Modern Wonders of the World

we live on a beautiful planet today our natural landscapes also boast man-made wonders icons of engineering and architecture so what are the world's modern wonders [Music] we've compiled our top seven from the tallest building on earth to the longest underwater tunnel from Aviation's greatest airliner to Engineering's greatest work of art these are our modern wonders [Music] [Applause] [Music] the great engineering achievements of the modern world are more than purely functional the visionaries who dreamed up their imposing shapes fused art and science to create structures of dramatic beauty our bridges dams and skyscrapers dominate our landscapes as the pyramids dominated those of ancient Egypt they are Testaments to the creative genius of humankind in the next two hours we tunnel under climb up jump off and fly with the greatest marvels the modern world has to offer Brooklyn Bridge is a modern masterpiece from a bygone age a symbol of humanity's ability to conquer nature it was the moonshot of its day when it was built it was over twice as long as any suspension bridge on earth it's towers one sword above the Manhattan skyline [Music] it was the first landmark of the vertical city [Music] yet a mysterious disease struck its workforce during construction and paralyzed its chief engineer [Music] the Brooklyn Bridge spans New York's East River connecting Manhattan and Brooklyn [Music] the Brooklyn Bridge is an immense and complex structure when it was completed in 1883 it was an engineering work of unparalleled genius they'll built in the age of the horse-and-cart it's so strong that it now carries up to one hundred and fifty thousand cars a day keeping this old workhorse in top condition is the job of the East River iron workers [Music] I love working on a Brooklyn Bridge because it is the most famous bridge in the world if you see it in movies to see it in commercials it's everywhere once you come up here becomes part of you it's like every time you've seen it's like that's my bridge my favorite bridge is the Brooklyn Bridge because it's a work of art there's no other bridge like this in the world [Music] it cost three million dollars a year to keep the bridge operational [Music] today the task is to reseal the joints on the cables no way I could ever sit behind a desk drive a bus to campus is the best job in the world you have total freedom here you're out in the open beautiful [Music] I feel special kinship for this bridge because my great-grandfather that had worked on it as a Nile Walker what it was being felt of a fourth generation Iowa Canal when construction began four generations ago in 1870 many thought the bridge would never be completed over a mile and a quarter long in total the main span measures 1600 feet the gothic tower stand 272 feet above the river they hold the main cables which in turn support the roadway [Music] just one of these cables contains more than 3,500 miles of wire enough to stretch from New York to London England the roadway hangs from the main cables via hundreds of vertical suspenders and diagonal stays which together create a web of wire the bridge was designed to be robust enough to cope not just with the traffic of the time but the traffic of the future cable suspenders and stays must be routinely checked and lubricated and as long as they are iron workers like Dave Collins have no doubt the bridge has a long life ahead of it I have no doubt that this bridge would probably make five hundred years I guess it carrying about 20 times what it was designed for so basically what we're gonna do today is just inspect the clamps look for loose ones and for some erosion of some nature [Music] danny's look pretty good these are not bad at all they're pretty tight doesn't look like there's any erosion [Music] I'm very comfortable here basically it's like a second nature built into me where I'm comfortable climbing around [Music] that'll be it for today I guess [Music] today 10 bridges cross the East River but Manhattan and Brooklyn used to be separate cities divided by the water barbara Milstein is a historian of the Brooklyn Bridge at Brooklyn Museum of Art there was no way to get off the island except literally by boat or swim across which people did do occasionally until the brilliant John Roebling burst onto the scene with plans for a suspension bridge twice as long as any other in the world tragically in 1869 he was killed while surveying the proposed site his son Washington took over the project the key elements of the bridge are its gothic towers which stand on the bed of the river each tower was built on top of a giant watertight box called a caisson made out of wood Brooklyn caisson weighed 3,000 tons and was the size of half a city block the first courses of stone for the towers were laid on top of the caissons gradually depressing them to the riverbed as Washington roebling's drawings show compressed air was pumped into the caissons men entered via an airlock and dug the riverbed by hand as the digging went on below the towers were simultaneously constructed above forcing the caissons ever deeper the men who went down into this case on under the river they really didn't know what they were getting into they were certainly not men who had done this work before and you can imagine what the sounds were like it was it was alternately hideously hot and freezing cold the smell was unbearable the work was hideously hard to do several men died from a mysterious illness known as caissons disease in fact they were victims of what scuba divers now know to be the bends the trips in and out of the pressurized caissons caused nitrogen bubbles to form in their veins damaging their nervous systems Washington Roebling himself was disabled by the bends and he had to direct operations from his bedroom overlooking the construction site it took over a year to complete the foundations the men left the caissons for the last time and they were filled with concrete it took almost 14 years to complete the bridge nearly three times longer