This is the tallest man-made structure on earth, a city in the sky nearly half a kilometer tall, the

Burj Dubai is the pinnacle of skyscraper engineering, it owes its success to seven key inventions we have
lined up, seven landmark buildings. Historic Giants of the skyscraper world at the heart of each one lies a
major technological innovation that allowed engineers to reach ever taller into the sky one by one.
Traveling up the scale will reveal the incredible stories behind these structures and the inventions that
have driven them higher seven ingenious leaps forward that have enabled skyscrapers to evolve from
big to bigger into the world's biggest.

Dubai is the fastest-growing city in the world an army of cranes and labourers work around the
clock to turn the city into a place that the whole world will look up to the centerpiece in the grand plan
is the Burj to buy the tallest skyscraper in the world it is the ultimate lead in a series of historic
engineering breakthroughs.

To understand how the Burj Dubai can be this tall we need to go back in time and look at how
skyscrapers begin the first breakthrough happens in the 19th century with a building that's only 43
meters tall the builders of the equitable Life Building in New York realize that before buildings can reach
taller they must find a way to make people climb higher the first big obstacle to skyscrapers is the stair
people weren't willing to walk lots of flights of stairs stairs and old office buildings for long they were
very dark and people weren't ready to climb stairs more than to the second floor the third floor and if
you were a lawyer and you were looking for clients and you were on the fifth floor you're undoubtedly
going to lose clients because they didn't want to come up to your office by the time you reach to the
sixth floor seventh floor you're incredibly windy that's it for me there's an obvious solution to the
problem the elevator but early elevators have one deadly fault nothing stops them from falling if the
Rope breaks but then a mechanic from Vermont invents a device that can stop a falling elevator almost
instantly in 1854 Elijah graves otis demonstrates his invention at the World's Fair in New York he stands
on a platform high up in the air apparently held only by a rope all right Stan be gentle with me then otis
tells his gasping audience that the rope is about to be cut Stan cut the rope and at the end of that
cutting of the Rope he reportedly took off his top hat bowed to the audience and said all safe gentlemen
all safe this is the world's first fully automated safety elevator it's a simple yet very clever invention the
critical element the elevator rope is secured with a powerful wagon spring mounted on top of the cab
this spring connects to a set of metal prongs on each side of the elevator the prongs run along guide rails
fitted with a row of teeth when the Rope breaks it triggers a chain of events the spring relaxes and
forces the metal prongs into the teeth locking the cab in place this is a true engineering breakthrough a
fact lost on Elisha Otis he was not a businessman he was not a marketer he was a mechanic he was a
tinkerer and I don't know that he fully recognized the power of this invention the elevator completely
transforms the urban landscape and it all starts on a busy street corner in downtown New York this
corner was the site of the equitable Life Assurance company's headquarters a building of extraordinary
significance because it was the first office building with an elevator and without an elevator the
skyscraper would be impossible the building standing here today is the new equitable life headquarters
it has replaced the old equitable life building which is not a skyscraper as we note it didn't scrape the sky
didn't soar up but it changed the notion of what an office building could be until the equitable life the
lower floors for building are the most desirable but the elevator completely reverses the economics of
real estate equitable understood that the upper floors now which receive light and air and we're away
from the noise of traffic would be the most valuable spaces in the building so what did they do they
occupy the lowest storeys in the building and they rend it out at the highest rents possible the upper
floors of the building so it's the whole idea of a skyscraper with high rents and views and light and air on
the upper floors which we still deal with today that was invented at the equitable building the Burj
Dubai takes the idea of the elevator to the extreme equitable life had seven and a half stories the Burj
Dubai has over 160 a height that stretches elevated technology to its absolute limit the Burj Dubai will
be able to accommodate 35,000 people getting a population the size of a small town in and out of the
building is the ultimate challenge for the elevators to cope with the numbers the Burj to buy has 53
different elevators some reach over 35 kilometres an hour and climb a hundred and 20 floors in under
50 seconds the biggest lifts carry up to 46 passengers stopping such a speeding juggernaut in an
emergency is a Titanic challenge we're now talking 30 tons 40 tons 50 tons of moving mass what
happens to an elevator brake system is the equivalent of driving an 18-wheel truck off a cliff and
stopping it in midair as soon as an elevator on the Burj Dubai exceeds its speed limit emergency brakes
spring into action metal brake shoes bite down on the guide rails and generate enough braking power to
stop the elevator within a few meters but at the end of the day the safety that we depend on that the
riders depend on to bring the car to a safe and a controlled stop is still a mechanical device all safe
gentlemen all safe the safety elevator allows the skyscraper to break through the five-story barrier
suddenly tall buildings a big business but as they approach 80 meters traditional building materials are
no longer strong enough to make the leap to the 87 meter fuller Flatiron Building in New York the
