From as early as 8000 BCE, mankind has been building towards the sky
and in the last millenia our abilities to build skyward has gone far beyond anyone thought
possible. So, what is the tallest man-made structure to have ever existed on earth?
Here’s a clue... it’s not what you think.
I’m Stu, this is Debunked and we’re here to sort the truths from the myths,
and the facts from the misconceptions.
Let’s face it, these constructions haven’t always been built for practical purposes,
many have been built for personal gain and the kudos of having the
tallest grandest structure to exist on the planet!
So let’s start with one of the earliest recorded egotists,
Pharaoh Khufu. He started construction of the Great Pyramid of Giza circa 2550 B.C...
...and believed he would become a god in the afterlife, so had a pyramid tomb
built for his body containing all the riches he would need in the next life.
It would have taken a workforce of thousands to build a structure like this
but contrary to popular belief, the workers were actually made up of skilled tradesmen
and laborers, and not hordes of slaves who were worked to death.
Instead, archaeological evidence has shown that they were fed well
and provided with comfortable accommodation, a privilege slaves would not have enjoyed.
Once the 2.3 million stone blocks, each weighing 2.3 to 13.6 tonnes (2.5 to 15 US tons) were in
place, the entire structure was covered with Limestone.
This means that the warm golden hue that the pyramid has today,
was in fact pure white originally.
After two decades the Great Pyramid Of Giza was
complete and stood proudly at 481 feet or 147 meters.
To get a true sense of scale for the first of our tallest structures,
that’s 25 of your average 2 storey houses stacked on top of each other. (*AVG USA/UK = 19ft)
This Tallest Man-Made Structure held the title for nearly 4000 years, until in 1311
another structure built in the name of god made its way 8% closer to the heavens.
The Lincoln Cathedral in England took around 200 years to build and was topped
off with a central spire that made the structure 160 meters or 524 feet tall.
This prized spire stood for nearly 240 years (237) and despite a storm causing it to collapse
in 1548, a height beyond this would not be achieved again until the late 1800s.
Up until this point religious spires were the
exclusive competition for the Tallest Structure accolade…
but in the District of Columbia,
USA construction to honour the country’s first president began in 1848
and over the course of nearly 40 years the Washington Monument took shape,
albeit with a 20 year hiatus in the middle due
to political differences that saw the grounds used as a cattle pen.
But by 1884 the commemorative structure was erected to a height of 169 M or 555 FT,
higher than even the tallest church spires in the world today.
However, Washington would be utterly dwarfed a
mere 5 years later when the French achieved a truly astronomical feat.
Designed to be light and airy, yet strong, this wrought-iron lattice
structure was built to celebrate the Centennial of the French Revolution.
The Eiffel Tower took only 2 years (2 years, 2 months, 5 days) to complete and stood…
nearly double the height of the Washington Monument at a staggering 300m or 984 ft.
The metal frame work alone weighed around 7,300 tonnes and it was coated in 60 tonnes of paint,
which actually needs recoating every 7 years!
But while the tower is today an icon of the Parisian cityscape,
the structure was originally due to be dismantled and scrapped only 20 years after its completion.
So, to prove its worth to the city, it’s designer Gustave Eiffel mounted
a broadcasting antenna on top, which not only became invaluable to military transmissions,
and later TV and radio broadcasting,
but eventually pushed the tower’s overall height above 1000ft (1063ft), hitting 324m,
but that didn’t happen until 1957.
At its original height of 300m, the tower held the Tallest title for more than 4 decades (41 YEARS).
During this time, across the Atlantic,
the craze for Skyscrapers had begun to populate the city skylines of America,
and Walter P Chrysler commissioned a building of his own namesake to be the tallest in New York.
However, a rivalry emerged with the Bank Of Manhattan, who too wanted the tallest
building in New York. A construction competition commenced. After a dangerously rapid 2 years...
...and a spire that was made in secret to overshadow the competition,
The Chrysler Building proved the tallest in not just New York, but the world. At 77-stories,
this epitome of Art Deco design stood at nearly 319 meters (318.8 M) or 1,046 feet.
However, this beauty of a skyscraper soon stood in
the shadow of what is now one of the most famous structures of all time.
But before we set your sights on that,
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Just one year later, and named after the New York state’s nickname - The Empire State
Building was designed to be the world’s first building to rise more than 100 stories high.
The construction of this building proved an important source of employment for New York
during the Great Depression, and saw up to 3,400 people a day working on the project.
Although it was higher than the Chrysler Building, it was built quicker than anyone
could have anticipated. It was finished under budget and ahead of schedule in just 410 days!
Originally designed to be a mooring station for airships,
its crowning spire took the total height to an enormous 381 meters or 1,250 feet!
With the addition of an antenna in 1950 the Empire
State Building stretched another 222 feet or 68 meters into the sky.
With or without this addition, the king would still been dethroned by
an unlikely challenger only a couple of decades later.
Because oddly enough, over the following years this ‘Tallest’ title wouldn’t pass
from one gigantic skyscraper to another. No. Instead the iconic
Empire State Building was topped by an unlikely and less elegant contender.
You see, by the mid 1950s a new phenomenon called television had gained ground in the USA
and new structures needed building to enable networks to beam their shows all over the country.
So in Oklahoma in 1954, construction of the Griffin Television Tower shot
skyward to an incredible 480 meters or 1 and a half thousand feet!
