Original subtitles

Today on Impossible Engineering.

The world's most massive gateways.

One towers above the waters.

Very innovative design.

First time done in engineering. First time done in this bridge.

And the other channels through them.

This is one of the biggest projects ever made.

Relying on pioneering innovations of the past.

It feels more like a cathedral than a functional structure.

It took revolutionary engineering to make the impossible possible.

For more than 100 years, the Panama Canal has provided a massive shipping

gateway between the Pacific and Atlantic Ocean.

But by 2006, engineers here find themselves in a massive predicament.

The problem with the original Panama Canal is that the ships are growing, and

the ship cannot fit through the existing canal.

Since it was completed in 1914, ships have increased around three times in

and simply cannot squeeze through the original canal, forcing these big ships

a costly two -week detour around South America.

We need a bigger canal.

The solution?

The Panama Canal Expansion Project, one of the biggest infrastructure projects

in the world.

This massive construction includes six new lock flights,

each one spanning the length of four soccer fields.

The gates separating each chamber reach the heights of an 11 -story building.

To make way for them, a staggering 5 .3 billion cubic feet of earth must be

dredged. A whopping 155 million cubic feet of concrete encase over 215

,000 tons of structural steel.

The result is a 48 -mile -long canal that can finally accommodate some of the

largest ships in the world.

But building this massive gateway is a tall order.

We have a big challenge here.

You have to understand the canal has to go over mountains in order to do this.

Overcoming this obstacle would be impossible without the greatest

from the past.

During the 17th century.

King Henry IV of France wanted to build a canal to link the Loire and the Seine.

But between the two rivers, a ridge rises up 130 feet.

To make boats sail uphill, 31 -year -old hydraulics engineer Hugues Cosnier

developed an ingenious solution.

Here in the village of Ronnier, Lesseps de Clouse is the most extraordinary

example of what Cosnier achieved.

The staircase block, the first of its kind in Europe.

Seven interconnected chambers enabled the boats to rise up the steep terrain.

Cognier's ingenious staircase lifted boats ten feet at a time.

The boat would come in from the lower level and the gate would be closed

it, sealing it into the chamber.

The next stage was to slowly bring in the water.

until they will naturally equalize.

Now the door could be easily opened without any water flushing through.

And the boat could safely travel through.

By using a total of 36 lock chambers, Cognier surmounted the 130 foot high

and made the entire canal system possible.

To build the Panama Canal over the mountain, engineers supersized Hugo

locked staircase concept on an epic scale.

Needless to say, the structures are massive, unique design.

We have three chambers.

Each raises the vessel nine meters.

So the vessel goes 27 meters high through an artificial lake, and it goes

the same three steps on the other side.

However, getting ships through the mountains is only half the battle.

The new locks require more than 20 ,000 workers excavating well over 2 billion

cubic feet of rock and earth.

That's 2 .6 million dump truck load.

But engineers must modify the landscape not only above the water, but also below

the water.

Deepening and widening the channels of navigation.

presented quite a big engineering challenge because you have very hard

To cut out this roadblock, engineers must rely on the D 'Artagnan, one of the

world's biggest cutter suction dredgers.

The D 'Artagnan uses a computer -controlled rotating cutter tool and

bedrock to smithereens. But the dredging and excavation produce huge amounts of

waste material.

To find areas where we could deposit 50, 60 million cubic meters of material is

not an easy thing.

Compounding this problem is an altogether unusual one. The adjacent

are deadly.

This was a contaminated area.

This was not a place where you could walk or use it because it was with

unexploded ordnance.

This former U .S.

Army firing range is littered with live ammunition.

To dispose of the 2 .1 billion cubic feet of earth on these treacherous

the engineers must draw on one of history's great innovations.

In the 1940s, the south coast of England was heavily fortified against invasion

from the Nazis.

When you've got a landscape that's littered with unexploded rounds, there's

always the risk that someone's going to set one of them off and people are going

to get killed.

Representing a landmine, this weight demonstrates the problem they present

buried.

