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I am exactly the type of nerd that is super excited about this kind of engineering, to the point where I visited a couple years ago and rode a boat on the wheel when I happened to be in Scotland. I mentioned having gone to a local in Edinburgh and got a very confused "why would you ever go to Falkirk?" It's a pretty easy half-day trip out of Edinburgh or Glasgow, and I recommend it if you have the time.
One fun thing if you have kids is that the playground there has some demonstrations of Archimedean principles, like how an Archimedes screw works. Also, I don't keep many souvenirs of my travels, but I do have a refrigerator magnet of the Falkirk wheel that spins freely. It doubles as a cat toy.
Suprisingly, the "axe head" sections each on one side of the circular top and bottom openings are unnessecary to the functioning, and just there for show.
It's also near a fort on the Antonine Wall, a further-north version of Hadrian's wall- so it's been the shortest route across Britain for quite a long time...
I have walked across it on the John Muir Way which is highly recommended. I actually didn't really remember what Hadrian's wall was. We always learnt it was to "keep out the Scots", but in fact it represented the Northernmost border of the Roman empire. I had no idea about the Antonine wall, nor that they got that far north.
I could be wrong, but I think the Antonine Wall is actually earlier than Hadrian's Wall in terms of being a crossing route, not just "a further-north version" — though Hadrian's Wall is older as a structure.
Used to love going there as a child. Also if your username makes reference to your family name, you probably have quite a lot of relations in the area.
Wait, how many people actually share a surname with "aserafini" in Falkirk? I'm skeptical there's a deep family network there just based on a username — unless Serafini is way more common in that area than I'd expect for a Scottish industrial town.
I live very near to it, in the summer they have boat trips that take people a trip on one of the two passenger boats.
The kelpies are connected via the canal, maybe 4 miles of locks you have to go through if you want to hire a canal boat to travel from the wheel to the kelpies.
I'm not sure why the Falkirk Wheel keeps getting posted to HN, but hey I'm not gonna complain!
I'll repost what I shared last time though, there's another much older boat lift on the canal network that solves a similar problem of transporting boats from the canal up and down to a river, but built with Victorian engineering instead (though it's been retrofitted a few times) called the Anderton Boat Lift, and it's worth a visit!
I really liked this one in Peterborough, Ontario, Canada: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peterborough_Lift_Lock
Built as a real working lift lock (originally 1904), rather than as a tourist attraction. Powered by a little bit of extra water in one of the buckets to tip the balance and drive the pistons.
There's also another unusual way - the Caisson lock.
Its design is TERRIFYING.
The boat is floated into a tube that get sealed at both ends and then (in the dark..) that tube is winched down into a completely flooded chamber until it (hopefully) lines up with the egress port at the bottom. The tube with the boat in is unsealed and the boat floats out.
Ooof, I'd never seen that. Thanks! From the wikipedia link:
> The May 1799 test at Oakengates carried a party of investors aboard the vessel, who nearly suffocated before they could be freed.
(!) ...and eventually they built a flight of nineteen locks instead, with a steam-powered pump to return water. The lift locks (and Falkirk Wheel) are a really impressive and elegant solution in comparison.
Oh that is terrifying; interesting, it "was first demonstrated at Oakengates on a now lost section of the Shropshire Canal in England in 1792". That little bit of rural UK was hot and happening from 1700 to 1800 and doing a lot of canal and river transport; it claims some part in the Industrial Revolution. Within 20 miles around Oakengates around that time was:
- early good quality cast iron; Abraham Darby in Coalbrookdale in ~1710 smelting iron from low-sulphur coal/coke for the first time, dominating the market in iron pots and pans.
- his foundry casting iron parts for early Newcomen steam engines in 1715 [2].
- the first iron bridge in the world[3] in 1781, now a town called Ironbridge. John Wilkinson invented a method of boring accurate cylinders for Bolton & Watt static steam engines, a friend wrote to him about the proposed iron bridge and he funded it.
- the first iron boat in 1787 in Brosely; the Trial by the same John Wilkinson, "convincing the unbelievers who were 999 in 1000".[7]
- the first iron framed building in the world, ancestor of skyscrapers. Thomas Telford[5] was a surveyor and engineer in the area, took inspiration from the iron bridge and started making other things out of iron, became friends with a flax mill owner whose mill burned down; they decided an iron framed building would be more fire resistant, and they built the first one ever[6] in 1797.
- very early high-pressure steam engine and high-pressure steam locomotive. Richard Trevithick around 1800; Coalbrookdale foundries built a static high pressure engine and a high pressure locomotive[4] within a couple of years of his Puffing-devil road locomotive and Pen-y-Darren rail locomotive were trialled in other parts of the UK.