than scheduled it also caused 27 men their lives it's difficult today to imagine the excitement generated by the opening of the Brooklyn Bridge in 1883 [Music] for the first time people in commerce could move quickly and easily between Manhattan and Brooklyn [Music] the two separate cities began to merge into one big Apple after the building of the Brooklyn Bridge New York began to grow by leaps and bounds by SuperSpeed it was incredible the development of the of the city and thus New York became one of the great cities of the world taxi driver Peter Franklin is known as the gabbie cabbie he's an honors graduate from the streets of New York there is no question that the Brooklyn Bridge is the single most representative item of the city of New York I guess in a way the Statue of Liberty yeah that's the whole country the Empire State Building no that's the whole state but Brooklyn Bridge really is New York Brooklyn Bridge not only links Manhattan with Brooklyn it also spans separate epochs in American history when they started it it was the Old West Cowboys and Indians wagon trains and all that by the time they finished the bridge we were now hurtling towards America being the principal power in the world so in a way it was the transitional thing it were almost like a time machine it took us from the past and brought us into the modern world [Music] when the Brooklyn Bridge was first completed there were a lot of people who are afraid to walk across it they were afraid to walk of course because they had never seen anything of this magnitude and they thought to themselves gee is this thing going to stay up a night despite the fears over 150,000 people turned up to walk across the bridge on the day it opened as a matter of fact on the first day I understand they charged one cent for people to walk across on the second day realizing they had a good thing going they charged three cents and if that doesn't sum up businessmen of New York I don't know what does the pedestrian boardwalk is the heart and soul of the bridge a place to exercise socialize and enjoy the view it's as much a park as a bridge and it even has its own police patrols just in case the bridge I think it brings a lot to the city nights utilize the bridge on a daily basis along with tourists from from the United States and from all over the world this is the 84th precinct favorite beat I'd like to talk to people they like talking to tourists it's a lot of fun to be involved the whole bridge journey of day to day activity the bridge generates a sense of well-being it's just a beautiful spot one of the best spots in the city to be at never look a beautiful once upon a time the Brooklyn Bridge was notorious as a suicide spot today the bridge is one of New York's most romantic places as a matter of fact many newlyweds have their wedding photos taken here [Music] John Roebling never lived to see the bridge he designed but his vision ensured that it has flourished for well over 100 years Brooklyn Bridge remains one of the main arteries of New York the world's greatest city that it still thrives in the 21st century is the ultimate accolade to those who designed it and built it coming up hair-raising stunts atop the world's tallest building [Music] ever since human beings began to build they have tried to reach the heavens [Music] the Petronas Towers in Malaysia are so high they almost seem to make it [Music] this is the tallest structure mankind has ever built eighty-eight stories of Steel blasts in concrete tower 1,500 feet above street level [Music] and this is what it feels like to jump off it [Music] [Music] the petronas towers are located in the Malaysian capital Kuala Lumpur [Music] [Music] the petronas towers are the headquarters of Malaysia's national oil company each tower can house 5,000 employees the towers are cloaked in 170,000 square yards of stainless steel and tinted glass when the Sun shines they sparkle like tropical diamonds they fill with light like cathedrals of old there is a six-story shopping center and even an opera house [Music] a skybridge creates a passage between the towers at mid height the result is a building that is as unique to kuala lumper as the Eiffel Tower is to Paris keeping this Asian jewel shining is an endless task for a small army of cleaners from the very bottom all the way to the top the Petronas Towers have 32,000 windows and each one is cleaned by hand [Music] window cleaner Mohammad Jamil discovered on his first day that this job requires a strong head for Heights last time I ate scared really I scared because this one is the first experience for me and this work I cannot never do before [Music] even the wet sponges must be tied on from this height one would hit the sidewalk with the force of a falling brick [Music] for us now this work is very easy for us I never talking about the new guys I don't know about that so approximately we finish one tower within four months or five plants just in time to start all over again this is one window cleaning job that's never done [Music] beyond a certain point the higher a building is the less cost effective it becomes as the Petronas Towers structural engineer points out building the world's tallest involves ego as well as economics there is a certain element of status symbol in it when you do a purely rational economic study you find that the sort of ideal point at which it doesn't make sense to build much higher is in the range of perhaps 50 60 maybe 70 stories so if you're going above that you're kind of making a conscious decision to do something more the statements that the Petronas Towers are making is that Malaysia has arrived [Music] in the twentieth century America was the home of the skyscraper but in the 1990s the race for the skies shifted eastwards to the fast-growing economies of Asia the petronas towers would proclaim that America no longer went unchallenged our leader Arif has been a key figure in the project since day one and we started we didn't know we were going to build a very tall building I'm certainly not the