An Account of a Civil Engineering Marvel…

Have you ever been to historic places in south India and ever wondered why the heck on earth you find so many ugly holes on huge rocks, right next to nice carvings and scriptures? Well if you have the discovery DVD’s and seen it already, good enough. The folks who still have no clue, listen carefully.

The maximum load that you are allowed to transport in the USA by road is about 30 tonnes. Anything more than this requires a license and specialized equipment and of course a lot of things. Now come to India, rewind your time way back to say 3500 B.C or 300 B.C or 700 A.D when most of these huge temples were built. We did not have airplanes, we did not have trucks or cranes to do the job. Nope, god did not do shit as usual, nor did black magic or divine power. Engineering science did the job.

The average weight of each and every rock is about 1300 tonnes and many of them shot past the regular 7000 tonne mark. Now how do you take these rocks up the hill, about 700 meters up the sea level? The simple answer is you gotta break them into pieces and take them, but then how the heck do you break such huge rocks. If your answer was drill and hammer them out, sorry mate, you scored an F (i did too!)

Drilling, hammering et all was time consuming and resourceful and required impossible amount of manpower and horsepower. Explosives are a thing that happened a few hundred years ago and were unheard of during these times. Even if they were available, blasting off mountain rocks meant you could not use them properly and cut it on a shape you wanted them to come out for specific purposes. So, here is what they did.

Instead of breaking the entire rock, they drilled very small holes into them along the line where the rock was meant to be broken. As soon as the holes were drilled, soft pieces of wood was thrust into these holes and the rock was heated so that it would expand (remember the physics lesson, objects expand on heat) and they thrust more soft wood into these holes and sealed them with mud and plastered it with lime. Now pour cold water  over it in large quantities, the rock cools down and contracts, however the wood inside absorbs the water and expands due to its soft nature and absorbing characteristic. So rock shrinks, wood enlarges/expands and thereby forces the rock to crack along the lines where the wholes were drilled.

Ta daa! You have a neatly cut rock precise to the line where the engineer drew the line and you could not cut them again into smaller pieces till they could be carried over or carved here for whatever use they were meant to be. That’s exactly how they did it. Engineering freaking genius, 1000’s of years back!