Dreaming of the 10-Ton Eiffel Tower Bullet, 1891

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 736

People find inspiration everywhere, insight to creativity in the obvious and not so.  Great statues have been envisioned in the depths of slabs of marble, solutions to mathematical problems in the step of a bus, the beginning of a new physics in the rolling ball in a wagon.  Its an old and very warn cliché, but the world can be seen in a grain of sand if you could just pieces together the bits of glass:  just as pointillism was seen in the not-simple intercession of two colors and cinematography in the latent image and the structure of the universe in a patch of dancing dust.

The Eiffel Tower has had its own way with the visions of people, from it representing the birth of The Modern, to an icon of passion, to architecture and engineering innovation, and to general  adventure and the call of possibility.  It has moved other people to think “special” thoughts:  like, for example, what a lovely canvas it would be to place a 700’-tall electrified sign.*  And to M. Carron of Grenoble, who may have the most unusual inspirations from M. Eiffel, the tower was the perfect place to drop a 40-foot tall, 20,000-pound bullet filled with 20 people in leather armchairs into a 200-foot deep champagne-glass pool.

This is certainly a singular insight.  But in 1891 it represented something a little more than just giving people a thrill ride.  Physics of impact aside for the moment, M.Carron’s bullet capsule would be released from the top of the interior of the Tower, about 1000 feet high, and released to fall into an excavated pool 150’ across and 200’ deep.  The idea was that in addition to the springs inside the capsule, the water would act as a “shock absorber”, and so “the shock felt by the occupants on landing will be in no way unpleasant”.  

[Okay, so the thing would hit at 178mph or so, and, assuming that the whole thing didn’t get completely crushed on impact, I’m not so sure that 200’ of depth is very much wiggle room for the thing to come to a halt (if it didn’t deform).  I Also it would have to not have any wind deflection so as to not veer off its perfect entry into the water.  And so on.  Calculating the force of impact is difficult without knowing how far down the bullet would go, but hitting the water at 80 m/s and stopping at 30 meters would yield something like 28,600,000 KE and 1,274,000 N. There are lots of problems….]

The thing is, though, the thing that made this so appealing, is that for the 20-francs that get a person a seat in the bullet, that they would each get to go twice as fast as any human had ever traveled before ( 65 miles per hour was about the speed of the fastest train constructed).  So it was an extraordinary claim, an done that doesn't get made all that often in the history of locomotion.

And so this wasn't a practicable or workable idea; but, well, so what?  It was an unusual idea, inspired by some sort of different thinking, which are both good places to be in according to the Gazetteer & Atlas of Ideas.  Sometimes thinking like this is just prelude to something else, thought avenues that had to be explored before the real thinking could get done, introducing you to a new geography of thought.  That's what M. Carron had going for him; the newness of his thinking was much more important than the wrongness of it.

*This story comes at the end of a post called Bad Ideas Department:  the First Image of a Hypnotized Chicken, so in spite of the title you'll wind up in Paris.

Comments

[Deb]

I found my way here via Patti. I agree that it was an unusual idea and am curious as to what else M. Carron might have invented. I was also thinking how curious he might be to see some of the rides at current day amusement parks.

[slevert]

"they would each get to go twice as fast as any human had ever traveled before (65 miles per hour was about the speed of the fastest train constructed)"

Were trains really the fastest form of transport in 1891? I don't have any stats on hand, but I'm willing to bet that in those days a good bobsled could briefly outrace the world's fastest train. I mean, today's bobsleds can go 120 mph or more, so 65 mph must've been easy enough to pull off a century ago, eh? I could be totally off base here, but it's an interesting thought at any rate.

[John Ptak]

DEB: thanks for having a looksee! I have no doubt that M. Carron would have been interested in today's amusement park rides--even if this is all he saw as a visitor to the future he would no doubt be astonished by the vast quantity of new materials. all of the light, strong stuff that go into those rides. Even as an engineer I feel that some would seem as though they were from another planet.

[John Ptak]

Slevert: I think that I'm more or less correct with 65 mph. Point is that if it was 65 or 75 or 85 that the folks on this ride would still be going twice as fast than anyone else had traveled. ANd lived. Which is a tricky point here because I have a feeling that the folks in the capsule would've been mush at the end of the day.