And now, it's pretty hard to tell there's anything there at all.

During World War II, the Germans also used landmines against the Allies.

To help the Allies, Josef Kozaki devised a clever solution.

This is what he developed.

So what we've got here are our two coils, which we're going to be using,

obviously, to detect the metal.

So let's plug this thing together and see how it works.

We've set up the conditions for a feedback circuit.

We've got the input of the amplifier being powered by one of the coils, which

then goes out again, amplified, and powers the second coil.

And that means that if there's enough connection between those two coils,

got the potential for the same signal to go round and round and round in a loop

and get louder and louder.

Just like what happens if you take a microphone too close to a set of

And all it takes is the presence of a little bit of metal just to increase the

coupling between those two coils.

Oh, there we go.

And then, there we go.

Dead easy.

We found that fake mine that we planted earlier.

Joseph Kozaki invented the first practical portable metal detector.

The Panama Canal Expansion Project utilizes the modern -day equivalents of

Kozaki's detector to clear the unexploded weaponry.

We got companies that were experts at doing this.

Then they piled them over together and blew them up if they were alive.

In all, the teams removed more than 3 ,000 pieces of live ammunition and

destroyed them.

And we cleaned 460 hectares of unexploded ordnance.

Engineers complete the epic construction in June 2016, and this colossal

container ship is about to put this newly designed massive gateway to the

The big challenge was to build a canal so we could fit this type of ship.

This ship is going into a lock that has 427 meters in

length by 55 meters in width.

To reach the elevated section of the canal, engineers must guide ships this

through two gigantic staircase locks at either end of the canal that will lift

the ship nearly 90 feet.

But simply supersizing existing designs isn't enough.

Although we have locks around the world that are wider, we do not have any that

are wider, longer, and deeper, and in addition, that have the three steps.

The biggest challenge that we encountered in the... Decision on the

was the type of gates that we would use. But to create lock gates powerful

enough to withstand the tremendous pressure of water, engineers must look

path to achieve more impossible engineering.

The Panama Canal Expansion Project is one of the most massive gateways in the

world. But to engineer lock gates that can withstand the tremendous pressure of

water, engineers must look to the past.

The sprawling citadel of Suomalina in Finland is home to one of Europe's

operating dry docks.

But keeping the water out of the dry dock hinges on the effectiveness of the

gates.

Traditional dock gates swing open like large double doors, but were difficult

maintain and put strain on the infrastructure of the dock.

Worse still, some docks used temporary gates made out of wood and mud that had

to be destroyed every time the dock needed recliding.

To resolve this problem, British naval architect Samuel Bentham came up with a

revolutionary idea in 1796, an example of which still stands here today.

It's amazing.

It really is massive.

Called a ship caisson, Samuel Bentham's lock is an ingenious cross between a

gate and a boat.

Today, we can see this 200 -year -old invention in action.

Right now, the caisson gate is full of water.

But first, workers must open the valves from the canal to flood the dry dock.

Now the water in the rock has reached the level where we can start pumping the

water out of the gate. And then the gate starts floating.

Despite weighing 90 tons, the floating gate moved by human power alone.

The Benton's invention is in action, and it's amazing.

It has really stood the test of time.

Today, the Panama Canal employs 16 new locks, but with a massive spin on

Bentham's floating caisson gate.

These gates roll in and out of position.

This can only be achieved because they float.

The gates are supported on an upper and the lower wagon, but the gates actually

float. And only about 15 % of the weight is actually carried by the wagons.

But for the $5 billion expansion to be worth the cost, operators must keep

traffic moving smoothly.

We only have one lane. We cannot shut it down for anything.

We have to be open 24 -7.

But shipping accidents do happen.

So how do you protect a 224 ,000 -ton, fully -laden cargo ship like this one

from disaster?

This would be impossible without the innovators of the past.

In the 19th century, the development of a world -changing material came from an

unlikely place, billiards.

In their attempt to develop new materials for billiard balls,

engineers developed many forms of plastic, including one called parkazine.

