planned to be of wood, too, but then it should have been 2 metres thick. More information here (in English) and here (in Dutch).
Related: Covered bridges – how to build and rebuild them. Also: wooden pipelines.
Waste Heat
May 31, 2009 by Filed Under: Energy
Homebrewed CPU
“Intel’s fabrication plants can churn out hundreds of thousands of processor chips a day. But what does it take to handcraft a single 8-bit CPU and a computer? Give or take 18 months, about $1,000 and 1,253 pieces of wire.”
Magic Motorways
In the “Highways and Horizons” pavilion at the 1939-40 World’s Fair in New York, General Motors presented Americans with “Futurama”, a vision of the city of 1960. Norman Bel Geddes designed an enormous scale model, showing a utopian city rebuilt for the motor age, completely separating cars and pedestrians. Five million people came to see the exhibit, waiting more than an hour for their turn to get a sixteen-minute glimpse at the motorways of the world of tomorrow. There
is a technicolor movie of the show online, as well as the accompanying book that Geddes wrote to explain his (and the motor industry’s) ideas (or propaganda): “Magic Motorways“.
Update: another movie here (via). Related: London traffic improvements (the Bressey Report, 1938).