tallest building in the world our intention was basically to build a beautiful building when they would put nature really in the world map and one that symbolizes what we think we are able to achieve but the winning design featured towers that would be just 50 tantalizing feet shorter than the Sears Tower in Chicago the world's tallest building at the time [Music] according to a reef critical changes in height were then made for purely aesthetic reasons the buildings had a shorter pinnacle when it was first designed it was suggested that perhaps by increasing the length or in pinnacle the building would look more in proportion and we tested out a few options and the one that was selected just touched the tip at 442 meters which just made a slightly taller than the Sears Tower in Chicago so it was it was a pleasant surprise surprise are not the new pinnacles would beat the Sears Tower by 33 feet and make the Petronas Towers the world's tallest building the taller a building the bigger the problem of wind sway the petronas towers can sway by up to two feet in high winds this wouldn't be a problem except for the sky bridge structural engineers realize that if the bridge was fixed rigidly into position a tropical storm could bring it crashing down the method of supporting the sky bridge was a pretty critical question you realized that if a gust of wind would hit one tower first half of that wind force would have tried to travel through the bridge and could have crushed it to get around the problem they designed a bridge that floats in and out of the moving towers on gigantic bearings an arch support completes the system arch means that the midpoint of the bridge is equidistant between the two towers the towers can do their dancing during the wind and one that when they've done their dancing and they've stopped the bridge will be equidistant between the towers again high above the sky bridge on the 88th floor these men are in training they are joining the elite group who clean the pinnacle of the building its spires these students are used to working from a window cleaning gondola but that's child's play compared to where they're going to clean the spires they must become experts in rappel also known as abseiling they think they've got a strong head for Heights they're about to find out we trained them from the ball ring downwards first there is to give them the experience not to do the cleaning but just to get them acclimatized with the situation to have the feeling of what it is like to go out of the tower [Music] trained them in a few phases the first phase it's basic absalom and then knowing the rope works and then we also train this boys to do changing from one group to another was in air [Music] we'd prepare this boys mentally and spiritually to do battle on top of the spire a student must undergo intensive training before his skill and nerve are ready for the spire [Music] the petronas towers are like a vertical city and getting thousands of inhabitants up and down the 88th floor safely and quickly was another challenge the design of elevators on a high-rise building or a skyscraper is a real challenge because you've a lot of people moving tens of thousands of people moving up and down they all want to get to work around the same time go to lunch the same time leave the same time so you can end up with a huge backup people have a limited tolerance for waiting 30 40 50 seconds begin to seem like a very long time office worker Roz's I emotion waits in the lobby for the first elevator of her journey to the 83rd floor top executives however don't have to wait at all they have the option of leasing an elevator for personal use I'm almost there can you bring the lift down to the lobby please as he enters the building his private elevator is already waiting to take him to the 86th floor Roz's is only just arriving [Music] on the Left Roz's elevator ascends at 19 feet per second on the right the executive climbs much faster so fast that he must equalize the pressure in his ears Roz's ride only goes as far as the sky lobby halfway up the towers while the executive continues on his way she must take an escalator up one floor to catch her next ride a local cab that will take her on to the top half of the tower meanwhile the executives private elevator has whisked him nonstop to the 86th floor he's already at his desk working while Roz is still on the move by the time she reaches her destination deals may have already been cut three floors above nonetheless the elevator system has got our 1180 feet up in less than two minutes up next a death-defying climb to the top of the spires these men are preparing to climb the spire of the world's tallest building Malaysia's petronas towers it's scary but I don't have time to think I just concentrate to my work properly everything is go OK and clear Ishmael is wearing a video camera strapped to his helmet to Chronicle the climb if he makes it no camera will have been higher on any structure on earth [Music] I must prepare properly the rope on the right position ishmael climbs the spire first to fix the rappel ropes he makes a mistake his student will fall it's 150 feet to the top and 1350 to the streets below [Music] the wind can gust add up to 70 miles per hour at this height the spire can sway by several feet [Music] Ishmael reaches the summit his helmet camera gives an idea of the dizzying height [Music] with the rope fixed the trainee begins his ascent [Music] Ishmael helps him to transfer to the rappel rope [Music] this job is so dangerous that the spires are cleaned only once a year [Music] [Music] on December 31st 2000 the petronas towers became the platform for the greatest official base jump of all time [Music] fifteen Daredevils from around the world left into a new millennium and straight into the record books [Applause] in the age of the skyscraper no building holds the title of world's tallest for long one day the petronas towers will be surpassed just like the Sears Tower in the Empire State before them but for now they remain King of the