But there's one more tight circular staircase. You reach the summit, short of wind, and gaze out over the ancient intellectual center of Pisa. You cringe against the wall each time you negotiate the south face and hang over empty space. Now it moves only 7 seconds per year, but that's cold comfort when it leans almost 5½ degrees off vertical - nearly a 10% tilt.Īnd so it stands, majestic and eerie - defying the rules of fall that Galileo was supposed to have learned on its summit. The Tower has continued tilting at an average rate of 21 seconds each year. Now the top was straight, but the lower portion had a gentle but permanent corkscrew shape. Masons squared off the top a second time and finished the Tower. With the Tower now leaning almost 2 degrees to the south, work went ahead once more in 1373. For another century the Tower sank and tilted - to the north, to the east, and finally to the south. The Tower tilted again, this time to the north. Masons squared off the top of the tilted stump and built upward. Yet the city fathers resumed construction anyway. By then the tilt had extended to 0.7 degrees. When builders finished the first third, they found it'd tipped 0.2 degrees to the northwest. I always thought of the Tower as a Renaissance building, but it's older than that. Its height, after 800 years of tilting and sinking into the soil, is about 184 feet. It's only one of many that've gone askew in various ways. The Leaning Tower, like many other old Tuscan towers, sits on soft soil. In fact one failure, the Leaning Tower of Pisa, is a marvel to see. The Gothic buildings that stand are a remarkable legacy. Medieval architects outreached themselves. The University of Houston's College of Engineering presents this series about the machines that make our civilization run, and the people whose ingenuity created them. Today, we visit the Leaning Tower of Pisa.
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