Falkirk Wheel {v.2} -- i sincerely hope this wiggles for you

Click top image for larger.

The Falkirk Wheel in operation. If this swell wiggle_gif actually works, I'll get around to explaining what the heck the Falkirk Wheel is and does.

But first, credit, and Copyright, and All Rights Reserved, for this amazing time-lapse photo to Duncan Smith. More of his remarkable photographs, most of them of Scotland, are HERE.

But -- in very small words -- the water at the bottom is an 18th century canal that leads to Glasgow, and the aqueduct at the top connects to a higher old canal that leads to Edinburgh.

The vertical difference in canal water levels is 24 meters = 79 feet = about an 8-storey building.

Scotland, right? You got that? The Vleeptron Ministry of Pizza paid 1 Slice to Abbas to verify that Scotland is somewhere in Europe. And Phrost won the whole pizza for identifying the Falkirk Wheel.

During the old Age of Canals, canal boats could get back and forth from Edinburgh to Glasgow by sailing through 11 locks (each lock typically raising/lowering the boat by about 3 or 4 feet = 1+ meter), but after trains displaced the canals (around 1830), the canals and locks went into decline and disrepair. Canal boats haven't been able to get from one canal to the other in a very long time.

The Falkirk Wheel was designed and built as a Millennium waterway restoration project. Queen Elizabeth II and her family cut the ribbon!

So now you can go to Scotland and buy a very inexpensive ticket to ride on a canal boat until you get to the Falkirk Wheel, and then, in this amazing 5-minute vertical transfer, you and your canal boat will be transferred from Low Canal to High Canal, while another boat and its passengers are lowered from High to Low.

Yes, look closely -- there's a canal boat (filled with people) in the bottom circle, and there's a boat and people in the top circle, and then the Wheel turns 180 degrees (or pi radians, if you prefer), and the high boat and people descend to the low canal, and the low boat and people rise to the high canal -- but boat and people always stay level, and don't get turned upside-down!

And then you continue your gentle canal trip. The amazing gizmo is so perfectly balanced that it uses an astonishingly tiny amount of electricity, and it also wastes an astonishingly small amount of water.

From Wikipedia: Architectural services were supplied by Scotland-based RMJM, from initial designs by Nicoll Russell Studios and engineers Binnie Black and Veatch.

The Magic Trick that makes it all work is Archimedes' Bouyancy Principle, which, when he discovered it, made him leap out of the public bath and run naked through the streets of Syracuse screaming "I'm naked! I'm wet and naked!"

Okay, 1 slice if you know what the naked old boffin really screamed, 2 slices if you can type it in Doric.

Look -- so far Vleeptron and its Commenters have managed to master Chinese, Japanese, Arabic, Farsi, Cyrillic and Hebrew. SOMEBODY ought to be able to master Doric. (And DON'T SAY: "It's all Greek to me.")