The Greek Trick That Made Mount Rushmore Possible

In 1927, the United States set out to carve four sixty foot faces into a granite mountain with no road to the top, no power, and one borrowed diesel generator that eventually exploded. What replaced it was a compressor handed over by a bankrupt gold mine, and for a while the drills died every Monday because the town of Keystone was doing its laundry. But the single most important tool on Mount Rushmore was not the dynamite or the compressors. It was a measuring trick borrowed from the sculptors of ancient Greece, scaled up exactly twelve times, and without it none of the four faces could have existed. Every documentary takes days of research. You can help us keep going by leaving a small donation, just click the link and support us: ☕ https://buymeacoffee.com/Construction... In this documentary we climb Mount Rushmore machine by machine, from the three Ingersoll-Rand compressors at the base and the eighteen hundred foot air pipeline, to the Chicago Pneumatic jackhammers, the dynamite that removed more than ninety percent of the mountain, the hand cranked winches and bosun chairs that lowered men down a five hundred foot cliff on finger thick cable, and finally the pointing machine that turned a five foot plaster model into a sixty foot face. We also look honestly at the granite dust, the silicosis risk, and the men who ran it all for eight dollars a day. CHAPTERS 00:00 No road, no power, no way up 04:40 The machines at the base 09:37 Drills, the forge, and the men on the cliff 15:12 Carving with dynamite 17:53 The Greek trick 26:43 The dust, the end, and the reckoning SOURCES & FAIR USE This video is based on publicly available historical records, including National Park Service archives, the Historic American Engineering Record, and contemporary accounts of the carving of Mount Rushmore (1927-1941). Archival images are used under fair use for educational and documentary purposes. #MountRushmore #ConstructionHistory #EngineeringHistory #HeavyEquipment #Documentary #GutzonBorglum Subscribe for more:    / @constructionlegends