skyscraper must be reinvented this is the Monadnock building in Chicago a living fossil in the skyscraper
world when it opens in 1893 it's the world's largest office block but it's 16 stories stretch stone to the
limit the walls at the bottom must be a whopping 2 meters thick to bear the weight of the Monadnock
the structure is so extremely heavy that it begins to sink into the soft Chicago soil eventually half a
meter of bricks and mortar disappear underground obviously stone is not skyscraper material so when
the architect of the Monadnock Daniel Burnham plans the fuller building in New York he's in a bit of a
pickle the extremely narrow plot dictates that his 22 story skyscraper has to be triangular Birnam knows
that there is no room for stone walls they would have to be so thick that they would be hardly any space
left on the ground floor and wasting valuable space is a cardinal sin for a skyscraper architect stone is
out of the question but if you look at the fuller flatiron today it looks like it's built from stone so how did
Burnham do it it's all just a facade under the skin of the full lies one of the most important building
technologies ever invented Burnham makes the building out of steel columns and steel beams locks
together into a steel skeleton steel is much stronger than stone so this skeleton can be thin and light yet
it can support the weight of the whole structure to keep the weather out Burnham can simply hang thin
masonry walls of the steel frame like curtains the building is an immediate success the Flatiron Building
was the first skyscraper to become a symbol of New York it attracted photographers famous painters
painted the building and it became a symbol at the highest levels of culture the Flatiron even affects the
weather the shape of the building caused a wind tunnel effect and men used to hang out at the corner
and watch for women's dresses to blow up so that they could get a look at women's ankles steel
construction truly moves the skyscraper on this is a new breed of building once the steel skeleton frame
is perfected basically you could build hypothetically to any height and that meant that land values in
commercial areas of New York absolutely skyrocketed because no longer was land valued for an 8 or 10
or 12 story building which was the most you could build without the steel skeleton frame but now the
sky was literally the limit the skeleton of the Burj by combines the best of steel and stone it uses over
30,000 tonnes of steel but in a very clever way the steel is embedded in artificial stone concrete this
reinforced concrete backbone will be clad in a high-tech curtain wall of glass and steel the wall latches
onto the bores to buy in units of up to two stories tall the panels themselves are rigid but the joints
between them are flexible if an occupant moves a heavy piece of furniture towards the edge of the
skyscraper the floor will Bend and force down the exterior wall but the flexible joint in between the wall
panels absorbs the movement so the wall as a whole is not damaged the joints also allow each wall
section to expand and contract as the Desert Sun passes around the skyscraper heating it up but the
most potent force it must withstand is the desert wind the curtain wall of the Burj buy will cost a
hundred million dollars so before it's bolted on the engineers take prototype sections for a test drive
this is where the rubber meets the road yes it has conformant has to perform right here today the
engineers apply the ultimate test an aircraft engine simulates a Desert Storm we try to put everything
that mother nature would throw out the building into these tests if the practice cop resists the window
get the prospect of the hope that the could will peeling off the whole building if you erected a curtain
wall and you didn't find out how to inherent design flaw like at Lake or something until after it was
occupied and the first storm came it's unthinkable the propeller spits wind and rain backwards at the
curtainwall section mounted behind it it reaches speeds of withstand pressures the buffeting and the
movement of the water across the surface is finding weaknesses and if there's any flaws and
connections or holes in the cart wall the water will seep through so if you see any water coming through
it's a fail and you know what's happened but today the prototype passes the test with flying colors the
Burj Dubai takes one step further to completion now the challenge for the engineers is to stop the
baking Desert Sun from turning their beautiful glass tower into a giant oven steel catapults skyscrapers
to unseen heights as walls now no longer have to bear all the weight architects can make them out of
completely new materials glass promises to flood buildings with light but also with heat to beat this new
enemy skyscrapers would need to get cooler when the United Nations designed their new headquarters
in New York they face a dilemma they want to cover the building with glass to make the interior as
bright as possible what they don't want is a 39 storey greenhouse a glass wall would allow a lot of light
into the building but also solar radiation this would be absorbed by the objects inside these in turn
would radiate heat into the surrounding air and warm it up as the sealed glass windows can't let the hot
air escape things would get uncomfortable very quickly you would basically be in an oven in the summer
so you need to have artificial cooling in order to make these glass skyscrapers work an American
engineer called Willis carrier cracks the cooling problem he invents a machine that can cool and dry hot
moist air by making it wet first it injects a fine mist of cold water into a chamber next it sucks hot soggy
air into this cold mist seen up close something remarkable happens as the hot air hits the surface of the
cold water the air cools down releases its moisture onto the droplets so the air is cooled and dried in a