Parkazine and other early plastics were a combination of cellulose, nitric acid,

and sulfuric acid.

While it could be easily molded into a variety of things, they were prone to

cracking.

So American inventor John Wesley Hyatt tried using a different additive to

improve the nitrocellulose material.

Hyatt discovered the importance of one key ingredient, camphor, found in the

wood of a laurel tree.

If we take this bowl of pasta to represent molecules of nitrocellulose,

see in their current state they really stick together, and it wouldn't make a

very useful plastic.

So what we need is a short little molecule to get in between these and

up so they can slide past one another.

So if we take this olive oil to represent the camphor, Hyatt realized by

just the right amount, he could free the molecules up and create a moldable

plastic.

He called his material celluloid, and it's considered to be the forerunner of

modern plastics.

Subsequent generations of these plastics now make it possible for today's

colossal cargo ships to squeeze safely through the new Panama Canal routes.

So we put fendering all over. There's about 6 ,000 fenders between Atlantic

Pacific to protect the vessel and the logs from hitting each other.

These fenders are covered with ultra -high molecular weight polyethylene.

This revolutionary thermoplastic enables the hull to slide along the fender's

surface rather than catch, while rubber absorbs any impact.

And the stakes for getting these vessels through without incident are sky high.

That ship is paying $850 ,000 just to come through the canal.

But operating these gigantic 11 -story high locks could create a huge

environmental headache.

One of the main resources for the canal to operate is water.

Fresh water.

No water, no transit of ship.

To keep it running, the canal relies on the human -made reservoir, Lake Gatun.

We have to be very careful on how we're going to use this water.

The city of Panama and the city of Cologne take water from Gatun Lake for

drinking water.

So it's of paramount importance not only for the transit of the vessels, but

also for the water consumption of the cities.

So how do you operate a canal of epic proportion and still conserve water?

To achieve the impossible, engineers must look to the trailblazers of the

The Panama Canal Expansion Project is one of the biggest water gateways in the

world. But to operate this gargantuan canal and still conserve water,

must look to the past.

They find inspiration in Roman Emperor Constantine the Great, who commissioned

an engineering wonder when he relocated the empire's capital from Rome to what's

now Istanbul.

To make way for an imperial city, Roman engineers needed a massive water storage

system.

This is the Basilica system, and it's a stunning example of Roman hydraulic

engineering.

140 metres long by 70 metres wide.

And there's more than 300 marble columns holding the roof 9 metres above the

floor.

It could hold about 80 million litres of water.

And when it was in use, this whole space would have been full.

And a sprawling network of channels and aqueducts delivered massive amounts of

water to the Basilica cistern, using nothing more than gravity.

Without those engineers, this city would never have been the success that it

was.

Today, the Panama Canal's engineering team is using a gravity -fed water

tank to recycle the water.

As the lock empties, the water channels into the highest pond, then the middle

one, and finally the lowest one.

Once the water is in the lowest part of the lock, it's dumped into the adjacent

lock. To refill the lock, the lowest holding basin drains first, followed by

middle one, and then the highest.

Like the basilica cistern.

This system relies on an elaborate valve system and nothing more than gravity.

We're saving 60 % of water, and that is a lot of water.

And we've done it. It's working without any problem.

By working through these challenges, the Panama Canal Expansion Project is

making history as one of the world's most massive gateways.

And opening up a two -mile -long gateway over the water.

A big part of the construction, it's underwater.

Is the longest fully suspended cable -stayed bridge on the planet.

Very innovative design.

First time done in engineering, first time done in this bridge.

For centuries, building a bridge across the Gulf of Corinth in Greece was just a

pipe dream due to one significant and seemingly impossible challenge.

We are sitting now from the side of the Peloponnese, and across is the

continental Greece.

This particular strait here is the higher seismic zone of Greece and the

seismic zone of Europe.

But despite this obvious hazard, there is desperate need for a safe, reliable

crossing.

There are examples of people that lost their lives because the furries were not

crossing due to bad weather and they could not come to the hospital.

