The Largest Stone Moved by Mankind —- The Thunder StoneWhen one usually thinks of big stones, one th

The Largest Stone Moved by Mankind —- The Thunder StoneWhen one usually thinks of big stones, one thinks of the Egyptians, with their massive pyramids, large monoliths, and tall obelisks.  Would you be surprised to learn that the largest stone ever moved by mankind was moved by Russians?In 1770 Catherine the Great commissioned the work of a large equine statue to honor Peter the Great.  Catherine, a German princess who married into the Romanov Dynasty, wanted the statue built to connect herself to Peter the Great and legitimize her claim to the throne.  The statue would stand in the middle of Peter’s Square (now Senate Square) in St. Petersburg, which was then the capital of the Russian Empire. The large bronze statue was cast by master metalworker Emelyan Khailov, while the mold was created by French sculptor Etienne Maurice Falconet.  The work of creating the statue was impressive enough, but the creation of the pedestal would be an equally impressive feat.  About 6 kilometers (3.7 miles) inland from the Gulf of Finland was the “Thunder Stone”, named because it was believed that a bolt of lighting has cut it loose from a cliff.  At 1,500 tons, it would be an incredible feat of engineering to move such an enormous boulder. The largest stone block used in the Great Pyramid at Giza, for example, weighs only 80 tons.  Falconet wanted to shape the stone, then move it, but Catherine the Great wanted the stone moved immediatly, and ordered that the stone should be worked as it was transported.  Falconet turned to Colonel Marinos Carburis, an engineer from Greece who was serving in the Russian Army. So what did the Russians use to move such a large stone.  Power tools? Heavy machinery? Extraterrestrials? Actually no.  The most impressive aspect of the project was that no animals or heavy machinery was brought in for the project.  Instead the work was left to 400 strong Russians and some simple technology.  First the work was halted until winter set in and the marshy ground froze.  The boulder was dug up and mounted on a large sledge which had 6 large ball bearings as wheels.  The sledge was mounted on wooden tracks and drug using two capstan pulleys worked by shifts of 35 men each. They only used 100 meters of wooden track, so the track had to disassembled and reassembled as the boulder was moved.It took the 400 men 9 months to drag the boulder 6 kilometers to the sea making a progress of around 150 meters a day, where it was loaded onto a barge and shipped to St. Petersburg.  While it was being moved Falconet and his crew chiseled the boulder into a more artist shape, causing the stone to lose 250 tons of weight on its journey.  The barge itself was constructed specifically for the stone, created out of two large full sized warships.  in 1782, after fourteen years of hard work, the statue was unveiled.In the 19th century a legend sprang up that as long as the statue remained standing, St. Petersburg would never be taken in a siege.  As a result the Soviets refused to remove the stature during the World War II siege of St. Petersburg, then renamed Leningrad.  Instead the statue covered with sandbags and a wooden frame.  Despite artillery fire and bombs, the statue was left undamaged, and the City of Leningrad held.  Today it is still located in Senate Square of St. Petersburg.  Most likely it isn’t going anywhere. -- source link

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