In 1930, the 22M-pound Indiana Bell building was rotated 90 degrees

https://mastodon.social/@Miriamm/110221714996508234

by rwmj • 3 years ago

178 76 3 years ago

dsfyu404ed• 3 years ago

Distance per time seems like a very poor choice of unit for something that's roughly rotating about one corner of itself.

MrDunham• 3 years ago

True, but radians or degrees are general more abstract.

"0.24 degrees per hour" (assuming 12 work hours per day) just doesn't really ring to me... and I have a mechanical engineering degree.

Someone• 3 years ago

It gets worse when you call it 14.4 (arc) minutes per hour.

Ignoring the ‘arc’, that’s dimensionless. You could just call it “0.24” ;-)

jmkb• 3 years ago

Picture an analog clock and it can be 0.008 hours/hour... about one percent of an hourhand's movement.

em-bee• 3 years ago

measuring degrees doesn't seem useful anyways, because it is not the rotating speed that is impressive but the speed against the ground at the outer edge.

OJFord• 3 years ago

I would guess it's the length of the outermost arc, sort of makes sense with the relation to employees inside not noticing it.

f1shy• 3 years ago

It was not only rotated, but also shifted: „was shifted 52 feet south“

1letterunixname3• 3 years ago

Let's find the 2D (3x3) translation matrix for this.

For angle representation, better use gradians because radians and degrees are too easy.

jihadjihad• 3 years ago

Fun fact: the building's architect was Kurt Vonnegut, Sr., the father of the famous author. Indiana Bell wanted the building demolished to make room for a larger HQ building, but Vonnegut's idea was to move the building out of the way instead [0].

"Between Oct. 12 and Nov. 14 1930 the eight-story 11,000-ton Indiana Bell building was shifted 52 feet south along Meridian St. and rotated 90 degrees to face New York St. Workmen used a concrete mat cushioned by Oregon fir timbers 75-ton, hydraulic jacks and rollers, as the mass moved off one roller workers placed another ahead of it. Every six strokes of the jacks would shift the building three-eights of an inch - moving it 15 inches per hour."

"Gas, electric heat, water and sewage were were maintained to the building all during the move. The 600 workers entered and left the traveling structure using a sheltered passageway that moved with the building. The employees never felt the building move and telephone service went on without interruption. And yes, the move took less than 30 days. It remains one of the largest buildings ever moved. The building was demolished in 1963."

0: https://www.indystar.com/story/news/history/retroindy/2014/0...

jonplackett• 3 years ago

demolished in 63!

After all that? FFS

aaronmdjones• 3 years ago

Put another way, by doing this, they managed to get another 33 years of useful life out of the building before its inevitable demolition.

selcuka• 3 years ago

It was build in 1907. So instead of getting demolished ~23 years later it was done when it was ~56 years old. Quite a win.

FuriouslyAdrift• 3 years ago

The original was the Central Union Telephone Company building and the one moved to make way for the new building which was built by Vonnegut. The original building was demolished in 1963. The Vonnegut building is still there.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AT%26T_Building_(Indianapolis)

Joker_vD3• 3 years ago

An inspiring reminder that lots of crazily monumental (pun intended) things are technically possible if only you actually want them to happen and willing to spend money on it.

P.S. "22 million pounds"? That's approximately 22 thousand half-tons or 11 thousand tons in sensible units. Then again, we're still measuring disk sizes in half-kibibytes by default even though the sector sizes have actually been 4/8 KiB for years...

briffle• 3 years ago

When you word it that way, it doesn't sound as impressive.. I've seen many 20k ton objects move large distances.. they are trains :)

JoeAltmaier2• 3 years ago

And 25 years earlier in 1905, 6000 ton Calvin Hall was moved on the Iowa campus in a similar way. It was a well-understood technique by 1930.

Joker_vD3• 3 years ago

Are they? I vaguely recollect freight trains' weight being in the vicinity of 6-8 thousand tons, not in the twenty thousands. How long would such a train be, 200 boxcars or something? Seems a bit unwieldy.

Ekaros• 3 years ago

Many of them even float... Referring to ships that are next size up.

rootusrootus2• 3 years ago

For further reading, I found this [0]. 20000T happens, but seems to be on the top end and not a typical train.

[0] https://www.trainconductorhq.com/how-much-does-a-train-weigh...

kube-system3• 3 years ago

For comparison, the Ever Given that got stuck in the Suez a couple years back has a capacity just short of 200,000 tons.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ever_Given

nayuki2• 3 years ago

The correct answer in metric is 9.98 Gg (gigagrams).

we're still measuring disk sizes in half-kibibytes by default

Where do you see that? Marketing and operating systems always measure disk sizes in bytes (or KB, KiB, MB, etc.), not sectors. Only in low-level tools like some hex editors and disk partitioners do I see data measured in sectors.

the sector sizes have actually been 4/8 KiB for years

512-B sectors for hard drives and flash drives, yes. But I'm too young to recall whether older hard and floppy disks had varying sector sizes. I can say, though, that CD's sector size is either 2048 bytes (data mode), 2324 bytes (XA), or some other value in other modes.

