The Impossible Stones of Osaka Castle

No country today could build the fleets that existed at the Battle of Jutland or at Trafalgar. The technology and skills to do so are outdated and in many cases no longer available - not to mention the lack of skilled manpower to do it. However a few wooden ships have been built to such standards but no one ever builds a dreadnought? Why is that? Money and there is no point in doing so.

Since we cannot do that does that mean the French, Spanish and Brits couldn't build scores of 1500 ton ships out of wood, and fill them with cast iron cannons? Or could the Germans and Brits not build the 50 or so steel capital ships with steam engines that they had in 1916?


Fringer a thousand years from now....

Could the people of the 15th century REALLY build Saint Peters? Its massive, they had no mechanical power, its way beyond human ability to have built such a huge structure....impossible I say....lol

It is actually amazing the things that can be successfully shifted with the correct arrangements of pulleys and ropes - look at what the Incans could achieve. We have lost a lot of this knowledge by the simple process of technological advancements........why bother figuring out the correct arrangement when we can use cranes? Personally, i believe that this may be an error on our part as a species......

reply to post by Hanslune


As a Brit, we couldn't make many of the wonderful frigates these days - each one had over 26 miles of rope! And not to mention the amount of trees needed to make even one boat.........too many flats these days and not enough natural resources.

We have the technology and the blue prints, just not the raw resources

One man did quarry 20 tons of coral and erected an entire castle, but no one knows how he accomplished the structure. His name Edward Leedskalnin.Is there another process/skill that we have lost over the centuries?
This castle always peaks my interest since I was young and saw this episode on In Search of.
The link below has the full article and is interesting to read. The U Tube clips from In search of are also at the link.

A small statured man barely weighing one hundred pounds, Ed quarried one piece of coral from the earth weighing over twenty-eight tons and then erected it himself! His accomplishments include a rocking chair weighing thousands of pounds that can be rocked with a finger, and an underground structure reached by climbing down a one-piece spiral stone staircase to a subterranean refrigerator. A five thousand pound heart-shaped coral rock table with a red blooming ixora growing from its center, is believed to be the world's largest valentine according to Ripley's.
In total Ed quarried over eleven hundred tons of coral rock for his Castle using tools fashioned from wrecking-yard junk

Much of the site is calibrated to celestial alignments including an ingenious thirty ton telescope towering twenty-five feet above the complex, perfectly aligned to the North Star. A working sundial calibrated to noon of the Winter and Summer Solstice, is so accurate it tells time within two minutes.

Ed disputed contempory science and believed, "all matter consists of magnets which can produce measurable phenomena, and electricity." Ed would say he had "re-discovered the laws of weight, measurement, and leverage," and that these concepts "involved the relationship of the Earth to celestial alignments." He claimed to see beads of light which he believed to be the physical presence of nature's magnetism, and life force, or what we term today chi.

Coral Castle

Originally posted by pirhanna

Originally posted by grey580
People forget that with enough labor you can accomplish a great many things.

I was able to move a shed with the help of 1 friend with 3 pvc pipes and my car.

Needless to say with 20 friends we could of picked it up and walked it to a new position.

Also too the Romans created the coliseum. They didn't have heavy equipment. But they managed it.

Did it weight 100 tons?
Also, correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think they had cars in 1583...
Just sayin.


The "slave" theory is so completely unfounded.

edit on 11-10-2011 by pirhanna because: (no reason given)

people.hofstra.edu...

For instance, four horses could pull a wagon weight of one ton 12 miles a day over an ordinary road and one-and-a-half tons 18 miles a day over a well maintained turnpike. Comparatively, four horses could draw a barge of 100 tons 24 miles a day on a canal.

Given enough horses and people a 100 ton stone could be moved over bamboo rollers. Remember that dragging something requires less effort than picking something up.

And of course they didn't have cars back then. But they had horses and other beasts of burden that they could use to haul things.

reply to post by mugger

He had an electronic lift and block and tackle with a tripod, for that matter he spent the better part of 30 years working the site.



From over head, there's really not much there:

The easter island statues are impressive. Even more impressive when you see how tall they really are.



How did islanders quarry the stone and carry it with no technology to do so?

reply to post by grey580


reply to post by grey580


Probably the same way these guys did:


PBS Nova has a special where they had a team move a Moai statue,

The amount of wood used to move the statues seems to be what led to the deforestation of the island.

It's also sorta been done annually for 19 years straight, now: Dulles Day Plane Pull. Lots of fun, and it's for a great cause.

As a side, there have been cranes and pulley systems since around 600 BCE.

Originally posted by grey580
The easter island statues are impressive. Even more impressive when you see how tall they really are.



How did islanders quarry the stone and carry it with no technology to do so?

Well, they either chopped down trees (deforesting the island and eventually causing their culture to collapse) and rolled the stones on the logs, or they all stood round and concentrated real hard until the stones just floated to where they wanted them.

Which do you think is more likely?

Oh, and to the OP - the stones of Osaka are not impossible just because you can't work out how they were moved. The Japanese engineers were just more ingenious than you, and the elite could access enormous quantities of cheap labour.

After Nobunaga’s death in 1582, one of his former generals, Toyotomi Hideyoshi, began construction of a castle on the site in 1583. Employing 30,000 men and 1000 shiploads of stone per day, the castle took three years to complete. From it Hideyoshi accepted the submission of Tokugawa Ieyasu, directed the Odawara castle and Korean campaigns, and received Chinese delegations during the Korean invasion.

source wiki.samurai-archives.com...

It was also a highly literate culture - don't you think if they used sorcery to move the stones they might have actually written about it?

It was also a highly literate culture - don't you think if they used sorcery to move the stones they might have actually written about it?

Or used it in war....