Structures: Or Why Things Don't Fall Down

by J.E. Gordon

There is a quotation from Genesis about the Tower of Babel at the head of Chapter 1. It may be remembered that this was a project to build ‘a tower with its top in the heavens’. However, I do not think any theologian has ever inquired to what height such a tower could really have been built.

A limit will be set to the height of the structure when the bricks begin to be crushed by the superincumbent weight.

Elementary arithmetic shows that a tower with parallel walls could have been built to a height of 7,000 feet or 2 kilometres before the bricks at the bottom would be crushed.

In the course of a long professional life spent, or misspent, in the study of the strength of materials and structures I have had cause to examine a lot of accidents, many of them fatal. I have been forced to the conclusion that very few accidents just ‘happen’ in a morally neutral way. Nine out of ten accidents are caused, not by more or less abstruse technical effects, but by old-fashioned human sin – often verging on plain wickedness. Of course I do not mean the more gilded and juicy sins like deliberate murder, large-scale fraud or Sex. It is squalid sins like carelessness, idleness, won’t-learn-and-don’t-need-to-ask, you-can’t-tell-me-anything-about-my-job, pride, jealousy and greed that kill people.

Survivals of this sort are known as ‘skiamorphs’ (shadow shapes), and in one form or another they are very common in technology, A modern instance is the survival of timber graining on the surfaces of plastic mouldings and furniture.