TRANSMISSION POWERLINE PYLONS: Has anyone noticed?

[Aspie_With_Attitude]

If you watch this video, this is where I ask million dollar questions about transmission powerline towers or pylons, why are they all different?

Is there a reason why they are each built differently?

It appears the different build has its own identity or its own personality. This something that not many people have ever noticed.

 

[Outdated]

Did you know South Australia uses a different type of power pole to the rest of the country?

We can't use timber for power poles because of termites. The Stobie Pole was invented in 1924 for power transmission lines, made of steel and concrete. There's an added safety feature with these poles, when a car hits them they crumple down onto themselves instead of falling out in to the street or on to someone's house.

 

[Shevek]

If you watch this video, this is where I ask million dollar questions about transmission powerline towers or pylons, why are they all different?

Is there a reason why they are each built differently?

It appears the different build has its own identity or its own personality. This something that not many people have ever noticed.

You can see the same thing with bridges. The engineers responsible know in a general way that triangles make economical structures, so they draw an arrangement of them, calculate the stress in each member, and specify the material size needed for it. Trying out a different set of triangles used to be a lot of work, so there is still no tradition of trying out a dozen to see which ones come out the lightest, let alone trying to see what they have in common and trying a few more refinements on the theme. The Forth Bridge, known as the Eiffel Tower of Scotland, is beautiful, but it is really two bridges built together, in case one was wrong. It is so over-built that it is still the only long bridge where trains can run at top speed. Recently, some structures have been designed by computers, trying to capitalize on the ability of 3-D printing to produce more complex shapes. People go ga-ga over them, even though they are also far from optimum in quite obvious ways to the trained eye.