Building Across: Beams and Bending Episode 6 of Understanding the World's Greatest Structures
Beams, combining tension and compression, are central to the second aspiration supported by engineering: building across long distances. As you survey beams from the primitive lintel over the Lion Gate at Mycenae to Norway's Raftsundet Bridge, you'll investigate scientific developments and transform your understanding of what makes this structural element possible.
Running Time
32 mins
Year
2011
Kanopy ID
1146779
Features
Professor at Lehigh University, Professor at United States Army War College, Professor at United States Military Academy - West Point, Stephen Ressler Ph.D
Languages
Subjects
Show More
Related videos
Suspension Bridges: The Battle of the Cable
After learning the science behind suspension bridges, begin your two-episode look at these structural marvels. Here, relive the Battle of the Cable, in which 19th-century engineers struggled over whether to build suspension cables from iron chains (as in England's Menai Strait Bridge) or steel wire (as in the Brooklyn Bridge).
Building Up: Columns and Buckling
One of the most potent human aspirations supported by engineering is to build up. Learn how this has been done from antiquity to the present with columns: structural members that carry load primarily in compression. You'll also learn about buckling: the often catastrophic stability failure that occurs in columns with…
Understanding the World's Greatest Structures - Science and Innovation from Antiquity to Modernity Course
The Giza pyramids. Brunelleschi's dome. The Brooklyn Bridge. Each of these structures is iconic. They are visited by millions of people each year because they provoke a sense of awe and wonder. They are as beautiful to behold as they are fascinating to study: just how did the engineers who…
Cables and Arches: The Power of the Parabola
In this episode, Professor Ressler introduces you to two final structural elements: cables and arches. The Saint Louis Gateway Arch and the cables of the Golden Gate Bridge are just two examples of breathtaking structural features that also have extensive, occasionally surprising, parallels.
Carved Stone Lintels of Yaxchilán
Blood sacrifices. Sacred visions. Poisonous animals. Artwork from the Maya kingdom of Yaxchilan may shock us, but the visceral and expressive detail carved into these stones is unlike anything in Western art. This riveting episode takes you into a truly different world of self-sacrifice and hallucinogenic trances, but a world…
Great Cantilever Bridges: Tragedy and Triumph
Professor Ressler shows how structural catastrophes produced two bridges that provide a wonderful opportunity to see and understand structure: Scotland's Firth of Forth Bridge and Canada's second Quebec Bridge. You'll also gain insights into the human element of engineering, and the reasons structures turn out the way they do.
Your House as an Engineered System
In the first of four lectures on your house as a technological system, review the eight engineered subsystems that go into modern dwellings. Then discover the miracle of building codes, which ensure that every new house is safe, constructible, and reasonably economical without involving an engineer in each design.
Internal Forces, Stress, and Strength
Use the Simple Tension Test (pulling on a structural element until it reaches the breaking point) as a gateway to understanding the concepts of internal force, stress, and strength. Then, see these concepts at work in structures such as the Golden Gate Bridge and Athens' Olympic Velodrome.
Constructing Australia
Politics, tragedy and conquest combine in stories behind the building of Australia. The Bridge, Pipe Dreams and A Wire Through the Heart combine rare archival images with dramatic storytelling in showcasing three landmark events that would allow Australia to mark its place in the world. The Sydney Harbour Bridge, the…
Post Ductility - Metals in Architecture and Structural Engineering
Filmed in September/October 2009 at the third Columbia Conference on architecture, engineering and materials.
Few concepts are as central in structural engineering as the ability of a material to sustain plastic deformation under tensile stress. The standardization of historically known deformation limits or ductile properties in most materials allows architects…
Engineered Transparency - Glass in Architecture and Structural Engineering
Filmed at an international conference of prominent architects and engineers at Columbia University, Graduate School of Architecture in September 2007.
After its role in the last century's call to a radical new architecture and urban life, glass architecture is today more ubiquitous than ever. A highly engineered product, glass has…
Everyday Engineering - Understanding the Marvels of Daily Life
Look around you. Great masterpieces of engineering are everywhere. As soon as you get out of bed in the morning, you are putting centuries of scientific and mechanical ingenuity to use. So familiar are these structures, inventions, and services that they are all but invisible. Yet they are just as…