Comment by Barathkanna 2 days ago
Cool to see how much engineering relied on intuition and improvisation before modern tools existed. These methods look primitive now, but they worked because people understood materials so well. Makes me wonder how much of that hands-on knowledge we’re losing today.
The deaths of masons and builders. All the way back to Hammurabi.
BTW, Hammurabi was particularly dastardly in his building code specifications. You could, of course, be put to death if a building or wall collapsed and killed someone. But that was just table stakes. Even Ur-Nammu had that much figured out.
Hammurabi added on to the punishment by forcing you to rebuild the wall..
to the specifications of reputable builders..
at your own expense..
and then be put to death.
Don't even get me started on Asian "building codes" back in the day.
HN user Arainach is right, no one was guessing, or intuiting, while building in a lot of these empires. It was wayyy too risky. Pretty much everyone was following rules passed down by the builders for centuries. In some cases, millennia. Only an actual ruler would dare even consider deviating from the known good building forms.
Life was worth a lot less back then. If they were putting people to death over every construction accident that claimed a life nothing would've got built. And back then they weren't building skyscrapers and suspension bridges where one key joint fails and the rest falls over with no warning. They were building simple fairly short structures that can only really kill you if the roof hits you on its way down and gave a whole lot of warning before that happened. Castles and cathedrals and city walls and the like don't fall down unless you intentionally ignore or obfuscate a ton of cracking a slumping and things moving, etc, etc. The people who'd have faced consequences like specified in these code are people who've actually done malicious things.
Being a successful architect was enough to make you a god in ancient Egypt
It was often neither intuition nor improvisation, but rules. Bill Hammack's "The Things We Make" goes into a number of examples.
For a slightly more modern example, take European Gothic Cathedrals. People weren't guessing, they weren't improvising, and they weren't relying on intuition - if they did most of them would have collapsed long ago.
These structures were made without blueprints, and often many of the head masons may have been illiterate, but a knowledge of forms and rules such as "the thickness of the wall of an arch should be a bit more than a fifth the span of the arch" allowed for reliably producing stable structures.
These rules were less precise than modern engineering math and mean that many of the structures are overengineered / have higher margins of error than are considered necessary in modern construction, but they are not based on intuition or guessing.