Some days I think we’ve forgotten how to build great things. Or perhaps that we’ve just bound ourselves so tightly with bureaucracy, red tape, and the need for “social license” that we can’t build anything big anymore. Looking at accomplishments of the recent past, it wouldn’t be unreasonable to doubt that we’d be able or even allowed to do similar things today. But digging deeper, you’ll find that despite our challenges, we’re still capable of greatness. I hope these spectacular feats of engineering from our own recent history will inspire us to dig deep within ourselves, go forth, and build wonders.

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The Raising of Chicago (1850s – 1860s)

After years of epidemics due to poor waste drainage, hundreds of construction crews literally raised the city by up to six feet.

Chicago was founded in an ideal spot geographically, right between the Great Lakes and Mississippi Watershed, allowing transport to and from everywhere from the Atlantic Ocean to the Gulf of Mexico. The only problem was that it was built on low-lying, swampy ground, just four feet above the level of Lake Michigan. As the city's population grew rapidly due to its booming economy and strategic location as a transportation hub, flooding and sewage disposal became a serious impediment to growth. Because Chicago was already so close to lake level, sewage didn’t drain properly, leading to all sorts of problems, such as the cholera outbreak in 1854 that killed 6% of the population, which followed five successive years of deadly epidemics including typhoid fever and dysentery.

There were really only two ways to resolve the emergency, both of which were unthinkable: abandon the city, or literally raise it and install a new sewage system. But when engineer Ellis S. Chesbrough drafted a plan to do just that, the city adopted it and got to work. From the mid 1850s to the early 1860s, a sewer and stormwater drainage system was laid, and then the entire city — streets and buildings and all — was raised above it by about six feet. For the buildings, this required hundreds of men turning jackscrews simultaneously, and was usually done while residents remained and shops stayed open. The Tremont House, one of the biggest buildings to be lifted, was six stories high, with 260 rooms, and covering over an acre of land. Engineers raised it six feet while hotel guests were oblivious to the work being done, but one patron was puzzled to note that during his stay, the steps to the front entrance got steeper every day, and windows on the building that were at eye level when he checked in were several feet above his head when he checked out.

In all, engineers might have raised about two square miles of urban buildings and surface infrastructure — an area the size of Portland, Oregon's downtown core — over the course of a decade or so.

The Panama Canal (1914)

The French gave up trying, but we didn't.

Historically, to get from Europe to Asia by boat, or from one side of America to the other, you had to sail around the bottom of either Africa or South America, long and sometimes hazardous trips. The idea of digging a canal through the narrow isthmus in Panama that joins North and South America, and separates the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans had been around for a while, but actually doing it was not attempted until the French tried in 1880. Though they’d successfully constructed the longer Suez Canal in Egypt about a decade earlier, that was flat and comparatively easy, and the attempt in Panama bankrupted the company working on it.

The French had faced a number of obstacles, most especially one of their own making: the poor choice of insisting on a sea level canal, instead of using locks, which necessitated excavating far more material than they needed to. They were also plagued by unrelenting tropical heat, floods, landslides, and ultimately the death of 20,000 workers — mostly from malaria and yellow fever — enough casualties to have fought and lost a medium-sized war.

Despite this, the undaunted Americans took on the project in 1903, finishing it in 1914 with some of the most insane engineering feats the world had ever seen under their belts. The construction involved excavating about 240 million cubic yards of earth and rock. This amount is more than that which would need to be excavated by digging a trench five feet deep, five feet wide, and encircling the Earth at the equator. The Culebra Cut (later renamed Gaillard Cut), a nine-mile stretch through the Continental Divide, was the most challenging section, involving the removal of over 100 million cubic yards of earth. The Americans also had to build what was then the largest dam in the world — the Gatun Dam — to create Gatun Lake, which allowed ships to traverse a significant portion of the canal at an elevated level, and was itself the largest man-made lake in the world at the time. And the canal's lock system was a masterful feat of engineering: each lock chamber was 110 feet wide, 1,000 feet long, and 85 feet deep, large enough to accommodate the biggest ships of that era. The locks were operated by massive steel gates, some weighing up to 745 tons. The whole thing was an absolutely immense undertaking.

Even with a superior plan and better equipment than the French, linking the world’s biggest oceans was not done cheaply, with the project costing an additional 5,855 lives. But they were not spent in vain, and through their efforts oceans were bridged, and the world was made smaller.

