When it comes to feats of engineering, everybody knows about the Pyramids and the Great Wall of China. Some even know you can see the Moon from the Great Wall. But how about these other feats of engineering? These wouldn’t be easy even today, let alone at the time they were executed:

  • In 1930, eight-story Bell Telephone Company building in Indiana was moved, turned 90 degrees, and moved again to make space for an expansion. The moving took about a month and, incredibly, the building remained fully operational the whole time. 🤯 Saad Ali Faizi has written a great blog post about it, or you could also watch this YouTube video about it.
  • The ancient Romans had a mining method named ruina montium where they basically collapsed the entire mountain or at least a huge part of it to access the minerals within. Undoubtedly made possible only by the existence of cheap slave labor, they would carve tunnels into the mountain making it weaker. Simultaneously they would accumulate a huge reservoir of water above the target mountain. Once both feats were completed, all of the water would be suddenly released into the tunnels, hitting the mountain hard from the inside and crumbling it. See this blog post by Marcos Martínez for more info.
  • If the ancient Romans were good at turning mountains into rubble, they could also extract huge chunks of them intact as well. The Baalbek Stones are the prime example of this: the Temple of Jupiter has three “small” ~800 ton monoliths in its base. It’s also possible they are in fact part of some earlier temple and just got reused by the Romans in their own temple later on. In addition to the “small” stones, three huge stones between 1000 and 1650 tons have been found from the nearby quarry, all within the top four of the largest stones ever quarried. How these stones were quarried, moved, and precisely placed into the temple is still something of a mystery.

So there you have it: three intriguing feats of engineering that at least I hadn’t heard about before. Along the way I also researched some other topics and fell into a pretty deep rabbit hole with, for example, the prehistoric Megalithic Temples of Malta — some of the oldest free-standing structures in the world.