10 World Engineering Marvels | Info Bites

10 World Engineering Marvels
The pyramids of Egypt and the Great Wall of China have been built by humans for millennia. Recently, ambitious engineers have attempted large transit and communications projects that challenge human creativity. These 10 engineering wonders transformed the world.
1. Panama Canal
The 1914 opening of the 51-mile Panama Canal changed global commerce routes. In 1904, the US resumed building after the French failed in 1880. Chief engineer John Stevens changed the project from a sea-level canal to one that required locks and damming the Chagres River to create the world's largest man-made lake. According to the Panama Canal Museum, workers displaced enough earth and rubble to bury Manhattan 12 feet as they cut the canal through jungles and mountains, fighting landslides and tropical maladies like malaria and yellow fever.
2. Golden Gate Bridge
The 1.7-mile Golden Gate Bridge spans the almost 400-foot-deep strait between San Francisco Bay and the Pacific Ocean. To withstand the strait's severe winds, the bridge can shift almost two feet laterally. Only 11 workers—10 in one accident—died on the dangerous project under chief engineer Joseph Strauss. The San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge, which opened six months earlier, killed 28 workers. An ingenious safety net under the bridge deck saved 19 workers.
3. Interstate Highway System
President Dwight D. Eisenhower championed the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956, which authorised the world's largest public works project. In event of a Cold War atomic assault, 41,000 miles of motorways with regulated ramp-based access and no at-grade junctions, simply overpasses and underpasses, were built to strengthen national defence and speed city evacuations. In 1990, the Eisenhower Interstate Highway System spurred suburbia and destroyed urban neighbourhoods, transforming the American economy and lifestyle..
4. Transatlantic Cable
In 1854, American merchant Cyrus West Field secured a charter to lay a telegraph cable across the Atlantic Ocean’s floor. After four failed attempts, American and British naval ships succeeded in laying a nearly 2,000-mile cable linking Ireland and Newfoundland in the summer of 1858. Queen Victoria’s 98-word inaugural message to President James Buchanan took 16 hours to transmit. Not quick, but speedier than packet steamships’ 10-day transatlantic transits. The communications link, though, ceased working after only a few weeks.
5. Hoover Dam
Built by an army of more than 21,000 workers, the 60-story-tall Hoover Dam was the world’s largest concrete structure and highest dam at the time it was dedicated in 1935. The project, which required the Colorado River’s diversion through four excavated tunnels, finished two years ahead of schedule. The arch-gravity dam on the Arizona-Nevada border controls the flow of the Colorado River, stores enough water to irrigate 2 million acres and powers more than 1 million homes with hydroelectricity.
6. Channel Tunnel
Opened in 1994 after six years of construction, the Channel Tunnel connected Great Britain to the European continent for the first time since the Ice Age. Known as the “Chunnel,” it includes three concrete tubes that were constructed by 1,100-ton tunnel boring machines.
7. Transcontinental Railroad
As the Civil War raged in the East, work began in the West to build a railroad that would link the United States from coast to coast. Authorized by the 1862 Pacific Railroad Act, the Central Pacific Railroad Company laid tracks eastward from Sacramento, California, while the Union Pacific Railroad Company moved west from Omaha, Nebraska.
8. Statue of Liberty
A symbol of friendship between France and the United States, the 151-foot-tall Statue of Liberty was dedicated in 1886. In Paris, French sculptor Frederic-Auguste Bartholdi fashioned large copper sheets to create the statue’s skin, which was packed in more than 200 crates and shipped to New York City.
9. Netherlands North Sea Protection Works
With parts of the country lying below sea level, the Netherlands constructed a system of floodgates, storm surge barriers and dams to prevent flooding and claim vast swathes of land from the Zuiderzee, a shallow North Sea inlet.
10. New York and Boston Subways
Civic officials wanted a speedier, cleaner alternative to horse-drawn carriages and elevated trains that polluted New York City and Boston. They tried underground rail travel, which many Americans considered unsafe and unworkable. Boston opened the first American underground in 1897.
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