Empire State Building (1931)

Still the fastest megaproject in modern history.

Famous for its place in the Manhattan skyline, when the Empire State Building was completed in 1931, it was the tallest building in the world, and the world's first 100+ story building — clocking in at 102 stories total.

Perhaps even more impressive than its height was that the entire thing was built in a year and 45 days, a full month before its official grand opening ceremonies. After almost a century, this is still the fastest completion for a project of this scale. Construction was the textbook definition of efficiency and innovation, with a railway built at the site to allow for human-powered railway cars to move material, each able to carry about eight times more than a wheelbarrow.

Methods of the time dictated that the twenty million or so bricks needed for construction be dumped in the street, then carried in as needed. To speed things up and reduce the backbreaking labor, they were instead funneled down a shoot and into a giant hopper in the basement. When needed, they were released directly into carts underneath the hopper, then raised up to the appropriate floor. Architect Richmond Shreve, whose company designed the building, said about the clockwork-like efficiency:

When we were in full swing going up the main tower, things clicked with such precision that once we erected fourteen and a half floors in ten working days — steel, concrete, stone and all. We always thought of it as a parade in which each marcher kept pace and the parade marched out of the top of the building, still in perfect step. Sometimes we thought of it as a great assembly line only the assembly line did the moving; the finished product stayed in place.

Though no longer the tallest building in the world — or in America — its ambition, beauty, and especially the speed at which it was built should continue challenging us to match and surpass it.

Hoover Dam (1936)

'Terraforming' the American desert.

Much of the American Southwest is arid, ranging from difficult to impossible for agriculture without irrigation. There’s a handy water source that flows through the region though, the Colorado River — but we realized early on that to properly utilize it would require a dam, and a big one. So big in fact, that nobody was quite sure whether it could be done, as a concrete structure that size had never before been built. The finished product was massive, at the time the tallest dam in the world, measuring 660 feet thick at its base — the length of two football fields — and thinning to a 'mere' 45 feet at the top. It created the world’s largest artificial lake, a title it held for decades; today it is still the largest reservoir in the states by water volume. The massive volume of water stored behind the dam actually deformed the Earth’s crust slightly, causing hundreds of small earthquakes in the decade after its construction.

Because the 4.4 million cubic yards of concrete required couldn’t be poured in one go (concrete generates heat and contracts as it sets, making pours of this size impossible), it had to be done in stages. Nevertheless, the blocks were still so large it was estimated they would take 100 years to cool and set properly. To solve this predicament, the engineers “embedded a series of one-inch pipes in them, through which ice water was circulated.” This necessitated building (at the time) the world’s largest refrigeration system, capable of producing 1,000 tons of ice a day. Before construction could start though, the mighty Colorado itself had to be diverted, so four tunnels, each 56 feet in diameter, were bored through the canyon walls to send the water elsewhere into Arizona and Nevada.

Once the dam was completed — two years ahead of schedule! — hydroelectric generators were installed, which provided abundant power and more than paid for their cost and that of the dam itself by 1987. Spectacular though the building of the dam was, another feat of engineering is often overlooked and should be mentioned, the construction of an entire city — Boulder City, Nevada — to house workers and their families. Today the Hoover Dam still tames the Colorado River, allowing irrigation of 1.5 million acres of land, and providing electricity to half a million homes.

Golden Gate Bridge (1937)

The impossible suspension bridge.

Iconic the world over, the Golden Gate Bridge serves as a link between San Francisco and Marin County. There had been a desire for a bridge since at least the 1880s, and at the time it was constructed, San Francisco was the largest American city still primarily using boats to get around, impeding its growth. But bridge design and metallurgical technology had to catch up first, and the powers that be had to come around to the idea that the experts — who said a bridge was impossible due to strong currents and wind, as well as frequent fogs — were wrong.

Construction began in 1933, in the depths of the Great Depression, and was amazingly completed ahead of schedule and under budget. The worries weren’t entirely without merit however, and construction was often difficult due to the strong currents, storms, and thick fogs in the area. During one of these fogs a cargo vessel actually struck a bridge access trestle, causing significant damage.