single step once you have air conditioning you no longer needed to be near Windows so suddenly you
could build skyscrapers with enormous floor plates and people would be working on an interior far away
from window and so air conditioning allowed for these buildings that are really really massive so all of
these things together made the building pay to its maximum air conditioning allows skyscrapers like the
boys to buy to rise up in even the hottest climates and there is hardly a place on earth where air
conditioning matters more than Dubai temperatures easily reach 40 degrees Celsius in the shade the
average humidity is 90% a truly extreme environment for a skyscraper the key to shielding the boys
Dubai from the rutile Desert Sun is built into its glass skin the air conditioning couldn't keep up but we
just use normal glass well this is an actual piece of the glass that we're using on the building we have an
outside face than inside face so what the outside coating does reflects the daily solar heat that comes
direct from the Sun we pass into an apartment or office the outside pain is coated with a thin layer of
metal like sunscreen the metal coating deflects ultraviolet radiation that would otherwise heat up the
building but the sunscreen is useless against the infrared that radiates from the hot desert sand so the
inner pane is coated with a thin layer of silver that keeps the heat rays out over 30,000 glass panels
enough to cover 17 football fields will protect the Burj Dubai from the scorching heat air conditioning
allows ever more people to work more comfortably inside skyscrapers and taller skyscrapers housing
more workers often greater profits the only problem is that bigger skyscrapers take much longer to build
to reach the dizzying 417 meters of the World Trade Center engineers have to invent a new much faster
way of building skyscrapers long before the twin towers in New York become the tallest buildings in the
world their developers face a mammoth problem the minute they start construction the clock starts
ticking every day their building is unfinished costs them deal so they have to work out how to reduce the
construction time to the absolute minimum the solution they come up with is to prefabricate sections of
the towers and assemble them like a giant jigsaw puzzle they build the sections off sites and ship them
to the towers construction site precisely when they're needed the only problem is how to lift the super-
heavy 50 tons sections into place quickly enough the traditional tool to build skyscrapers like the Empire
State Building is the derrick crane but to get Derrick's from one floor to the next they have to be
disassembled carried up and reassembled a process that can take two days such a crane is not going to
be fast enough for the World Trade Center these buildings were higher than anything had been
constructed in the past so naturally we cast our eyes about the world to see what was there and what
might be better suited to the project the team find a revolutionary crane in Australia it can lift 50 tons
and four of them can reach into every corner of a Twin Towers and once they have assembled three
floors an amazing thing happens the bottom of the crane releases collides up three storeys and locks
back into place and then the whole crane jumps itself up to the next level that's why it's called the
kangaroo crane they were fast well they had some defects so they spread a lot of oil around so we could
was a constant cleanup operation after them and so words but they were faster and quite reliable with
the help of the prefabricated sections and the jumping kangaroo cranes the Twin Towers take shape
rapidly the builders managed to finish up to two floors every week in 1970 world trade tower one
becomes the tallest building in the world and while even more floors appear at the top tenants move in
at the bottom time is money on the board by the kangaroo crane is still the crane of choice here the
builders have taken prefabrication to a new level the key to speed is a new technology called jump
forming the process starts the bottom of the building steel workers assembled steel cages that will
become the backbone for the floors and wall to the Burj to buy the kangaroo cranes hoist the steel
cages up and slop them into special molds called jump forms in goes the concrete and 12 hours later
when the concrete hardens the form gets ready for the jump hydraulic Pistons push the form up leaving
the concrete block behind it takes only two hours for the form to move up to the next level where the
process starts all over again this way the Burj Dubai is cast in place layer by layer like a giant wedding
cake but delivering concrete to the top of the tower gets more difficult with every floor it's five o'clock
and the man on the day-shift go home but on the top of the Burj to buy the casting crew are waiting for
the concrete to arrive what we're standing on right now will be the hundred and fifty fifth floor so going
to pour some walls tonight below workers prepare the pumps they can really only pour concrete at
night because in the searing daytime temperatures that concrete would overheat they need 630
horsepower pumps to cope with the 25 tons of concrete contained in each pipe and they're about to
pump this concrete higher than anyone has ever done before an amazing challenge for the pumping
system we're pumping 570 meters at the moment which is a real record for a building site it's a very
aggressive environment within the pipe but the high pressures the aggregates rubbing against a steel
you've got to watch out because you get where through the steel and the pipes burst it takes 40
minutes for the concrete to travel up the pipes from the bottom to the hundred and 55th floor it's a
combined effort of raw machine power and subtle chemistry if the concrete is too thin and set slowly it
causes delays if it's too thick it may set too soon and block the pipes that night it takes until 4:00 a.m.
