OH PANAMA!
I have been interested in Leonardo Da Vinci for some time! In fact, I am probably going to devote a whole page just to how Da Vinci would have handled
Lego® elements! The reason why I mention him right now is the work he did in designing the Milan-Lake Como waterway ( for your info, Leonardo was one of the first folk to seriously study water and pioneered the way for fields like hydrostatics...you can read all about it in LEONARD THE SCIENTIST by Zammattio, Mariononi and Brizio )....I hadn't thought about canal locks since all the hub-bub about the Pananma Canal years ago.
The Pananma Canal...hmmm...out of Lego® elements? WHY NOT?
Armed with some excellent reading in Nigel Hawkes STRUCTURES and an article by Fred Allen in Invention & Technology, I talked about the challenge of the Panama Canal. You are all probably familiar with parts of the story...the French failures ( did you know the artist Gaugin briefly visited the Canal ? ), death from malaria, Teddy Roosevelt and the American politicking in Central America etc. What caught my attention were the engineering challenges...the repeated efforts to open the Culebra Cut where the earth kept ( and keeps ) sloughing into the canal...or that the canal is controlled by a mechanical computer built in 1910
( to insure the smooth and safe operation of the locks and the "mules" that pull ships through ) that has remained unchanged all this time.
To quote the article: "A study was undertaken in the 1980s to see if the old GE conrol system should be replaced; it found that exchanging it throughout the canal for the latest electronics would cost $600 million and improve nothing."
Fred continues:
"The gates are hollow double doorsof steel mitered so that they meet in a flattened V pointing toward the higher water. They are are as old as the canal, mde between 1911 and 1914...The gates in effect float, and despite being being as much as eighty-two feet high ( the tallest is this first Miraflores lock, which has to accomodate the steep Pacific tides ) and weighing up to 745 tons, they are so well balanced that each is pushed open and closed by a forty-horsepower electric motor and in the event of an electrical failure can be opened by hand by a single person turning a crank."
Wowsers, after some discussion of the marvels of the Panama Canal, I offered a challenge: The first student to build a working canal lock that would move a Lego® rowboat 6 verticle incheswould win $10.00!
The following are some pictures of what the students created!
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