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Tuesday, 17 August 2010 05:51 |
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Before the advent of the steam locomotive, people used tracked cars and ‘gravity railroads’ to winch ore car trains up hills and brake control them back down, a system that resulted in many spectacular crashes. To cross rivers and chasms people built aqueducts, bridges of water, over which the mules, muleskinners, and the barges they pulled could move at 1-3 mph. These aqueducts were designed by Roebling, the legendary engineer who later designed the Brooklyn Bridge. To me, these are amazing innovations that exercised the immense vision and problem solving skills (through trial and error no doubt) of our long ago fore fathers. While I leave the history of battles, etc. to others, when I stood on the site of the visionary, imaginative, innovative, and astonishingly inventive accomplishments of those who came before us, I embraced the history of inventive thinking; Those men and women were every bit as creative and inventive as we are today and worked with fewer technologies. Why, you might ask, do I care about these obscure examples of invention in the world of transportation, beyond their being a testament to ingenuity, and the hard work of those who thought up, built, and operated them? Answers to follow . . .
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