skies [Music] Concorde is the greatest civilian aircraft ever built in the aviation Hall of Fame Concorde stands second only to the Wright brothers made in flight even before she leaves the ground she goes like a bat out of hell [Music] she cruises at twice the speed of sound faster than the Earth rotates take off from London in the evening and you can watch the Sun rise in the West [Music] Concord has been flying for over 30 years but she's so far ahead of the pack she's out of sight [Music] Concord is an anglo-french invention she was conceived developed and perfected in Toulouse France and Filton England [Music] Tuesday June 4th 2002 fifty years ago today elizabeth ii was crowned queen of england [Music] [Applause] the crowning moment of this Golden Jubilee will be provided by another Queen Concord sovereign of the skies at London's Heathrow Airport captain Mike Bannister is going through his pre-flight checks Mike is the senior concorde pilot in british airways there are 12 pilots in the team but his number one he's first choice to fly today's mission I'm very honored to be involved in the Jubilee fly pass later on today it's a great thrill we've been preparing for it for over four months and very soon we'll be setting off to join up with the world's leading aerobatic team the red arrows at the time of the Queen's Silver Jubilee in 1977 Concorde had already been in service for one year [Applause] remarkably a quarter of a century later she is still the world's only supersonic airliner we'll join up with the red arrows over the North Sea then with the rest of the formation routine over London towards Her Majesty it's going to be a great moment Concorde is a fantastic airplane to fly she handles so beautifully she's so responsive that she's the perfect airplane to fly in formation [Music] I'm saying all of the mail and the whole of the front of Buckingham Palace truly millions of people they're waving [Applause] [Music] [Applause] when she made her maiden test flight from Toulouse France in March 1969 Concorde was decades ahead of her time [Music] the transistor radio is still considered a neat new idea home computers and even digital watches were still a dream yet here was an aircraft which aimed to carry 100 passengers at twice the speed of sound [Music] Concord first smashed through the sound barrier in a test flight on the 1st of October 1969 as she punched through the air at Mach 1 the sonic boom could be heard 20 miles away it had cost over 3 billion dollars to get Concord airborne and supersonic [Music] the four engines each provide 38,000 pounds of thrust the equivalent of six thousand family cars Concord is the only civilian aircraft that has afterburners when lit they give 20% extra thrust [Music] the air-intake slow the speed at which the air hits the engines from 1,500 miles per hour to just 500 within their 11 foot length the Gothic wing is sculpted from aluminum there are no joints or welds the DeltaWing allows Concorde to takeoff and land at low speed it still flies supersonic the trademark nose can drop by 12 and a half degrees Concorde has a high angle of attack on takeoff and landing if the nose were fixed the pilots would not be able to see the runway beyond after the break land before you leave on Concorde the supersonic time machine on the 25th of July 2000 Concorde crashed just after takeoff from Paris Airport both French and British Concorde fleets were grounded the disaster marred a previously unmatched safety record a tire had punctured on takeoff sending shrapnel into the fuel tanks encased in the wings amongst other measures Kevlar linings were fitted to the fuel tanks to prevent recurrence and within 15 months the revamped Concorde was back in business Concorde now flies three times a day from London and Paris to New York she makes the 3400 mile flight in less than half the time of a jumbo jet she does it thanks to a series of engineering miracles the pilot lights the afterburners for takeoff [Music] the nose is raised and the afterburners are switched off Concorde won't go supersonic until she reaches the atlantic 150 miles to the west [Music] we're estimating arrival in New York just over three hours now touching down around over the Atlantic the pilot can really open her up the afterburners are real it and Concorde slips effortlessly through the sound barrier you would just go gently through the speed of sound and you'd know you're through the speed of sound because it's the shock where it start to form all the pressure instruments give a slight kick and you know you are truly supersonic [Music] this plane is built for speed and the faster she goes the better she performs [Music] at Mach 1.7 the afterburners are switched off again and she accelerates to twice the speed of sound unaided she's almost sixty thousand feet above the earth on the edges of space and flying as fast as a speeding bullet [Music] having beaten the sound barrier Concorde must now beat the thermal barrier at Mach two air friction heats her skin to 260 degrees Fahrenheit well above the boiling point of water Conchords engines power the air conditioning system without it the passengers would cook as the plane heats up she actually lengthens by up to a foot fortunately the designers thought of that and throughout the airplane there are areas where the aircraft stretches only one of those is noticeable and that's on the flight deck there's a section between the flight engineers panel and the piece behind where you can't get a sheet of paper on the ground but in the air it opens up and you can get your whole hand in there there's an apocryphal story about one of the early pilots putting his hat in that gap in supersonic flight when he came down and landed he couldn't get it out at this speed in height jet fighter pilots must wear pressure suits in oxygen masks yet Conchords passengers and crew need no special apparatus it is the ordinariness of the ride that makes her so special if you think about it you're flying at twice the speed of sound on the edges of space and the passengers