Naked Science Forum
General Discussion & Feedback => Just Chat! => Topic started by: Jimbee on 20/03/2025 17:24:52
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The Statue of Liberty is in New York Harbor. (And it is technically called La Liberte eclairant le monde or Liberty Enlightening the World, and in New Jersey. But who cares.) And it is based on the Colossus of Rhodes built in 280 BC.
The Colossus of Rhodes was an amazing feat of engineering until it was destroyed in 226 BC. Some people still claim it straddled the harbor. Like Shakespeare said "Why, man, he doth bestride the narrow world like a Colossus". If that was true, they would have to had supported both long heavy legs, made of bronze and iron, as they slowly built it up to be joined in the middle.
How did they do that? Just like the pyramids, we could never do that now. Actually is that even correct, because I've heard people say that, about humans being unable to build a statue like that today. And did the Colossus really straddle the harbor? Has that ever been proven?
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People have been building bridges for thousands of years. What you put on top of the bridge, a road, a railway or a lighthouse in the form of a statue, is up to you.
The current harbor entrance is about 100 ft wide. No big deal, and the older one may well have been narrower.
The Pons Fabricius in Rome was built in 62 BC and is still standing, with an 80 foot span.
That said, current progress on building an unnecessary railway from London to Birmingham (at a greater cost per mile than flying to the Moon) suggests that the art of bridge building (or indeed public works of any sort) has been lost in the last 200 years.
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Well the Forest of Arden had lions in it according to Shakespeare.
Unlikely they could have produced enough metal in sufficient quantity and quality to bridge out of metal, with a method of joining the pieces. I dont know when the means to process metal in sufficient quantity was, but they would have been millennium ahead of everyone else. My guess is it was of stone construction faced in bronze, or quite small at the side, the statue of liberty does have a large pedestal to bolster it's size.