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Recent Articles
- Channel Tunnel
- Empire State Building
- CN Tower
- Golden Gate Bridge
- Itaipu Dam
- Delta Works
- Panama Canal
- Bali
- Forbidden City
- Bagan Temples & Pagodas
Channel Tunnel
November 6th, 2009 by Travel
The Channel Tunnel is a long rail tunnel that lies beneath the English Channel from England to France and was finished in 1994. It is the second in regards to large tunnels with the Japanese Seikan being the longest tunnel. However the underwater section of the English Channel makes it the longest rail tunnel in the world located underwater.
Taking just seven years to build after a few false starts it began functioning in 1994, having met in the middle in 1990. Both the British and French worked on the project until its completion, meeting half way, making a tunnel which is 31 miles long and 23 miles of that is under the ocean, with 8.2 million passengers riding it in 1995. In 2005 it was down from that number to 7.45; however it is expected to more than double this year with new rail connections having been added. Proposed plans for a second tunnel have been made, however no date for construction is planned and the economics have only been touched on.
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Empire State Building
November 6th, 2009 by Travel
The Empire State Building is an iconic building located in New York City, New York, and was used as a broadcast point from its tower, for observation, and at one point would have been a stopping station for zeppelins before being found to be too unstable.
It stood at the world’s tallest building from its final completion in 1931 until the finishing of the World Trade Center’s North Tower in 1972, and is now the tallest building in New York since the obliteration of the World Trade Center. Construction took from January of 1930 until May of 1931, being one of the fastest constructions for a building of its gigantic size. The building has survived a direct head on collision with a B-25 bomber in the 1940s. Since the collapse of the World Trade Center the Empire State Building has come back into the main service center for commercial broadcast stations for radio and television, and it has been broadcasting signals since 1931.
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CN Tower
November 6th, 2009 by Travel
The CN Tower is located in Toronto, in the country Canada, and it is a communications tower that stands 553 meters tall, and since it was finished in 1976 after three years of construction, became the world’s tallest free standing structure, and it boasts the highest observation deck in the world at 447 meters in the sky.
Occasionally the building poses several hazards, such as falling ice, possibility of fire (which has been mitigated by vast updates and is very unlikely) along with the staggering height. Recently it has been outfitted with a LED display that runs along up the entire tower, and fully lighting it costs a thousand Canadian dollars a month. Currently they are more energy efficient than the old system using regular light bulbs, which were inefficient and had to be replaced often. The tower also broadcasts several television stations and radio stations, with 8 TV and 20
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Golden Gate Bridge
November 6th, 2009 by Travel
Completed in 1937 the bridge was the largest suspension bridge ever built at the time, and connected San Francisco to Marin County, allowing for faster and more efficient transportation throughout the area. From 1933 until 1937 it provided thousands of jobs during the depression and allowed the area to survive much of the worst times through the economy it created.
Something new at the time was the usage of a safety net during construction, which saved 19 of the 30 men who fell, and would have saved the others had there not been a failure in the net itself. The record for being the longest suspension bridge was broken thirty years after construction in the 60’s by a bridge in New York. Today it has 100,000 cars on it traveling in either direction at once on average and serves as a major artery through the area, greatly decreasing travel times that would have otherwise occurred by driving around or using a ferry to cross the channel.
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Itaipu Dam
November 6th, 2009 by Travel
The Itaipu Dam is located on the Parana River between Brazil and Paraguay which generates 934. billion kWh a year, and supplies Paraguay and Brazil with 90% and 20% of the electricity used respectively by both countries. Construction of the massive dam started in 1970 and was completed in 1984 with generation of electricity, after the reservoir was filled. Because of the jobs it provided forty thousand people were needed in construction and through that boosted the economy of the entire country, making it possibly one of the best economic construction in Brazil to date.
This year expansion is planned to raise the capacity to 14,000 MW to provide more cheap electricity to the respective countries and will feature the ability to run eighteen 700MW Generators at any given time. It saves the country of Brazil from using petroleum for power generation, which would be nearly 500,000 barrels of petrol each day, thus being more environmentally friendly and cost effective, and so far the dam has produced a total of 1.4 million gigawatt hours since its completion.
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Delta Works
November 6th, 2009 by Travel
Delta Works refers to a massive construction of dams, sluices, dikes, locks, and storm surge barriers in the Netherlands to protect much of the land from rising water and risks from storms or other harsh weather. Construction of this entire massive area was undertaken between the 1950s until the late 1990s and hired many thousands of people.
The result currently is that over ten thousand miles of dikes have been built, with one and a half thousand miles in primary dikes and eight and a quarter thousand in secondary dikes. Because of the current global issues in regards to Global Warming and the overall rise of sea levels the dikes locks and dams are planned to be upgraded in the near future with taller and wider structures to prevent the flooding of the Netherlands. These plans call for construction to continue until 2015, however more are likely to follow in other areas extending that time line indefinitely with the constant steady rise of the seas.
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Panama Canal
November 6th, 2009 by Travel
A Major shipping channel that runs across the country of Panama, the Panama Canal is a major shipping route that cut the distance of travel from going all the way around South America to going through the middle, saving 14 thousand miles of travel and time. The first attempt by the French cost them twenty thousand lives and never lived up to the effort in the late nineteenth century.
However the United States of America stepped in under President Theodore Roosevelt and in 1904 and took over construction, completing it just a decade later with only 200 American deaths. Through a series of locks the water level is either lowered or raised for the ships as they pass through, thereby equalizing the water levels along the way since they are never the same in both oceans. Because the original capacity was 80 million tons a year and it currently serves 278 million tons per year, along with growing ship sizes, plans are being made to upgrade the canal in the future so that shipping can continue.
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- 7 Wonders of the Ancient World (5)
- 7 Wonders of the Middle Ages (7)
- General (38)
- Man Made Travel Wonders (5)
- New 7 Wonders (7)
- New 7 Wonders of Nature (1)
- The 21 Finalists (22)
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