are sitting there in total comfort in their shirtsleeves drinking champagne and eating caviar in a completely normal environment and that is one fantastic achievement in 1996 Concord made the transatlantic flight in record time two hours 52 minutes and 59 seconds that's an average ground speed of over 1,200 miles an hour for the entire flight New York is five hours behind London time and as the flight takes less than three and a half hours Concorde lands before it leaves Concorde is a time machine she's a great airplane to fly from a pilot's perspective and a fantastic airplane from a customer's point of view a nothing else offers you the opportunity to buy back time to travel faster than the Earth rotates to literally arrive before you leave 30 miles out from New York the pilot lowers the nosecone ready for landing [Music] when one looks at Concord from a distance it seems to be much more pitched up than 11 degrees but that's all it is and then of course you touch down gently on the runway reverse thrust another roar from the engines and you come to a stop [Music] Concorde maybe over 30 but she's still turning heads [Music] Concord is a piece of twentieth-century sculpture it's a fusion of art and technology and it looks so beautiful it looks so right it just captures people's imaginations [Music] she's likely to be over 50 years old before another supersonic airliner comes along perhaps it's a case of being unable to improve on perfection coming up we brave the heights of the eiffel tower with its daredevil workforce the eiffel tower is Europe's most recognizable landmark this metal obelisk is a shrine to the engineering brilliance of the 19th century [Music] it attracts more paying customers than any other monuments on the planet when built it was twice as high as any structure on earth [Music] it remained the world's tallest building for 40 years [Music] incredibly the tower was erected as a temporary structure and was nearly demolished almost a century ago the Eiffel Tower is situated in the heart of the French capital Paris the Eiffel Tower has graced the Parisian skyline since 1889 the centennial of the French Revolution that year also saw Paris host the world fair an international celebration of science and technology [Music] the French government wanted an engineering masterpiece to honor the events and it got one the Eiffel Tower was a futuristic building decades ahead of its time [Music] [Applause] [Music] these men are sky painters since its construction the eiffel tower has been given a fresh coat of paint every seven years now the 18th painting campaign is underway [Music] the crew is working just below the third floor almost 1,000 feet above the ground [Music] the tower consists of 240,000 square yards of metal and every inch must be covered the crew will get through 60 tons of paint and use 1500 overalls and brushes [Music] over the years this iron lady has worn different colored coats when she was first built she wore venice red all together she has been six different colors since 1968 she has been Eiffel bronze the tower was the brainchild of Gustave Eiffel a visionary engineer who specialized in building iron railway bridges is 5000 blueprints for the towers assembly were hand-drawn and incredibly detailed construction began in 1887 the tower would be made from over 18,000 metal parts held together by two and a half million rivets it took just one hundred iron workers to assemble the tower to the Parisians watching from the streets below they were virtually invisible seen from the ground when you see about 80 people spread on that surface at 50 meters it looks like ants you don't see anymore so people had the impression the whole thing was doing not by itself the ingenuity of design and assembly meant the whole structure was completed in just two years two months in five days and without a single fatality [Music] the tower is shaped by aerodynamics it is literally sculpted by the wind every curve every strut was designed to minimize the amount of wind resistance the spaces between the iron were as important as the iron itself the metal structure weighs only seven thousand three hundred tonnes yet it barely moves even in the strongest winds place the tower in a cylinder and the air inside it would weigh more than the tower itself the physical beauty of this spiderweb in the sky saved it from an early demise the Eiffel Tower was only meant to stand for 20 years but it became a permanent feature on the Paris skyline next up how Gustave Eiffel made a king's ransom [Music] Gustave Eiffel stood to make a fortune from the newly built Eiffel Tower if he could entice enough paying customers few would be prepared to climb the 1665 steps to the top so he installed hydraulic elevators to carry them in 1889 elevators were a new technology a public flocked to the tower for one of the most thrilling rides on the planet two million paid to make the ascent in 1889 alone Gustave Eiffel wiped out his dead within two years of the tower opening to be in the center of Paris at 300 meters and to look down to the city would have been a spectacular thing you could almost boast about it they've done that you know that it was a sort of personal achievement it remains a thrill more than a century later Eiffel Tower still soars above the low-rise City giving a spectacular views more than six million ascend the tower each year and the figure is rising all the more incredible then that the hydraulic elevators from the 19th century are still operating they are maintained by a team of dedicated engineers these lifts are probably the last example of the 19th century technology still working still used and we do intend to keep them alive this cylinder weighs over 200 tons as the cylinder drops it pushes this piston the piston pushes this trolley which in turn pulls these cables which lift and lower the elevator cabins [Music] today's system represents a fusion of old and new computers control the speed of the elevators and perform thousands of safety checks every second [Music] and yet