• jcs@lemmy.worldEnglish
    8·
    3 hours ago

    There is nothing more permanent than a temporary solution that works.

  • IndiBrony@lemmy.worldEnglish
    78·
    13 hours ago

    I’ve been to this bridge. It’s the Devil’s Bridge in Wales.

    Here’s another angle, ripped from Wikipedia:

    The river underneath is insanely deep. Pictures do not do it justice just how much further it goes out of the bottom of this frame. You do not get out of there. That is death.

    The bottom-most bridge was built around the 12th century. How the hell they managed to build stuff like this way back then staggers me.

    • ulterno@programming.devEnglish
      5·
      2 hours ago

      The bottom-most bridge was built around the 12th century. How the hell they managed to build stuff like this way back then staggers me.

      I find it hard to relate with this sentence. That’s just 3 bridges on the top of what seems like a natural rock formation, right? With 2 being arches and the top one being a modern-ish structure.

      No matter how deep it is, it’s narrow enough to just move a prebuild wooden foot bridge used for people to go around constructing the thing.

      • IndiBrony@lemmy.worldEnglish
        11·
        5 hours ago

        You may joke, but that’s actually part of the legend of the bridge!

        The legend goes that a woman saw her cow grazing on the opposite side of the river.

        To get it back, the devil offered to build a bridge in exchange for a living soul.

        The woman threw a piece of bread across the new bridge and her dog went to eat it. The devil got the dog’s soul 👍

        Poor dog

    • ruk_n_rul@monyet.cc
      23·
      13 hours ago

      They really should continue the tradition by building a fourth bridge over the current one when the time comes.

    • throwback3090@lemmy.nzEnglish
      07·
      9 hours ago

      Labor was free because of slavery, so the economics were not the same. Current engineering has the concept of “over engineering” which is what cracked-up addicts in wall street call “building to last”, due to the “expense” of not being shortsighted on a quarter by quarter basis.

      • ruk_n_rul@monyet.cc
        12·
        6 hours ago

        Actually overenginnering is the thing with pre-modern structures, like the bottom bridge here. Survivorship bias played a role, where things they don’t build to last, evidently don’t last to this day, but mostly it’s because they don’t really understand the math behind all of it so they take the most conservative and the tried and tested rules of thumb when doing big structures. This is why big projects back then can take decades to complete.

        In the modern day, we design specifically to balance durability and cost, and we are confident of our maths and understanding of material science to use the least amount that does the work for the design life that we choose.

      • Rayquetzalcoatl@lemmy.worldEnglish
        6·
        5 hours ago

        Was it slaves? I am not seeing any references to slaves building the original bridge online anywhere, where did you see that? :o

        • crapwittyname@lemm.ee
          1·
          1 hour ago

          I think it’s just an assumption based on the mode of society at that time in history. If it was built in the 12th century it was built by what we would now consider slaves. In the 1100s the land was divided into fiefs and the lord of that land considered the people who lived and worked on the land as part of that land: serfs. Unless this bridge was an exception to the rule, then serfs would have undertaken all the labour that got it built.