There was a need of this bridge.

So in the 1990s, Chief Engineer Panyotas Papanikolas embarks on designing the

ambitious Rhian and Tyrian Bridge.

His first challenge is to design a bridge that could span the almost two

gap over the Gulf of Corinth.

But the distance is too great for a single -span bridge.

So engineers must build support towers in water that's over 200 feet deep.

No matter what type of bridge we want to select, we could not escape the depth

of water.

But building bridge supports in waters this deep would have been impossible.

without the great innovators of the past.

The team takes their cue from British engineer Guy Monsell, who first overcame

the extreme challenges of building at sea in the 1940s.

Monsell's influence in contemporary engineering... I don't think really can

overstated. This was really the first time that this had ever been attempted,

and so it was really quite a daring feat of engineering.

During the Second World War, London was a prime target for German bombers.

So, in the English Channel, Mansoul developed something radical.

Naval force.

Consisting of two 80 -foot -high concrete towers.

Each one contains four floors of accommodations topped with a gun deck.

But Montel's true ingenuity lies in how these towers were constructed and

deployed at sea.

When they had it in the place where they wanted it, they essentially just pulled

out a stopcock at one end and let the water flow in.

As the water was flowing in,

the barge started to lift in the water.

All 100 men were hanging on as the fort was sinking at 35 degrees.

Despite a rough submersion, Mansoul's groundbreaking design worked perfectly.

The bottom of the barge basically filled up with water, and eventually the

entire barge sunk to the bottom and flattened out.

These groundbreaking naval forts helped British forces shoot down 22 enemy

aircraft and 30 flying bombs.

They helped protect London from attack and made engineering history.

The engineers of the Rhian and Tyrian Bridge are supersizing Mansell's

revolutionary floating concrete design.

But before these 80 ,000 -ton footings can be taken out into the Gulf of

Corinth, engineers must face a more pressing problem.

The Gulf of Corinth lies in the heart of one of the most active seismic zones in

the world.

Earthquakes can liquefy the soft seafloor, which would cause the piers to

and the bridge to collapse.

We had to find the solutions how to reinforce the subsoil in order to be

handle those weights, those big structures, and also to withstand the

earthquake. But this is much easier said than done.

To make the bridge earthquake -proof, engineers must make the impossible

possible.

The Rhian -Antirion Bridge in Greece is the longest fully suspended cable

-stayed bridge on the planet.

But this massive gateway across the Gulf of Corinth...

lies in Europe's largest earthquake zone.

To stabilize the seafloor, engineers drive hundreds of pylons deep into the

where the four piers will sit.

The pylon are the elements that at the end of the day will take most of the

of the earthquake.

It is the pylon's responsibility to take those loads down to the foundations.

Bridge footings are usually anchored firmly into the ground.

But the Rhian Anterian engineers placed them on top of a 10 -foot layer of

gravel.

The looseness of the gravel allows the footings to sway during an earthquake.

Very innovative design.

First time done in engineering, first time done in this bridge.

Without this solution, it would have been impossible to build the bridge.

Now braced for earthquakes, engineers maneuver the half -constructed piers

place for the next audacious step.

And from here and further up, it was constructed in situ, right here at this

location. Each time workers add a layer of heavy concrete, the pier sinks

further down, inching it closer to its final resting place, 200 feet below on

the seafloor.

The end result is four enormous hollow foundation piers, the first of their

kind.

But building a bridge across one of the busiest trade routes in Europe is no

easy task.

Of course, what you try to do is to find the closest possible part of the

street. But of course, we have to respect the navigation channels.

For this bridge to span a two -mile gap without interfering with shipping,

engineers must look to the pact.

In 1826, British civil engineer Thomas Telford changed the bridge game forever

at the Minai Strait, which separates mainland Wales from the island of

Centuries ago, bridging it would have been impossible because a traditional

Roman arch design built into the water would block the passage of ships.

Telford revolutionized bridge building with the Minai Suspension Bridge.