the pistons are still lubricated as they always were with goose fat [Music] how many Parisians does it take to change a light bulb the answer is two but they must have a head for Heights this is the perfect lighting rig floodlights illuminate the tower from the inside to create the impression of liquid gold [Music] Eiffel Tower was a pioneering work of genius wrap his skin around her iron frame and you have the essence of the modern skyscraper [Music] she has stood guard over Paris for more than 100 years yet she remains a modern icon an anthem to the world of iron and technology [Music] next up we pay homage to an American icon Hoover Dam Hoover Dam an American pyramid a concrete giant in an unforgiving desert many said it couldn't be done many died in its construction Huber's not just any damn it was the first of its kind size magnitude its completion was a victory of human courage in the face of adversity it tamed the mighty Colorado River made the Desert Bloom and changed the Southwest of America forever it's just a fennel it's watching work around the power of water [Music] hoover dam straddles the state line between Nevada and Arizona in the American Southwest [Music] [Applause] [Music] Hoover Dam is a vast concrete wall that holds back the Colorado River and forms Lake Mead only 45 feet thick at the top at its base it's almost as thick as it is tall it stands 726 feet high and contains almost 7 million tons of concrete pad pattern Astro inspects the labyrinth of tunnels and conduits inside the dam wall it's quite a bit of concrete they've said you could pave a highway from San Francisco to New York with the amount of concrete is placed here in its day Hoover was the biggest dam ever built it remains the largest concrete dam in the Western Hemisphere but it is more than just a wall it's a work of art ordinary concrete surfaces are transformed by Art Deco designs there are intake towers standing 400 feet above the lake bed Italian craftsmen applied the finishing touches to give the dam its outstanding beauty [Music] over 38 million visitors have come here to admire its grandeur they soon learn that without Hoover Dam the Southwest would be a very different place before Hoover Dam Las Vegas was an unknown railroad stop in the middle of the desert the dam brought water and electricity fame and fortune to Nevada Vegas has never looked back in LA to the population relies on Hoover for much of its power in water the dam generates four billion kilowatt hours of hydroelectricity every year Hoover's power plan contains 15 130 megawatt generators just one could supply a city of 400,000 inhabitants with all their power needs but hydroelectric power is just a commercially useful by-product Hoover dams real job was to control the Colorado River [Music] the Colorado ran wild for countless eons as it carved the Grand Canyon in its race Southwest to the Gulf of California America's most dangerous river seemed untamable [Music] annual spring floods caused misery and ruin for farmers in Southern California [Music] when the river dried to a trickle in the hot summers crops withered and cattle died Hoover Dam was conceived to control floods and store water for irrigation work began in 1931 during the Great Depression for unemployed young men like lead tilman news of the hoover dam project was electrifying i read in the newspaper and heard on the radio that they were gonna build a big dam down on the colorado river and that the government was going to spend a hundred and sixty-five million dollars that was a lot of money in those days and it had a promise of an opportunity for a young man i was 18 years old along with thousands of others lee headed for las vegas he was one of the lucky ones and quickly got a job as a truck driver i got $5.00 a day driving truck down there I could go into a grocery store and feed my family for a week on $5 so you know there's a big difference between you might say nothing and five dollars a day [Music] the deadliest job belonged to the high scalers men who swung from ropes a thousand feet above the ground to blast and scrape the canyon walls in preparation for the dams concrete it was said that only the most desperate became high scalars if you weren't starving you didn't need this job badly enough it was two years into the project before the first concrete could be poured the damn wall was raised in interlocking blocks a mountain of concrete was delivered in buckets eight cubic yards at a time the concrete was poured 24 hours a day seven days a week 52 weeks a year [Music] working conditions were extreme 1931 was the hottest year on record temperatures soared above 140 degrees Fahrenheit none of us were used to this heat that came from someplace oh there's no place like the heat was here then the canyon was an oven by August 1931 fourteen men had already died of heat exhaustion the conditions were so harsh that had firstly barely registered the magnitude of the project after it began to come up a little ways one I remember thinking one time my gosh odd I'm a part of something that's just tremendous and from then on every time I'd come down I'd see that dam seemed like it grew a little bit every every time we come down and it was it was amazing and and then I really began to feel I was a part of something very important for two solid years that concrete continued to pour then on the 29th of May 1935 the job was done two years ahead of schedule and under budget an army of the unemployed had written itself into the history books [Music] it took over six years for Lake Mead to fill up behind Hoover's gigantic wall so about two hundred feet from this wall here you have the force of Lake Mead angling downward it's about forty five thousand pounds per square foot the facts today we're going to Mexico Hoover Dam and Lake Mead transformed the Southwest almost overnight they stopped the vicious cycle of flood and drought replacing it with a constant flow of water Southern California became America's salad bowl Hoover Dam is no longer the largest dam in the world but it