Another challenge was blasting rock underwater, in order to deeply plant earthquake proof footings for the bridge. This had to be done by divers, who regularly made the watery descent to place dynamite or remove material with high pressure hoses — all of this done by pumping air to the diver through a long hose at the surface, as scuba tanks had not yet been invented. To build cables capable of supporting such a huge bridge, an innovative design was formulated — for each yard-thick cable, almost 26,000 smaller wires were bundled and squeezed together using a circular hydraulic press. The cables used so much wire, in fact, that if they were all laid end-to-end, they would encircle the globe three times. Though today we would take such things for granted, another innovation pioneered during the construction of the Golden Gate Bridge was the use of safety netting underneath the workers, saving at least 19 lives over the course of the build.

Despite all the natural hazards, some of the greatest challenges were human, namely navigating the bureaucracy and environmental activism to get the bridge approved and financed in the first place (sound familiar?). In a funnily ironic echo of modern permitting problems in San Francisco, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors opposed lead engineer Joseph Strauss’s plans for the bridge, saying the cost would never be recouped. To clear away resistance, he lobbied heavily and hired a political fixer who over a number of months liberally greased enough palms so that the path forward was clear. The Sierra Club opposed it for all the usual reasons — not much has changed, and local ferry and shipping businesses opposed it for fear the bridge would impact their bottom line. Truly, there is nothing new under the sun.

16 years after it was first proposed, the Golden Gate Bridge was finally complete, with Strauss able to say:

The Golden Gate Bridge, the bridge which could not and should not be built, which the War Department would not permit, which the rocky foundation of the pier base would not support, which would have no traffic to justify it, which would ruin the beauty of the Golden Gate, which could not be completed within my costs estimate…stands before you in all its majestic splendor, in complete refutation of every attack made upon it.

Though since surpassed by larger bridges, it was for a time the tallest and longest suspension bridge in the world, and served as a blueprint for later bridges. Since its opening, well over two billion vehicles have driven over it.

Bingham Canyon Mine (1906 – ongoing)

Literally the biggest manmade excavation in history.

The Bingham Canyon Mine (aka the Kennecott copper mine) targets a porphyry copper deposit which formed when copper-rich fluids moved upwards from a large magma chamber several kilometers deeper. These types of deposits tend to be relatively low grade, but are economical because of their size, and are actually the largest source of the world’s copper. Copper was first discovered at the mine site back in 1848 by two brothers (last name Bingham), but the mine itself didn’t start officially until 1906. The reason for this was mostly economics — nobody had yet figured out how to make these sorts of mines profitable.

But Bingham was the first. When operations commenced, they used (at the time) cutting edge technology and production methods, including creating an open pit mine, steam shovels — which are exactly what they sound like, excavators powered by steam — and building a railroad. By 1912, it was the world’s largest industrial mining complex. The copper deposit there is so extensive that over the last century, the mine has produced over 19 million tons of copper, more than any other in history. At 2¾ miles across at the top and ¾ of a mile deep, it’s also the biggest manmade excavation ever, so large it can be seen from orbit. While some may consider it a bit ugly, we have to pull copper out of the ground anyways, so go big or go home.

Mount Rushmore (1927 – 1941)

Immortalizing the best of our presidents.

In the Black Hills of South Dakota stands Mount Rushmore, where in 1934 workers began carving into the granite wall the heads of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt, and Abraham Lincoln, arguably our greatest presidents. Work had actually started in 1927, requiring several years of carefully dynamiting the surface to remove over 450,000 tons of rock. “The workers were so skilled, knowing how much dynamite you needed to use to blast off rock, that they were able to get within about three to five inches of the final faces,” said Mount Rushmore historian Amy Bracewell. Much of the carving was then done with jackhammers, which had to be powered using air compressors at the base of the mountain, and connected to them through a 30 inch, 1,800 foot pipeline.

Over 400 workers were involved, and despite working on or dangling off cliffs for most of it, there wasn’t a single casualty. While a carving of this scale is impressive in and of itself, an important lesson here is that it almost didn’t happen. While a bill necessary for the work to begin passed the Congress easily, it took three tries to be approved in South Dakota itself. Funding was also a problem early on, all of which shows that when it comes to building something great, perseverance is perhaps the most important thing after the idea itself.

Moon Landing (1969)

“That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.”

Since before recorded history, mankind has looked up at the night sky in wonder. It was the realm of mystery and the harbinger of blessings and disasters, and before the 1960s, no human had ever been there. That changed in 1961 with the first man in space. But the real prize was reaching the Moon — our nearest celestial neighbor. America and Russia were in a space race to reach it; for exploration, and also to prove which system — American freedom or communist tyranny — was better.