Then Regression To The Mean happened and the area faded back into history.
Yes, the Kelpies are suprisingly striking. I went along thinking they'd be a modestly interesting thing to see but the scale and sculpture work makes them a real "Wow" moment when you see them up close.
> and the same power it would take to boil eight kettles.
Newspaper-style units, but laughter aside, I tried to do the math.
If a kettle is rated at 2.5kW, then five minutes of usage (to boil a kettle, or for eight of them do a turn of the bridge) is 2.5kWh * (5/60) * 8 = 1.6kW.
My Nissan Leaf stores about 24kWh. So it's about 7% of a Leaf's battery to turn the wheel, or 10km of range. Given mass, perhaps it is finely balanced, and that seems more reasonable than I expected.
I am not an electricity expert and will get things mixed up ;)
Even though it solves a very specific problem, I'm surprised this kind of boat lift hasn't been replicated elsewhere. Even just the self-balancing properties of it.
If the area was a major commercial shipping hub once, what's the reason it isn't any more? Depopulation? (If it's depopulation, then was it emigration or was it a fall in birth rates?)
> The town is at the junction of the Forth and Clyde and Union Canals, a location which proved key to its growth as a centre of heavy industry during the Industrial Revolution. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Falkirk was at the centre of the iron and steel industry, underpinned by the Carron Company in nearby Carron. The company made very many different items, from flat irons to kitchen ranges to fireplaces to benches to railings and many other items, but also carronades for the Royal Navy and, later, manufactured pillar boxes and phone boxes. Within the last fifty years, heavy industry has waned, and the economy relies increasingly on retail and tourism.
So, yes, deindustrialization. But being at a key canal junction doesn't mean much today, since modern railroads and steamships rendered the canals obsolete a century-ish ago.
> But being at a key canal junction doesn't mean much today, since modern railroads and steamships rendered the canals obsolete a century-ish ago.
That is true for the English narrow channels which are way too narrow to support any kind of large vessel, but not true in general - the Mittellandkanal in Germany for example still sees a huge amount of traffic and there’s regular infrastructure investment going on into the canal network in many places. One example is the new boat lift in Niederfinow which is not as architecturally beautiful as the Falkirk wheel, but lifts entire river barges.
The British canal system became largely obsolete when the Railways came. Partly because the railway companies bought the canals and closed them to strengthen their monopoly. The canals were restored and reopened by enthusiasts for leisure boating, and in this is still going on. This is strengthened by the tow paths being legal rights of way, and walking them is very popular.
Canal boats had no engines, they were pulled by horses and very slow and dependent on a lot of horse care and feeding. Some of the early static steam engines were used to pump water up the canals to re-use it in locks, and there were lock keepers to employ and dredging to do, so it's not even as if the canals were a sunk cost and had almost no running costs.
I'd not be surprised that industrialists would do such a thing as buy up the competition and shut it down, but I'd be a bit surprised if canals were much competition after railways really came in?
Deindustrialization, triggered by depletion. The thing about mines is they don't last forever, and if you build your industry near the mines that supply it it becomes uneconomic once the mine is depleted.
Also, the world got a lot bigger, to the extent that a tiny canal was no longer meaningful.
The population of Scotland as a whole has grown slowly and continuously - nothing comparable to the mass depopulation of Ireland, even when you consider the Highland Clearances. It has however mostly concentrated in the economic centers of Edinburgh and Glasgow.
British canals are smaller than you imagine, and were even when they were commercial waterways. The standard lock widths are only 7ft or 14ft (2.1m/4.3m) so the boats are narrow, proportionally long, and very small compared to a Rhine barge or something.
As with the railways, we built early, to a small gauge, and lived with the consequences of that later.
I worked on a lock automation project in the early 90s—Germany, much bigger scale. The depth thing was fascinating even then. You size infrastructure for the cargo that exists, not what you wish existed. Britain locked itself into toy boats a century before anyone thought it mattered.
I'm not sure I'd call it vandalism in the academic sense—more like operational damage from misuse. The engineering failure analysis would be interesting though, especially given how precisely balanced those caissons are. Even minor structural compromise could cascade quickly.
I've seen this in person and the wild part is how simple the actual operation is. Two counterweighted gondolas, no pumps needed. The whole thing runs on like 1.5kW — less power than a kettle. Makes you realize most impressive engineering is about elegance, not complexity.
One fun thing if you have kids is that the playground there has some demonstrations of Archimedean principles, like how an Archimedes screw works. Also, I don't keep many souvenirs of my travels, but I do have a refrigerator magnet of the Falkirk wheel that spins freely. It doubles as a cat toy.