PYRAMID AND RAILWAY

Evening Post, Volume CXXVI, Issue 128, 26 November 1938, Page 10

PYRAMID AND RAILWAY

The London ana Birmingham Railway, the centenary of the completion of which is being celebrated, was the subject of one of the most curious calculations in cubic measure ever made, says the "Manchester Guardian." It was at that time by far the biggest piece of railway constructional work ever achieved, and one of the engineers employed on it set out to prove that it involved the greatest outlay of human energy in history. Looking about for something with which to make a comparison, he fixed on the Great Pyramid as representing what was generally thought to be the vastest work of man. Allowing for the foundations, galleries, and so forth, and reducing the whole to one uniform denominator, he decided that the building of the Great Pyramid represented the feat of lifting 15,763,000,000 cubic feet of stone to a height of one foot. He then made a similar calculation for the railway, and brought it out at 25,000,000,000 cubic feet lifted one foot. Diodorus Siculus gives the number of men employed on the pyramid as 300,000 and Herodotus as 100,000; the time employed was supposed to have been twenty years. The engineer was able to point out that 20,000 railway construction men had lifted 9,267,000,----000 more cubic feet one foot in less than five years.