Joker_vD3• 3 years ago

Where do you see that?

Precisely where you've described; I've also seen "du" use it once, although it normally uses 1 KiB blocks (one of the very few things that I agree with rms on).

512-B sectors for hard drives and flash drives,

They've been using 4 KiB sectors since 2011; the 512-bytes sectors are emulated in the controller: [0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Format

Dylan168072• 3 years ago

The correct answer in metric is 9.98 Gg (gigagrams).

10 gigagrams. It's a rough estimate of 500 tons per story.

But tonne is a perfectly good "unit officially accepted for use with the SI". If you're willing to use "minute" and "liter" you should be fine with tonne.

mangamadaiyan2• 3 years ago

Older SCSI HDDs allowed you to format them with whatever sector size you wanted. Sector sizes that were greater than 512 bytes were not uncommon.

equalsione• 3 years ago

"During the 1850s and 1860s, engineers carried out a piecemeal raising of the level of central Chicago to lift it out of low-lying swampy ground. Streets, sidewalks, and buildings were physically raised on jackscrews."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raising_of_Chicago

finnh• 3 years ago

Same deal in Seattle. Small parts of "the underground" remained in use for decades, including as speakeasies during Prohibition, but nowadays it's only tourist thing (but pretty cool nonetheless)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seattle_Underground

rootusrootus2• 3 years ago

A little different, though. No buildings were raised in Seattle, they just built the roads higher (12-30 feet) and bridged the old sidewalks. Second floor became first floor.

paulette449• 3 years ago

I went on the Seattle Underground tour, it was really interesting, strongly recommended. The website has more history [1]:

"(Bill) Speidel ultimately did find the remains of the city consumed in the Great Seattle Fire of 1889, a town founded on mostly soggy tideflats whose streets would, whenever the rains came, bloat deep enough with mud to consume dogs and small children. After the fire, which destroyed some 25 square blocks of mostly wooden buildings in the heart of Seattle, it was unanimously decided that all new construction must be of stone or brick masonry. The city also decided to rise up from the muck in which its original streets lay. It was this decision that created the Underground: The city built retaining walls, eight feet or higher, on either side of the old streets, filled in the space between the walls, and paved over the fill to effectively raise the streets, making them one story higher than the old sidewalks that still ran alongside them."

[1] http://www.undergroundtour.com/about/history.html

chrisbrandow• 3 years ago

I’ve never heard of this. Incredibly fun fact!

n1b0m3• 3 years ago

How did they get under the foundations of the building in order to move it?

tantalor• 3 years ago

You don't move the foundation, you move the building.

n1b0m3• 3 years ago

How do you get in between the foundations and the building to lift it?

xenadu02• 3 years ago

To give a more concrete answer: you dig under a small section of footing. Small enough that the footing itself bridges the load across the gap. Then you install your first support element between the remaining undisturbed soil and the footing. Now that section is supported just as it was before, but by a jack, strut, wheel truck, or whatever instead of soil. Rinse and repeat until all the soil is gone.

For larger internal spans you usually install bracing elements like trusses or I-beams. This is done in a similar way: you hollow out a narrow strip, install the truss/beam, then that gives you enough leeway to continue digging on either side of it until you reach the location for the next truss/beam. Shims are used to ensure solid contact all along the length. The trusses/beams are anchored to the support elements.

At any one time only a very small part of the building's foundation is "floating" and unsupported.

Actually moving the building varies based on its size, weight, and other factors. You'd usually jack up the whole building to make room for the trucking elements which might be independently steerable wheels, one or more semi-trailers, or whatever. Then you lower the building onto the trucking element and it becomes a really big vehicle or trailer that you slowly and carefully move.

At the destination you usually pour new footings and/or piers in the same pattern as the original support elements so your truck bits can just drive right into place. Then you again just jacks to lift the building off the truck elements, move them out, then lower the building onto the new footings.

This is very simplified. A lot of engineering goes into making sure the building moves as a single piece without too much flexing (vertically or horizontally) and that the "road" it moves on can support the weight.

JoeAltmaier2• 3 years ago

Years earlier in 1905, the University of Iowa moved it's Science Building to a new location, off the famous Pentacrest park to its current location across the street. It had to be turned to pass through the neighboring buildings, then turned back to its final location on a foundation prepared.