is still the greatest [Music] it's both a masterpiece of engineering and an architectural classic [Music] 96 men died during its construction not including those who perished from heat exhaustion but the rest of the 5000 overcame the heat the danger and the depression to produce a monument to the sheer will of humanity their achievement is second to none after the break take a ride along the Panama Canal and through its deadly hells Gorge [Music] this is the world's greatest man-made waterway as early as the 16th century people dreamed of a canal which could link the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans [Music] it took over 150 thousand workers 20 years of toil to dig the 50-mile passage on average 600 workers died for each mile of canal hewn from the tropical jungle [Music] since it was completed in 1913 almost a million ships have passed through the Panama Canal before the canal it took six weeks to sail from New York to San Francisco via the treacherous seas around Cape Horn now it can be done in just three weeks the Panama Canal crosses the narrowest part of the Central American isthmus [Music] Panama has a mountainous interior so the canal is not a simple trench between oceans rather it is a lock and lake system that carries ships up and over the high ground [Music] the Panama Canal is an ingenious water elevator it lifts ships 85 feet from sea level via a series of locks and then lowers them back down again on the other side the Eleonora is designed to squeeze through the locks and cuts of the canal she's about the size of the Titanic tugboats buzz around her as she approaches the miraflores lock at the pacific end of the canal steering a 27,000 ton ship into a narrow lock is like trying to park a juggernaut on a sheet of ice by law only specially trained pilots can take ships through the canal system stop engines Oscar Soto has been a Panama Canal pilot for ten years no bussing three to seven sir for Queen the Eleanor is captain must surrender his authority to Oscar while the ship is in the canal is the only place in the world so far as I know that the pilot takes full control of the navigation of the ship with millions of dollars as well as human lives resting on his shoulders it's not a job for the faint-hearted Thank You Oscar feels the shifting currents beneath his feet and watches for trouble like a hawk [ __ ] we can lose the engine we can the brother there could be a failure in the logs so we have to be ready for everything that lie ahead a pilot must always think two steps ahead the Eleonora only has inches of room on either side the gates shut and the water level rises until it equalizes with the chamber ahead the gates open and the ship moves on [Music] the miraflores locks raise the Eleonora 54 feet above sea level [Music] she sails on towards the cue Libra cut a nine-mile gorged carved from the rock of the Continental Divide it was here that the first attempt to dig a canal in the 1870s failed the workforce nicknamed the cuts hells gorge French engineer Ferdinand de Lesseps had built a Suez Canal and thought he could do the same in Panama but after seven years of fighting malaria yellow fever and a brew climate the French had excavated only 1/10 of the canal more than 20,000 workers lost their lives de Lesseps abandoned the project bankrupt and insane 15 years later the US government thought it could succeed where the French had failed steam shovels enabled the Americans to excavate more in a day than the French had managed in a month temperatures in the Coulee birkut rose to 120 degrees Fahrenheit at noon with blasting and landslides this was the most hazardous area of construction it involves removing millions and millions of cubic yards of rock solid rock at one point there were 13,000 people working there it was 12 hour shifts very intensive scheduled day after day only Sundays off almost 100 years later blasting still goes on canal widening is part of the modernization program designed to increase the flow of traffic through the canal thirteen thousand ships a year negotiate its locks and waterways at an average toll of 56,000 dollars each after passing through the queue Libre cut ship sail on to Lake Gatun [Music] the 164 square miles of Lake Gatun were created to provide the water needed to work the locks the rainforest is responsible for Panama's high annual rainfall which keeps the lake topped up but the forest is under threat two-thirds of it has been chopped down this century the destruction continues the canal could be in danger within a decade on average 33 ships a day pass through the canals three sets of locks each one uses fifty-two million gallons of water a loss to Lake a ton of three billion gallons every day the equivalent of three thousand Olympic swimming pools when ships reached the end of Lake Gatun they are lowered down to sea level through the gatun locks these locks are a giant machine of concrete steel and water once through the gatun locks it's plain sailing out into the Atlantic the creation of a water passage across Panama was one of the great human achievements the realization of a 400 year old dream these 50 miles between the oceans are among the hardest ever won by human hands up next a battle through miles of rock beneath the sea to dig the channel tunnel the English Channel a stretch of sea that separates England and France for centuries people dreamed of digging a tunnel beneath it but all who tried failed in the 1980s the French and English joined forces to try again this time they did it 13,000 workers [Music] ten million tons of equipment 93 miles of rock this is the longest marine tunnel in the world many believe it's the world's greatest modern wonder the Channel Tunnel passes beneath the sea between Folkston England and cacao France [Music] before the tunnel opened there was only one way to get across the channel the journey from London to Paris took an entire day now with a Eurostar train it takes just three hours these are amongst the most sophisticated trains in the world their top speed is 186 