Researchers Made 25-Ton Boulders They Can Move by Hand
gizmodo.com
gizmodo.com
I've since come to the conclusion that when you mix simple tools with a bit of brainpower, you can accomplish far more than people would ever believe.
How does he get the pebble underneath a large block initially?
How will get the horizontal stones across the top lifted and pivoted into place?
https://web.archive.org/web/20161107075626/http://www.thefor...
I imagine once he'd gotten the supports placed, he could just raise the lintel between them with the machine, perpendicular to its final resting position, then rotate it into place.
To get an initial fulcrum under a stone, it looks like he built a wrench-shaped wood frame, essentially attaching a long lever handle to the stone. One can be seen in the second picture on this page:
https://web.archive.org/web/20161206062032/http://www.thefor...
At 2:08, they show the counterweights and one of the pivots he used for moving the barn. (It's a "pole barn", so it has no concrete foundation. His webpage says they had to add about 50% of its weight again in reinforcement so that it would hold its shape when moved this way.)
He used a pivot sitting on top of wooden shoring boards, I can imagine the process for any weight would be similar.
In order to move something of a given weight against earth's gravity you need to expend a certain amount of energy to do that work. There is no way of getting around that because physics. While few people could theoretically move a boulder up a hill it would be very, very challenging to do without additional sources of energy.
> In 1871 the U.S. Department of Agriculture published a “Statistics of Fences In the United States.” At that time, it noted that in New England and New York State alone, there were 252,539 miles of stone walls, enough to circle the globe ten times, and to build all the pyramids of Egypt times one hundred. It has been calculated that such an effort would have required an army of 15,000 workers 243 years to accomplish.
When you are trying to harvest crops on a series of glacial moraines, stones dropped by glaciers and brought to the surface by each winter's freeze/thaw cycles are the most reliable annual crop. :-)
In spring, after thaw, but before the ground is dry enough to till and plant, some levers, a ground level sledge or "stone boat", and draft animal(s) to pull it will get the stones to the edge of the field. Making a more tidy "dry" or unmortared stone wall from them is optional.
It's hard to see how this technique would apply to the very rectangular 800 tonne trilithons at Baalbek or the 1000 tonne statue at the Ramesseum, or even the 70 tonne underground sarcophagi at Saqqara.
Prehistoric people had ropes and they also had poles. I'm always baffled by this reluctance to admit that they simply used cranes, levers, and similar technology.
The structures here basically exploit moments in order to move them. But there's nothing giving them stability once they are 'static'. Surely the end piece of the bridge could just fall over if you stood on the edge of it?
As ar as I can see they never actually move the boulders.
For this to have any relevance the bolders would need to be dragged / pushed / towed into place