The challenges were unprecedented, like the mathematics of how to leave orbit and re-enter the Earth’s atmosphere. Nobody knew for certain whether the dust on the Moon was so deep in places that the lunar lander would just sink (it didn’t). Also, a rocket capable of taking men to the Moon and back didn’t yet exist, nor did the lunar lander, or most of the other technology needed for the mission. Tackling these challenges took a focus and dedication we’ve never seen before or since during peacetime, and funding for it peaked just shy of 4.5% of the federal budget in 1966 (as opposed to about 0.5% today).

On July 16th, 1969 Apollo 11 succeeded in landing men on the Moon for the first time in human history. The landing was fraught with peril, starting with the realization about nine minutes before touchdown that they would overshoot their landing site due to a slight unexpected boost from residual air inside the connecting tunnel between the Command and Lunar Modules when they separated. The chosen landing site was smooth and relatively free of craters and boulders, so Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin had to improvise and pick a new spot on the fly, touching down at a site that would later aptly be named Tranquility Base with less than 20 seconds of fuel left in their tanks before they would have been forced to abort. While all this had been happening, a master alarm had been blaring intermittently. The alarm code was unfamiliar, Aldrin said, and "we couldn't look it up in the book to see what the problem was 'cause we were watching where we were going!” Ground control back in Houston knew it was the computer dealing with too much information and that it might start an automatic reboot. But the decision was made to keep going, as long as the alarm stayed intermittent, because an abort at this point was almost as dangerous as carrying on.

John F. Kennedy said it best in his 1962 speech:

We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard; because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one we intend to win...

We need to bring back that spirit again. With it, there’s very little outside our grasp.

The International Space Station (1998 – ongoing)

A bridge above.

More than any other object in space, the International Space Station (ISS) is a symbol of our desire to explore and conquer the final frontier. It’s also a symbol of international cooperation, and a testament to the fact that humanity can work together peacefully in space — the only environment where that’s been the case. 15 nations have contributed, with the United States, Russia, and the EU being the major partners, and NASA handling the lion's share.

The cost to build the ISS was tremendous, at least $100 billion, with an additional $3 billion a year to run it, making it the most expensive object ever built. But the benefits have been extraordinary, with thousands of experiments performed that have enhanced our understanding of living and working in space, and brought benefits back to Earth as well. It’s also allowed us to have a continuous human presence in space since Expedition 1, when it docked with the station on Nov 2nd, 2000 (Expedition 70 is currently up there). So far a total of 273 people from 21 countries have spent time at the ISS.

The station is by far the largest manmade object ever put into orbit, clocking in at 365 feet end to end, with a pressurized volume of about 34,400 square feet and a mass of 925,000 pounds (next largest was Russia’s Mir at 286,000 pounds). Assembling its 43 modules and other elements required 42 launches (36 American and 6 Russian), and over 260 spacewalks during construction, maintenance, and reconfiguration.

As incredible as it is, one sometimes looks at it and thinks we should be doing so much more. Building bigger stations, including rotating ones to start experimenting with different levels of gravity. Stations that could serve as tourist destinations, and as they grow larger, permanent colonies. Private companies are planning in this direction, and it’s about time.

Spacecraft leaving the Solar System (1972 – ongoing)

To boldly go farther than any robot has gone before.

Of all the hunks of metal humanity has launched into space, most have only been as far as low Earth orbit (LEO). A far smaller number have broken free of Earth’s gravitational field to explore the Solar System.

But to leave the Solar System entirely and break free of the sun's gravitational grip requires moving extremely fast. Only five probes have or will soon manage it: Pioneer 10 and 11 (launched in 1972 & 1973, but no longer working), Voyager 1 and 2 (both launched in 1977, and both still working), and finally New Horizons (launched in 2006) which gave us our first closeup of Pluto, and is still exploring the Kuiper Belt.

To gain the extra speed needed to get out of the sun's orbit, each probe did one or more slingshot maneuvers around various planets, gaining gravity assists in the process. Pioneer 10 used Jupiter, and Pioneer 11 swung by Jupiter and Saturn; both Voyager probes used Jupiter and Saturn, with Voyager 2 also getting a kick from Uranus; and the New Horizons spacecraft just used Jupiter. Of the five craft, Voyager 1 holds the title of fastest and farthest, as well as the first to reach interstellar space. Unless we launch something substantially faster, nothing will ever overtake it.