before the job is finished now the concrete and steel skeleton of the Burj Dubai is nearly complete on a
mammoth project that will cost about 1 billion dollars to build every day is precious but the system has
worked to perfection the tower is nearly 600 metres tall and a new floor goes on every three days
prefabrication technology allows giant skyscrapers to grow even faster which makes them even more
profitable and desirable but as skyscrapers soar even higher into the clouds they become exposed to a
new enemy one that exploits every weakness the wind to build the 440 2 meter Sears Tower in Chicago
the proverbial Windy City engineers must turn the skyscraper inside out in 1970 the architects building
the new headquarters for Sears & Roebuck in Chicago faced a problem their skyscraper the Sears Tower
will be over a hundred floors tall a height that exposes it to huge wind forces building this skyscraper
using a traditional steel skeleton would cause massive problems the torah' steel skeleton gets the more
susceptible it is to bending in high winds gusts off Lake Michigan can buffered a skyscraper add up to 80
kilometers an hour this causes the upper floors to sway affecting the workers inside the motion of tall
buildings more like the motion of a ship it creates a kind of seasickness there's that same sense in a very
tall building so if necessary to reduce the swaying component down so the people are not sick the
architects of the Sears Tower invent a technology that can beat the wind they shift the steel framework
from the inside of a building to the outside this so-called exoskeleton makes it very hard for wind to
bend the building in the Sears Tower nine such Jews locked together to make the building rock salt the
exoskeleton is the best way of resisting wind ever invented to prefer even at wind speeds of over 90
km/h the top floor of the Sears Tower only moves expected to be nearly twice as tall as the Sears Tower
at this extreme height fighting the wind with a rigid exoskeleton is not good enough to stop the high-
caliber residents from getting seasick the architects turned to highly advanced aerodynamics the most
important thing in a tall building is the way it interacts with the wind and so what we did is we
essentially as we designed this building we kept testing in the wind tone and we use the wind tunnel as
part of our design process at high speeds wind can be extremely dangerous for a skyscraper air rushes
around the building performs mini tornadoes called vortices these areas of low pressure suck the
building sideways and the toll of the building the more dangerous the vortices become then these large
forces are actually perpendicular to the direction of the wind but tall building we're ever to fall down the
wind it's most likely it fall down sideways to the wind not in the direction of the wind so on the Burj to
buy rather than fight the wind bill and the design team decide to deceive it they don't like the tower flat
and rectangular but give the Burj to by a more unpredictable shape each section of the tower is
designed to deflect the wind in a different way this disrupts the power of the vortices and breaks the
hold of the wind and the building as the wind blows across it it never gets organized because every
single portion of the building will shed vortices at a different rate than the rest of the building and we
call this confusing the wind so we actually when we designed the building where she designing the wind
and the way the wind behaves around the building and it makes a tremendous difference we would
never been able to go this tall if we had not done those with mobility gravity heat and wind conquered
the skyscraper faces its next big challenge in Asia where booming economies want to show off their
wealth super tall skyscrapers become the objects of desire Binet Jie is rife with the Nemesis of tall
buildings earthquakes to build the 509 meter Taipei 101 skyscrapers take another leap forwards in 1999
the architects of the world's tallest skyscraper the Taipei 101 in Taiwan faced a problem Taipei sits near
the Pacific Ring of Fire the most seismically active area on earth an earthquake hits the city roughly
twice a year it's not a question of if but when the earth will shake the taipei 101 earthquakes are
actually really strong compared to wind for example wind loading very rarely will break a large building
but for an earthquake it's actually quite easy to do with that Adam crew will test a model building on an
earthquake simulator to make it realistic this model is built with spaghetti spaghetti and steel actually
quite similar in the way they behave you can actually see that it it buckles quite nicely to relatively low
load and steel beams behave in very very similar way so it models steel really quite well with the top
floor glued in place the model is ready to face the tremors here comes the slowest the first earthquake
you can see the building really isn't moving very much at all looks pretty solid so not really being
bothered by this earthquake it was a bit of a faster earthquake now again the little bit of movement but
the building looks really nice and strong even faster it's gonna go looks like if that had been a real
building the four would have fallen down and all the people who would have been killed so although it
looks relatively intact this is really a catastrophic failure for a building Adam crude tests a second model
that has elastic bands added to the spaghetti so here comes the earthquake that smashed the other
building see how well this one does you can see it's moving a lot but it's actually performing really well
top of the building is actually hardly moving at all it's literally staying there stationary and the ground is
