Tallest in the World

The Great Pyramid of Egypt originally stood 481 feet (146.5 m) tall and was the tallest man-made structure on Earth for nearly 4000 years—basically until the late Middle Ages when the Gothic cathedrals of Europe were being built and were trying to outdo one another in terms of their dimensions.

Interestingly, a couple of these churches held their pre-eminent rank only briefly because their heavenward-reaching spires met some kind of mishap, and thus they yielded their number-one place to a lower structure and the record height goes down three times in the following record.

The Great Pyramid was first surpassed around 1311 AD by Lincoln Cathedral in England, which had a spire believed to have been 524 feet (159.7 m) tall. (It collapsed in a storm in 1549.)

St. Olaf's Church in Talinn, Estonia, built in 1500 (521.6 ft, 159 m), was the tallest building in the world from 1549 to 1625 when its spire was destroyed by lightning.

St. Mary's Church, Stralsund, Germany (495 ft, 151 m), was the tallest building in the world from 1625 to 1647 when its spire was destroyed by lightning.

Strasbourg Cathedral, France (466 ft, 142 m), was the tallest building in the world from 1647 to 1874.

St. Nikolai Church in Hamburg, Germany was the tallest building on earth (483 ft, 147.8 m) from 1874 to 1876.

When the Washington Monument was completed in 1884 it was the tallest structure in the world at 555 feet tall (169 m). The Washington Monument was not the tallest structure on Earth for very long. It was surpassed in 1889 by the Eiffel Tower, which is 1063 feet (324 m) tall. It was the tallest until the age of the great skyscrapers in the US began in the 1930s with such buildings as the Chrysler Building and the Empire State Building.

Just for comparison purposes, the great ocean liner Titanic, which sank in 1912, was 882 feet long—longer than The Great Pyramid was tall but shorter than one of the great cathedrals was tall. The huge airship the Hindenburg, which burned in a famous disaster in 1937, was almost as long as the Titanic, with a length of 804 feet.

Copyright © 2012 by Richard Stein

Not the Real Thing

I just saw a photo of a castle, and the teaser for the article said, "If you're thinking Disney, you're right." Well it's not Disney and that's not what I thought of. I thought of the original, or the real thing, if you will: Neuschwanstein, "Mad King Ludwig's" castle in Bavaria, Germany.

Similarly, I was watching a figure skating competition on TV. As one skating couple's performance started, the commentator identified the music as "2001 A Space Odyssey." Wrong! The music is Also Sprach Zarathustra, by Richard Strauss--though as it happens, that music was used in the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey.

And I guess that in the same vein, another bit of music, in people's minds, might be thought of as "The Lone Ranger," though hopefully more people might recognize that it's the William Tell Overture-- if for no other reason than that The Lone Ranger has not been a current TV show for a very long time, so maybe the music has sort of reverted to its original identity.

I wonder if people see a picture of the Eiffel Tower and think of Las Vegas instead of Paris. Or a picture of a pyramid and think of Memphis, Tennessee, instead of Egypt. We are getting so used to copies, reproductions, derivatives, and so forth that we ignore the real thing.

Copyright © 2011 by Richard Stein