Though it isn’t leaving the Solar System, by far the fastest ever human made object is the Parker Solar Probe, launched in 2018. Its mission is to study the Sun, and will use multiple gravity assists from Venus to gain speed and adjust its trajectory. At its closest approach to the Sun in 2025, it will be moving at 430,000 mph (119.4 miles per second) or about 0.064% the speed of light.

Sphere (2023)

A world wonder.

Unlike anything else that exists, Sphere is a giant orb 366 feet high and 516 wide, making it the largest spherical building in the world (present or past), about 50% bigger than the runner up in Sweden. The entire exterior is covered with giant LED screens consisting of 1.2 million LED pucks, each of which are made up of 48 individual LED diodes — these cover most of the inside as well. From the outside, this allows it to morph into everything from a miniature (though still enormous) version of our planet, to a giant eyeball, a tennis ball, pumpkin, Mars, etc. Inside during concerts, the 16k resolution screen—the size of two soccer fields — works in tandem with technology providing haptic, audio, scent, and temperature features “meant to be targeted to each member of the audience during live performances.”

At one point during the first performance in the Sphere — featuring U2 — the building appeared to disappear, showing scenes from Las Vegas and the surrounding desert. Stunning is an understatement, with audience members using descriptors such as “insane,” and “mind-bending.” Adding to the Jetsons vibe, there are also several humanoid robots named Aura serving as greeters that can interact with guests, answering their questions. The Sphere sets a new standard for futuristic buildings, opens a new medium for artists, and looks to continue wowing everyone who sees it.

Starship (2023 – ongoing)

America's science victory.

Conceived of by Elon Musk, a fully stacked Starship is a sight to behold. The tallest rocket ever built, it tops even the mighty Saturn V that took men to the Moon by about 20 feet. It’s also the most powerful, projected to enable lifts of between 100 to 150 metric tons to orbit in its reusable configuration. To back up a bit, Musk started his company SpaceX with the ultimate goal of making life multi-planetary, and turning humanity into a spacefaring civilization. The best way to jumpstart this — in his estimation — is colonizing Mars. The first obstacle to overcome was reusing rockets, because throwing them away after a single use makes little more sense than scrapping an airplane after a single flight. Despite being proclaimed by pundits as impossible, the iconic Falcon 9 rocket achieved that, now making regular trips to orbit. But to really lower the cost of getting mass into LEO and beyond requires a far bigger reusable rocket, which is why Starship was built.

After the upper segment did some shorter hops in late 2020 and early 2021, its first fully stacked flight (including the Superheavy booster) was in April 2023. The launch was a success, though it failed to make orbit, and managed to damage the launch pad pretty thoroughly. But the whole culture of SpaceX is to move fast and learn quickly from both success and failure through rapid iteration, so they took the lessons of the first launch and quickly applied them to building a better Starship.

The second (even more successful) flight took place on November 18th, 2023. Though Starship didn’t reach orbit, the new steel pad and water deluge system effectively prevented pad destruction upon takeoff, and Starship did a successful hot stage separation before the booster “experienced a [stunning and rather eye-catching] rapid unscheduled disassembly.” The upper stage of Starship continued firing for several more minutes, reaching space for the first time on a suborbital trajectory. More tests will be needed, and Starship will need to master landing and catching the Super Heavy booster. But from here the path to the Moon, Mars, and beyond looks clear, and it is beautiful. Here are some stunning pics, videos, and more videos of the second launch.

As the father of the American space program Werner von Braun once said, "Our two greatest problems are gravity and paperwork. We can lick gravity, but sometimes the paperwork is overwhelming." For Starship in particular, and space in general, these technical challenges are daunting enough, and are only conquered through incredible innovation and drive. But they are doable, as SpaceX has repeatedly proved. If we fail to become a multi-planetary, spacefaring species, it will be because of overzealous regulations enshrining safetyism and the precautionary principle, which basically allow any unknown “serious” danger to be leveraged to slow projects down or halt them altogether.

While we marvel at what we've accomplished, we need to constantly be on guard against forces that would prevent these — and even greater things — from being done.

Let’s make sure that the techno-optimistic future as embodied by SpaceX’s vision of colonizing space comes to pass.

— Owen Lewis