For suspension bridge, we need two very strong abutments, and then you need two

towers. And then what you do is once you've built your towers, you take a

like these guys, and you string these up and over the towers, and then you drop

hanger cables down from the main cables, and then put your bridge deck in place.

And then once your bridge is completed, if you have a load that comes along, say

our car here, it comes along, and now when the load gets out near the middle

the span, the load from the car then gets transferred up.

through the hanger cables, into the main cable, up over the tower.

The tension in that cable gets anchored in these strong abutments, and the

compression force here goes down into the foundations in the bedrock.

Helford created the world's first major long -span suspension bridge.

All of the support is coming from the suspending cables and the main cables up

above you. So below the bridge deck, there's absolutely no obstructions,

in a straight is obviously a very important thing.

The Rhian -Antirion bridge is seven times the length.

But unlike the main anchored cables of Telford Suspension Bridge, the Rhian

-Antirion uses individual cables radiating from four huge pylons spaced 1

feet apart.

In 2003, deck building begins.

Each section is floated out into the Gulf of Corinth.

and attached to either side of a pylon until the decks meet.

This massive operation takes over a year to complete, but designers must also

ensure the deck can survive an earthquake, which requires a

approach. What you see is a deck just going through the pylons, does not

does not sit on the pylons.

This one has this unique feature of the full suspension deck.

Instead of resting firmly on the foundation piers, the deck hangs a few

above them, creating a fully suspended floating deck.

Engineers had to ensure rigidity in normal conditions, but flexibility in

event of an earthquake.

Their solution, the world's biggest shock absorber.

They're similar with the shock absorbers that we have in the cars. They allow

some movement, but what they do mostly, they absorb this energy.

This quake -busting design proves its worth four years after the bridge opens,

when a 6 .4 -scale earthquake hits the Rhian -Antirion in 2008.

The innovative dampening system kicks into action and saves the bridge from

disaster.

But earthquakes aren't the only natural forces that the engineers must overcome.

We are like inside the wind channel here, so there is always, always wind.

To break this massive gateway for near hurricane -level winds, engineers must

learn from history's engineering catastrophes.

Spanning across the Gulf of Corinth in Greece, The Rhian -Anterion Bridge is

longest fully suspended cable -stayed bridge on Earth.

But to construct this massive gateway across a wind tunnel with near hurricane

-level winds, engineers must learn from history's great engineering

catastrophes.

In 1940, the Tacoma Narrows Suspension Bridge near Seattle earned the nickname

Galloping Gertie.

Just four months after opening, the bridge's twisting motion became so

it suffered a catastrophic failure.

An investigation found that 40 mile per hour winds hitting the solid edges of

the deck created an unstable oscillation that fed off itself, causing the

disaster.

With winds here reaching 70 miles per hour, engineers must make the bridge

aerodynamic.

One of the solutions is to put fairings, spoilers, the same thing on a fast car.

You have the spoilers underneath just to improve the aerodynamic shape of the

fast car that drives through the wind.

Here is the wind that drives through the bridge.

And like the fairings, the massive cables holding up the deck must also be

strong enough to survive extreme wind gusts.

So how do you make nearly 40 miles of tables like these windproof?

This would have been impossible without the breakthrough innovators of the past.

In the second half of the 19th century, German -born engineer John Augustus

Rubling designed his New York City masterpiece, the Brooklyn Bridge.

Rubling used steel for the bridge's four massive suspension cables, but with a

significant twist.

And at Columbia University in New York, engineers are comparing the cabling

system used on the Brooklyn Bridge to those that came before it using a giant

universal tester.

This will be very similar to what you would have on an old bridge pre

Bridge, for example.

To simulate a bridge failure, this steel bar will be stretched under massive

tension.

So we expect this bar to fail at around a good 200 tons.

Right now you can see the necking is starting at about a quarter up from the

reduced section.

The energy release was massive, and now the specimen is just catastrophically

failed. It's broken.

Next, the engineers test Rubling's steel cable design, which is comprised of

numerous smaller wires.