Here's an article (a pdf, not a web page)

https://pubs.lib.uiowa.edu/ihi/article/id/1547/download/pdf/

returningfory2• 3 years ago

Reminds me of a recent story in New York in which a Broadway theater was raised 30 feet. The owner of the building wanted to put commercial space on the ground floor, but the theater itself was on the ground floor and protected. So the solution was to raise the theater above the ground floor. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/28/business/palace-theater-t...

oriettaxx• 3 years ago

https://www.openculture.com/2021/04/when-the-indiana-bell-bu...

jtaillon• 3 years ago

This article (and the included video) has a bit more detail for those interested in the mechanics of how they accomplished the move (like me!): https://www.archdaily.com/973183/the-building-that-moved-how...

dingosity• 3 years ago

And yet today we can't update a tag on a Lambda without something going wrong.

mtoner23• 3 years ago

Chicago just did one of these moves last year. To move an old building out of the way for new red line track. https://news.wttw.com/2021/08/04/time-lapse-video-cta-moves-...

0cf8612b2e1e• 3 years ago

They did that one in only two days!

Kon-Peki• 3 years ago

Here's another from about 10 years ago; they moved a mansion and its coach house to another block on the street to make room for a basketball arena. Impressive that they squeezed it into a tiny city lot, and saved the tree in the (new) backyard!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HVEgXkbiTaE

hindsightbias• 3 years ago

That 8000 ton building at Fell & Franklin? It wasn't built there.

https://hoodline.com/2015/06/newton-j-tharp-school/ https://www.opensfhistory.org/osfhcrucible/2021/02/28/the-jo...

robotnikman• 3 years ago

Reminds me of the raising of Chicago, which happened in the 1850's

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raising_of_Chicago

dang• 3 years ago

Indiana Bell Building was rotated 90° while everyone inside still worked in1930 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30544635 - March 2022 (2 comments)

In 1930 the Indiana Bell building was rotated 90° - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29441670 - Dec 2021 (122 comments)

In 1930 the Indiana Bell Telephone Building was rotated 90 degrees - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26534718 - March 2021 (2 comments)

Indiana Bell Building Move (Of 1930) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26530546 - March 2021 (9 comments)

Indiana Bell moved a functioning building in 1930 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21468788 - Nov 2019 (24 comments)

Rotating the Indiana Bell Building (2014) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20901264 - Sept 2019 (5 comments)

openforce• 3 years ago

Things people do for Vaastu Compliance! /jk

zacharyvoase• 3 years ago

This may look cute, but you should know that buildings only do this when they are extremely distressed. If you see a building rotating, no matter how slowly, do not approach it!

1letterunixname3• 3 years ago

This may happen https://youtu.be/yHp4Wi2d6BQ

lo_zamoyski• 3 years ago

This is more common than it might seem.[0][1][2][3]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structure_relocation

[1] https://tvpworld.com/41981555/lubomirski-palace-moved-to-new...

[2] https://science.howstuffworks.com/engineering/structural/hea...

[3] https://untappedcities.com/2014/08/22/8-historic-buildings-t...

DANmode• 3 years ago

Most of these aren't housing telecom infrastructure, or performing downtime-less patchovers!

This feat is far more impressive than you're giving credit.

Doxin• 3 years ago

This[1] is a great video on the topic of cutovers. Not quite downtime-less, but seriously impressive little amount of downtime in any case.

[1] https://youtu.be/saRir95iIWk

hi41• 3 years ago

What a marvel of engineering! I find it amazing that it could be done almost 100 years back. I didn’t think technology was so advanced back then.

Don’t the pillars of the building go deep into the land? How were able to lift the whole building with the pillars that buried so deep?

vba616• 3 years ago

Moving buildings, not just rotating them, is not that unusual.

In fact, there's a building I know of that was moved, people changed their mind soon after, and then they moved it again.

Once it was a mansion that reportedly belonged to Leland Stanford (you west coasters might have heard of him), later a nursing home, and finally a bank. It was in the way of a Wal-Mart and other development.

This page says that one of the moves was 350 feet:

https://www.wolfehousebuildingmovers.com/news/moving-ingerso...

A rail depot in Ohio was moved 1000 feet:

https://www.wolfehousebuildingmovers.com/news/wolfe-moves-cs...

A gas station is claimed to have been relocated 1.5 miles in three hours:

https://www.wolfehousebuildingmovers.com/news/historic-phila...

(This is not an endorsement of the company and I'm not affiliated with them; I just found their page by looking for the mansion)

fifilura• 3 years ago

And here you are, a similar stunt performed in China.

https://nitter.net/historyinmemes/status/1648843533116137472...

In 1930, the 22M-pound Indiana Bell building was rotated 90 degrees

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