miles per hour [Music] Eurostar really flies it gets you from the center of London to the center of Paris in less time than it takes by plane if you travel on the shuttle you can even drive from England to France without leaving dry land but before the tunnel opened this man crossed from England to France on foot the last time this happened was during the Ice Age [Music] to be the first man to cross the channel by foot for 15 or 17 thousand years it was absolutely brilliant and I'll do it tomorrow game on the day in question he was 150 feet below the seabed 13 miles from England French territory was just a yard away he was one of the army of tunnel tigers who were digging the Channel Tunnel Graham's counterpart on the French side was Philippe Cosette both sides had been digging towards each other for a total of 24 back-breaking miles now they were separated by a yard of rock at 11:13 a.m. on December the 1st 1990 England ceased to be an island we preached through we shook hand we exchanged greetings and we exchanged the flags when we actually broke through there was a wind howling through the hole and it actually took my helmet off the first land Lynx since the Ice Age was finally opened Bram had the honour of being the first to cross into France Filipa myself do realize that we were involved in the moment of history and we realized that it's only going to happen the once because even if you do another Channel Tunnel they're not going to break the record we've done it we've made history it took the tunnel Tigers three years to dig their way into French territory by train Grahams journey from coast to coast takes only 20 minutes [Music] strictly speaking there is not one channel tunnel but three two rail tunnels run either side of the smaller service tunnel in which Graham and Philippe made their historic breakthrough the tunnels were bored in 12 stages both the English and the French teams had to dig three tunnels underground from the coast to the inland terminals and three tunnels under the sea [Music] this is not Cape Canaveral but folks in England not the stages of a space rocket but sections of a tunnel-boring machine or TBM for short xi TBMs were used to dig the channel tunnel the largest weighed over 600 tons and measured almost 30 feet across the sharp end of a TBM is only the tip of the whole machine the main body stretches back 800 feet and is manned by a crew of 80 the gigantic rotating jaws got to work on the 15th of December 1987 its tungsten carbide teeth and blades began to tear their way through the rod the TBM is a self-sufficient tunneling machine that can dig up to 190 feet of tunnel a day and install concrete lining on the walls many of the workers were veteran tunnellers but no one has experience of anything so vast and complex there was a lot to learn when you start a project like the Channel Tunnel or anytime the learning curve is very very steep and you try and climb that steep learning curve as quickly as possible to get onto an easy drive up next disaster strikes as the SI pours in soon after work on the Channel Tunnel began the English team hit fractured Rock work almost ground to a halt as the sea came pouring in it hit morale very early on people weren't going as quickly as they wanted to go people thought like god how long is this going to carry on for and will it kill the program for a while it looked touch-and-go but the English struggled through three miles of leaking Rock and got back on track there were criticisms of the amounts of money that were paid to these men believe me these men earned every penny mile after mile they drove their mechanical moles onwards the high points came whenever one of the 12 sections of tunnel was completed [Music] [Applause] [Music] the climax came in the summer of 1991 when the rail tunnels finally met deep beneath the channel and fought their way through ten million cubic yards of rock they were two weeks ahead of schedule and right on target the biggest undersea drive in history was over [Applause] today the tunnel contains high-speed rail lines which carry more than 300 trains a day the shuttle locos are among the most powerful in the world they carry cars and trucks and the rolling stock are the largest on earth [Music] in 1996 the unthinkable happened [Music] on the 18th of November a shuttle carrying trucks from France to England caught fire all 34 people on board escaped into the service tunnel service tunnel vehicles rushed firemen towards the scene and the injured away [Music] the rail tunnel became a blast furnace reaching almost 2,000 degrees the Train wheels fused to the track the disaster cost Eurotunnel almost half a billion dollars but the safety systems worked the service tunnel remained clear of smoke and no one perished today the Channel Tunnel is the most heavily used railway system in the world in the first five years of operation trains carried 28 million passengers and 12 million tons of freight under the scene digging the Channel Tunnel was one of the greatest engineering challenges of the 20th century its success makes it a contender for the title of the greatest engineering achievement of all time these seven modern wonders each represent staggering victories of human beings over nature [Music] they are celebrations of our creativity monuments to our imagination [Music] you

Channel: Naked Science

Views: 3,426,705

Rating: 4.398139 out of 5

Keywords: modern, wonders, world, famous, top, best, documentary, brooklyn, bridge, petronas, twin, towers, concored, eiffel, tower, hoover, dam, panama, canal, channel, tunnel, man, made, eurostar, eurotunnel, lake, mead, historic, landmark, construction, beautiful, building, distinctive, postmodern, style, architecture, spires, tallest, biggest, longest, design, cultural, icon, monument, lock, history, planet, asian, skyscraper, underground, ship, greatest, suspension, urban, landscape, notorious, cathedral, skybridge, sculpture, grand, canyon

Id: CYUlzC8Znok

Length: 88min 35sec (5315 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 23 2014