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Then there was the London to Birmingham railway line, built largely by hand, which was supposed to be more work by less people in less time. "Peter Lecount, an assistant engineer of the London Birmingham railway, produced a number of - possibly hyperbolic - comparisons in an effort to demonstrate that the London and Birmingham Railway was "the greatest public work ever executed either in ancient or modern times".[4] In particular, he suggested that the effort to build the Great Pyramid of Giza amounted to the lifting of 15,733,000,000 cubic feet of stone by 1 foot (say, 450,000,000 m3 by 0.3 m). The railway, excluding a long string of tasks – drainage, ballasting, and so on – involved the lifting of 25,000,000,000 cubic feet (say, 700,000,000 m3) of material reduced to the weight of stone used in the pyramid. The pyramid involved, he says, the effort of 300,000 men (according to Diodorus Siculus) or 100,000 (according to Herodotus) for twenty years. The railway involved 20,000 men for five years. In passing, he also noted that the cost of the railway in penny pieces, was enough to more than form a belt of pennies around the equator; and the amount of material moved would be enough to build a wall 1 foot (305 mm) high by one foot wide, more than three times around the equator." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_and_Birmingham_Railway#... |