We Humans, being a couple of feet high, weighing barely a quintal are capable of making & building things million times bigger & heavier than us & we have proved it. Hats off to those engineers who have built them !
So lets have a look at the top 10 biggest machines of all time which we’ve never imagined of !
These are the machines which are so big that you might have to walk a kilometre or so to view them completely.
So get ready to get your jaw drop…!
The countdown begins…
The top 10 biggest machines are-
10. The giant mechanical spider -La Princesse
La Princesse is a 15-metre giant mechanical spider weighing over 37 tons. It was designed & operated by French performance art company La Machine. The spider was showcased in Liverpool, England, as part of the 2008 European Capital of Culture celebrations. In 2009, it was on display in Yokohama, Japan, as part of Yokohama’s 150th anniversary of it’s port opening.
9. Biggest dump truck – BelAZ 75710
It is manufactured by BelAZ in Belarus. The entire truck costs over $6 million.
Specifications :-
Length – 20.6 m
Breadth – 9.87 m
Height – 8.16 m !
The empty weight is 360 tons & it can carry 450 tons of load !
It is powered by 2 diesel engines giving a power output of 4600 hp – 4.6 times than the Bugatti Veyron Super Sport, the fastest car in the world !
8. Biggest aircraft – Antonov An-225 Mriya
The Antonov An-225 Mriya is a cargo aircraft that was designed by the Soviet Union’s Antonov Design Bureau in the 1980’S.
The An-25-225’s name, Mriya means “Dream”(inspiration) in Ukrainian. It is powered by six turbofan engines and is the longest and heaviest airplane ever built with a maximum takeoff weight of 640 tonnes. The Antonov An-225 was initially developed for transporting the Buran space shuttle.
Specifications :-
Length – 84 m (275 ft 7 in)
Wingspan – 88.4 m (290 ft)
Height – 18.1 m (59 ft 5 in)
The airlifter holds the absolute world records for an airlifted single item payload of 189,980 kgs ! Currently it is in commercial operation carrying oversized payloads.
7. Biggest rail gun – Schwerer Gustav
Schwerer Gustav is the biggest railway gun ever made. It was developed in late 1930’s by Krupp to destroy the main forts of French Maginot Line.
The fully assembled gun weighed nearly 1,350 tonnes, and could fire shells weighing 7 tonnes to a range of 47 kilometres (29 mi)(I seriously read it thrice to make sure what I am reading…can you believe that – 7 tons … Oh crap ! I SURRENDER ).
Specifications :-
Length – 47.3 metres
Width – 7.12 metres
Height – 11.6 metres
Barrel length – 32.5 metres !
The Nazis had to stop using the gun because the railway tracks laid were easily visible to enemy air troops & hence it was easy for them to destroy the gun by dropping bombs on it.
It could fire only 14 times a day.
6. Crawler – The Rocket Transporter
Crawler is a vehicle used by NASA to transport rockets & space shuttles. Only 2 of them are built by Marion Power Shovel using components designed and built by Rockwell International.
Specifications :-
Length – 40 m
Breadth – 35 m
Height – Adjustable from 6.1 m to 7.9 m
Weight – 2721 tons !
The crawler-transporter is the LARGEST SELF-POWERED LAND VEHICLE in the world.
To know amazing, interesting facts & details about Crawler, visit this link !
5. Largest tunnel boring machine – Bertha
Bertha is a tunnel boring machine built specifically for the Alaskan Way Viaduct replacement tunnel project in Seattle.
The name Bertha, after Seattle’s only female mayor, Bertha Knight Landes.
Specifications :-
Length – 300 feet
Diameter – 57.5 feet
Weight – 7000 tons !
4. Biggest ship – OOCL Hong Kong
Built by the Samsung heavy industries, the OOCL Hong Kong is the biggest cargo ship evr built. It has a carrying capacity of 21,413 TEUs, being the first one to cross the 21000 mark (TEU is Twenty foot equivalent unit, an inexact way to indicate 1 twenty feet long container). And guess what, the biggest cargo ship is powered by the biggest internal combustion engine – the Wärtsilä-Sulzer RTA96-C generating more than 80,000 kW of power !
Specifications :-
Length – 399.87 m
Maximum speed – 40 km/hr
Carrying capacity – 197,317 tons
You should definitely check out the top 5 longest, biggest & heaviest ships and submarine in the world, they will blow your mind!
3.Largest excavator – Bagger 288
Bagger 288 (Excavator 288), one of a group of similar sized ‘sibling’ vehicles such as the Bagger 281, Bagger 285, Bagger 287 etc. built by the German company Krupp is a bucket-wheel excavator or mobile strip mining machine.
It can excavate 240,000 tons of coal of overburden daily – the equivalent of a football field dug 30 m deep !
The Bagger’s operation require 16.56 megawatts of externally supplied electricity. It can travel upto 2-10 metre per min(0.1 to 0.6 km/hr). It can maximum climb a 5 slope.
Specifications :-
Length – 220 m
Height – 96 m
Weight – 13,500 tons !
2.Overburden Conveyor Bridge F60
F60 is the series designation of five overburden conveyor bridges used in lignite(type of coal) opencast mining in Lusatian coalfields in Germany. As overburden conveyor bridges, they transport the overburden which lies over the coal seam.
The cutting height is 60 m, hence the name F60. It is the largest moving machine in the world.
Specifications:-
Length – 502 m (even greater than the height of Empire State Building)
Width – 240 m
Height – 80 m
Weight – 13,600 metric tons !
It is also described as lying Eiffel tower ! The Overburden Conveyor Bridge F60s hold the title of largest land vehicle of any type by physical dimensions.
1. The Large Hadron Collider
The Large Hadron Collider(LHC) is the world’s largest & most powerful particle collider, most complex experimental facility ever built & largest single machine in the world. It was built by the European Organization for Nuclear Research(CERN) between 1998 & 2008 in collaboration with over 10,000 scientists and engineers from over 100 countries.
It lies in a tunnel 27 kilometres (17 mi) in circumference, as deep as 175 metres (574 ft) beneath the France-Switzerland border near Geneva, Switzerland.
The LHC’s mission is to allow physicists to test the predictions of different theories of particle physics & in particular to test the properties of the Higgs boson and other unsolved questions of physics, advancing human understanding of physical laws !
You might like :- Top 10 Flying Machines in the World !
Well, I would love to hear your thoughts on these mighty machines. Would you like to own any one of them ? If yes, which one would it be & why ? OR you could also share your favorite one !
Share your thoughts in the comment section below 🙂 !
3 comments on “The Top 10 Biggest Machines in the World !”
bagger 288….woww….can anybody imagine larger than this in case of excavator?
bwahaha ! I guess not Saurabh
Toss up between the mriya & hadron collider. Not sure where i would put them or how i’d run them without a team of teams but they belong together anyway, that hadron collider could be used for figuring out how to make the giant airplane move without it’s jet engines. Or just move my teams of engineers back & forth around the world to operate my collider ?