Known as the Komo World’s Tallest Video or KWTV Tower it provided
the widest broadcast coverage across the southwest of the United States.
“The higher the tower, the more views we got!”
The comparatively light structure weighed 476 tonnes, but due to its narrow dimensions
it required multiple levels of double guy-wires to support it in severe winds.
Over the following decades as television consumption increased, so did the height
of these masts, and the title was passed through a variety of radio and TV towers,
culminating with the Warsaw Radio Mast in Poland in 1974.
This thing stood more than twice as high as the Chrysler building at whopping 646
meters (646.4M), over 2,100 feet (2,121ft)
Built to essentially broadcast the success of communist rule,
the mast was so powerful it could transmit as far as the United States and Australia.
Despite the mast’s collapse during high winds in 1991,
another structure wouldn’t reach these dizzying heights until 2010.
Here we find ourselves in Dubai, a city that was originally built on fishing,
pearl diving and maritime trade, and it existed mainly at a two storey level. But
independence from the British in the 1970s combined with an oil boom saw a new city
centre form of man-made marinas, beaches, and lakes, surrounded by skyscrapers.
But construction on the jewel in Dubai’s crown didn’t begin
until 2004 and would see a structure reach higher than anyone had thought possible.
Designed to be, not just a ‘Super-Tall’ skyscraper,
but a vertical city it’s Neo-Futurist style wasn't just for aesthetics.
The stepped columns that rise up around the central spired structure are actually designed
to deflect wind from the building. But the interesting force that we’re dealing with here,
is not that this enormously tall building could be blown over, but instead be sucked over.
As wind hits one side of the tower, it sheds and forms whirlpools of air on the opposite side.
The wind stress that these vortices create
can cause a building to rock side to side and damage the structure.
The changes in shapes of the Burj Khalifa at differing heights,
essentially confuses the wind so that there’s not one concentrated force.
“It’s almost like you have several different buildings with height
and each one of them has different vortices shedding at different wind speeds. All of
those things can’t happen at the same time so what you’re left with is very little vortex shedding.”
Standing more than double the height of the Empire State Building, the Burj Khalifa was
completed in 2010 and stretched, to a previously unimaginable, 2,716 ft or 828 meters high!
While competition may take the limelight in years to come with the likes of Saudi
Arabia’s Jeddah Tower being constructed to 1 kilometer up from the Earth’s surface,
the subsequent years have seen The Burj Khalifa stand proudly as the World’s Tallest Building.
But wait! Building!? We’re looking for the World’s Tallest Structure. What if
there’s a category of structure that we’ve completely missed?
Well let’s rewind just a few years, back to 2007. Before the Burj Khalifa had been completed,
here in the holy bible of records, the great adjudicators of Guinness World Records
declared something rather unexpected as the World’s Tallest Freestanding Structure.
210 kilometers southeast of New Orleans a tangled metal tower stood taller than any
structure before it. Except, this thing stood underwater.
With its entire structure weighing more than fifty thousand tonnes,
The Petronius Compliant Tower rose 2000 feet, that’s 610 meters, up from the sea floor.
Towers like this are designed to be more flexible than traditional land structures…
and can cope with a 2% sway of its height, by comparison,
most buildings on land are designed to withstand a maximum of 0.5%.
Two years later another type of oil platform, the URSA Tension Leg Platform,
seized the title with a total height of 4,285 feet,
that’s 1,306 m and taller than the Burj Khalifa with the Empire State Building balanced on top!
The structure includes 16 tendons, of 3,800 feet or 1200
meters (1158 M) in length. Each tendon has a 32 inch diameter and weighs 1000 tonnes.
The foundations of these tendons go a further 134 meters or 440 feet into the ground,
although we’re not counting foundations,
for comparison the Burj Khalifa’s only go 50 meters or 164 feet into the ground.
This monolith of a structure is designed to remain
steady in the ocean and can simultaneously withstand hurricane force waves and winds.
Two years later, another structure of the same design superseded it,
with the Magnolia ETLP being declared the World’s Tallest Structure
extending more than 1,400 meters or 4,700 ft up from the sea floor.
Now it’s been debated whether underwater structures are eligible for this accolade.
The big difference between a structure like this and that of one on land is that
a building or tower is held up by means of a rigid steel and concrete framework.
Instead of being held up, a tension leg platform is being held
down using steel tendons. But to clear the matter up Guinness World Records have stated:
“If "height" is defined as the distance that a structure extends upwards from
the Earth's surface, then the Magnolia Extended Tension Leg
Platform in the Gulf of Mexico is the world's tallest man-made structure.”
Since then, Bigfoot is the latest Platform to extend even further to over five thousand feet,
or nearly one thousand six hundred meters. If you stacked up 2 Burj Khalifas,
only the tip of the second spire would be poking above sea level.
But what of the future? There’s a limit to how deep you can go in the ocean,
but there is no limit to the skies.
Enter the Clouds Architecture Office. In 2017 these guys…
...proposed a structure that is nearly out of this world.
They have designed the World’s Tallest Structure to be hung from an
orbiting asteroid 50,000 kilometers above ground… yep you heard that right.
The actual height of The Analemma Tower is yet to be specified, but it would be made up
of offices and residential units and would essentially be an elevated floating city.
"I would love to see it built, however I don't think I'll be alive when it happens,"
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