As the giant universal tester stretches it, they subject the bound cable to

extreme heat to weaken it.

You can see each wire is actually breaking one after another.

It's not just this one catastrophic failure. but rather this cascade.

When the cable starts to fail, the remaining wires take up the load,

impending collapse.

So what you saw there was exactly why the suspension bridge wires are such a

great solution. But you can see that you didn't have this one catastrophic

explosion and failure of the member, but rather each one of these wires actually

broke.

Bound wires like these made of steel enabled John Rubling to design what was

the time the world's longest and strongest bridge.

180 feet above the Gulf of Corinth, cutting -edge suspension technology

by John Rubling keeps the ultra -modern Rhian -Anterian bridge from crashing

into the water.

Every cable is made by individual strands.

They are parallel.

Strand is 50 millimeters diameter, more or less.

Each strand carries more or less the same load.

The only thing we do as the cables get bigger and bigger, we put more and more

strands from 37 strands in the small cables up to 73 strands in the longest

cable.

But unlike New York City, near hurricane force winds in the Gulf of Corinth also

put a great deal of stress on the cable.

A wind tunnel facility reveals just how destructive wind can be for a bridge

cable.

All right, so we're going to start it up and we'll see what happens.

If this were the cable in a real bridge, this type of oscillation would be very

worrying to the designers because that can lead to fatigue, which can cause

cracking, and hence potentially failure of the structure. So the structure could

collapse due to oscillations such as this.

So in 1957, British scientist Christopher Kit Scruton added a simple

reduce these catastrophic oscillations.

He called the fin a helical strake.

With the helical strake, we get this disruption of the flow pattern, we

introduce some turbulence, and both the formation of the vortices and the

vibration of the cable both stop.

The helical strake seems to be working.

Helical strakes are integrated into all of the nearly 40 miles of cabling on the

Rhian -Anturian Bridge.

This, combined with spoiler -like deck bearings, makes this bridge one of the

safest on Earth.

But in these splendid surroundings, a massive gateway like this can't just be

functional. It must also be beautiful.

So, how do you find the right balance between strength and grandeur?

Delivering both would have been impossible had it not been for a great

innovation of the past.

The Rhian -Anthurian Bridge is a massive gateway that spans a record -breaking

two miles across the Gulf of Corinth in Greece.

But designing a bridge that's both strong and beautiful would have been

impossible without one of history's great innovators.

In 1928, renowned Swiss civil engineer Robert Maillart designed a

bridge that linked two remote mountain towns.

300 feet above the Salgina Valley in Switzerland, towers the awesome Salgina

-Tobel Bridge.

From this location, we have a very nice close -up nobody else can have.

Major was a master in designing such slender elements, like

columns, like arches.

Meyer was the very first who realized the potential of steel -reinforced

concrete, and this here is his masterpiece.

Concrete is strong in compression, but reinforcing it with steel bars also

provides strength in tension, allowing it to be manipulated into almost any

shape with an elegant three -pinned hollow box arch supported by reinforced

concrete columns.

The Salgina -Tobo Bridge opened in August 1930.

Concrete is often having a bad name, and people think it's an ugly material,

ugly application.

And this application here proves that it has not to be the case.

A thousand miles away in Greece.

engineers are bringing Maillard's aesthetic sensibility to the Rhian

bridge. The four reinforced concrete pylons embody minimalism, flexible

strength, and elegant design.

As we go towards the top, we try to make it more elegant.

At different locations of the bridge, you'll find different types and

qualities of concrete.

780 ,000 tons of reinforced concrete also ensure this bridge could survive an

earthquake of seven on the Richter scale.

For Panjotis Papa Nicholas, this massive gateway is a lifetime achievement.

These things look impossible.

Then as long as you keep walking and get closer and closer, then you see you can

be close to the millimeter.

And they fit together.

By modernizing innovations of the past and making groundbreaking discoveries of

their own, the engineers of the Panama Canal Expansion Project and the Rhian

-Anthurian Bridge have made the world's most massive gateways.

They've succeeded in making the impossible possible.

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