Civil Engineering feats!

Lim Kong Meng :: ckmlim@ntu.edu.sg
Subject Librarian for Civil & Environmental Engineering

Taj Mahal, Great Wall of China, Eiffel Tower, Millau Viaduct, the Panama Canal, the Channel Tunnel and the list goes on … all feats of Civil Engineering.

Do you know the Great Wall of China spans some 3,500 km across China and was created over a period of 1,800 years from the 3rd Century BC?

Look at the wall section of the Great Wall of China. It’s amazing!
Picture taken from “Amazing Achievements : a celebration of human ingenuity” by Nigel Hawkes.

The Panama Canal, linking the Pacific and the Atlantic Ocean, took more than 40 years to build and was one of the largest and most expensive engineering projects ever undertaken during the 19th Century.

If you are keen to know more about these feats or about other civil engineering feats, take a look at some of the books (with beautiful pictures and illustrations) found in our library collections:

“Amazing Achievements : a celebration of human ingenuity” by Nigel Hawkes.

“The seventy wonders of the modern world: 1500 years of extraordinary feats of engineering and construction” by Neil Parkyn.

“The Builders : marvels of engineering” published by the National Geographic Society.

For those who likes to know more about these feats online, our Media Resource Library has a collection of video recordings showcasing these interesting engineering feats which you can view online.

To find the titles we hold, just enter “Extreme Engineering” in OPAC. You should retrieve about 30 titles.

Look out for the video recording on the construction of the Millau Viaduct of France, a suspension bridge which has the tallest bridge piers in the world, some 343 m high! Eiffel Tower is only about 302 m high.

There are other interesting titles as well, for example, the widening of the Panama Canal, tunneling under the Alps, and building of the Hong Kong Airport.