Episode 81 (Below, from Above)

the memory palace

Nate DiMeo

History, Publicradio, Natedimeo, Radiotopia

4.8 • 7.3K Ratings

🗓️ 27 January 2016

⏱️ 15 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Music

* We start off with Wien, by Labradford. * The guys head out to the work site to Piano 3, from Jon Brion's score to Synecdoche, New York. * Then we hear a bit of Metamorphosis by Vladamir Ussachevsky before being bombarded with bits of Fast Pasture by Todd Reynolds. * There's a long stretch of Fog Tropes by Ingram Marshall * Followed by Fragment I by Library Tapes * Before ending on Berceuse, by Alexandra Sileski.

Notes * This is a story I've been wanting to do forever. In fact, falling in love with the story of the Brooklyn Bridge was one of the things that sent me on a path to doing The Memory Palace at all. So, most of this stuff I just kind of already knew. But it was a particular pleasure to go back and read David McCullough's masterful, lovely The Great Bridge. And to read a ton of contemporary accounts of its construction, particularly the New York Time's piece where the reporter heads down into the Brooklyn Caisson.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	This is the memory palace. I'm Nate Demayah.
0:05.0	If you want to build a bridge, a long one over a large body of water, or some reasonably
0:10.6	impressive chasm, you'll want to build a suspension bridge. One of those with the towers
0:15.8	on either side, sticking up from the water or pulling the ground, with a cable swooping
0:20.0	down and up and down and up between them. And if you want that bridge to work to hold
0:24.4	the cars and the trucks and the minivans, to withstand a high wind, to keep standing during
0:29.5	an earthquake or tsunami, those towers need to stay still so the rest of the bridge can
0:34.5	move a little bit. It's physics, just trust me. Those towers need to be anchored deep within
0:40.1	the ground. So you will need to dig holes, which is hard enough to do in some rocky chasm
0:45.3	in the purines of the Poconos, but in water, it's a whole other thing. So if you want to
0:50.8	build a bridge over water, over the East River, between Manhattan and Brooklyn City,
0:56.4	and it's 1870, just, you know, to pick and humber it ran them. You need to find a way to dig
1:01.9	underwater. So fill a bathtub and take a glass and flip the glass over and push the glass to
1:09.7	the bottom of the tub. There's air in the glass. There's water in the tub, but it can't get inside.
1:15.6	You get it, it's a diving bell, and picture tiny people in that glass, chipping away at the
1:21.0	porcelain or the vinyl at their feet with tiny picks and wee little shovels. Now the air will run
1:26.9	out of that glass, so you'll need a tube or a straw poking up through the top and up and out
1:31.4	past the surface of the water to let the good air in and the bad air out while they tap away
1:35.5	those tiny people with their tiny tools, digging at the bottom of your tub for some reason.
1:41.1	And that's the idea. You build a watertight chamber. You find a way to keep the air circulating
1:47.0	within that chamber and you push it down to the bottom and you start to build your tower on top
1:52.2	of it while the people inside dig away. Meanwhile the increasing pressure of the growing tower helps
	...

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