moving really quite violently underneath it so slightly bizarrely by making the building more flexible
you've made the building stronger to survive in fast and violent quakes the Taipei 101 needs a dash of
elasticity so the designers make their building rigid where it has to be but flexible where it can afford to
be at the heart of the Taipei 101 they put 36 rigid steel tubes filled with concrete and give the building
strength while the columns stand firm during a quake the rest of the structure is elastic it can flex and
roll the punches halfway during the construction mother nature tests this design to the limit on the 31st
of March 2002 an earthquake hits the taipei 101 the quake has shattered smaller buildings but the
Taipei 101 is still standing the engineers of the Taipei 101 claim that during the quake their building is
the safest place in town the Burj Dubai can withstand earthquakes of up to 6 on the Richter scale
because it has a massive reinforced concrete skeleton but here the engineers face a different problem
making a super tall building stand up in the desert sand requires special measures at the Burj Dubai they
had Rock relatively shallow but it's very very poor rock it's very weak it's very fractured and it on its own
it can carry a lot of weight so they went 50 meters down deep into the rock in order to get enough of
rock to support that structure 50 meters of the Burj was really at the limit of what rotary drilling
equipment probably could do in that area drilling into the rock in Dubai may be hard but it's when you
pull your drill out that the real trouble starts the rock under the boys Dubai is fragile and saturated with
groundwater any big hole will cave in immediately to stop this from happening the engineers fill the
bore holes with a viscous polymer slurry which pushes the groundwater and rock fragments to the edge
of the ball and keeps it open this is polymer slurry it's really kind of just a heavier fluid the polymers is
kind of a space-age material and what it does is it makes very long molecules or chain so that we add it
to the water it kind of makes very long tendrils that come out that viscosity helps to keep the excavation
from caving in the sacred name for the contractors on site is basically to call it's not the syrupy polymer
is denser than water but lighter than concrete the concrete displaces the slurry and eventually hardens
to form a foundation pile 200 of these piles work together to stop half a million tons of real estate from
sinking into the ground the building so far has gone down around 30 millimeters which is slightly more
than an inch there's about the thickness of my thumb which it which is a very small number for a
building of this size in just over a hundred and thirty years the skyscraper conquers all the forces of
nature using the power of human ingenuity but as buildings saw higher and higher into the sky they
become more vulnerable now the fear of terrorism threatens their existence today a final technological
leap forward keeps the occupants of the world's biggest skyscraper safe a chilling day in September
2001 seems to spell the end of the skyscraper after the attacks of 9/11 many believe that no super tall
building will ever be built again you my curly was the fire director of the World Trade Center on 9/11 I
don't think anyone can say that they could foresee those events of September 11th where planes would
be used basically as missiles to fly into the building but once that occurred the the it became a fire safety
issue and then we began our typical plan to to evacuate the occupants evacuating a skyscraper is a
phenomenal challenge the taller you build the more people have to walk ever further to get to safety on
9/11 the difficulties become tangible you would think that walking down stairs would be a lot easier
than walking up the stairs but it's not it's almost as difficult as walking up not everyone walks at the
same speed and you may have some people who walk very quickly people who are more physically fit
some people were injured maybe didn't have their shoes they lost you know things along the way and it
sure didn't make it easy for anybody the bulged by has built-in fire protection as its concrete backbone is
naturally fire resistant but it's expected to be nearly twice as tall as the twin towns so how did people
get out in an emergency the answer is they don't the Burj Dubai contains 9 very special rooms refuge
rooms built from layers of reinforced concrete and fireproof sheeting the walls of these rooms
withstand the heat of a fire for two hours each room has a special supply of air pumped through fire
resistant pipes sealed fireproof doors stop smoke from leaking in in the refuge room residents can seek
shelter from a fire until emergency services bring it under control there is one of these rooms about
every refuge rooms are a radical idea but even the safest place in the world is no good if the access
route is blocked by smoke but there is technology that takes smoke out of the equation the Burj Dubai
has an early warning system that guards it round the clock if fire activates a smoke detector a heat
sensor or water sprinkler a network of high-powered fans kick in the fans force clean cool air through
fire resistant ducts into the building the fresh air pushes the smoke out of the stairwell and keeps the
evacuation routes clear it's fire safety fit for a 21st century skyscraper when the Burj Dubai is complete it
will be the tallest structure that mankind has ever built on the face of the planet standing on the
shoulders of historic engineering marvels the boys Dubai really is the ultimate skyscraper until someone
builds an even bigger one