Background
Genesis
The Technique
Bosco Rasche Invitationals
Proving in Experiment
Background
Joe Ware was a world class aerospace engineer; please don’t blame my mistakes on him. This is my “work.” Mistakes are mine, not his. I wanted to do it. Curiosity. He merely showed me basic trigonometry and encouraged me to try. (I did, and it fried my brain; I couldn’t work the TV remote for a week.)
I developed a way that may have helped build pyramids in Egypt.
I’m certainly no engineer, and I never spent enough time developing the idea—so here’s everyone’s great chance to kid me for some terrible FUBAR. No doubt I’ll mess some of this up: 2+2=3? I never studied math. Maybe someone who is actually aware of at least the basics of engineering and pyramid building will take a look at this some day and run with it. The only engineering I’ve ever had was by osmosis, whatever soaked into me from Joe through the pillow.
Nonetheless, it’s been fun, so I thought I’d share.
Genesis
Back in about 2001, Joe and I were watching a TV documentary about pyramid building—reference Khufu’s Great pyramid in Giza—and it occurred to me that the ramp idea for getting stones up was only part of it. Ramps make sense for the lower levels or megaliths, but carried to the top, they can become larger than the pyramid, itself. And working them up the slope seemed too difficult.
I’d done some rigging on sailboats, such as our former Catalina 30, so it occurred to me to use a block and tackle system to get the stones up the top half of an unfinished pyramid for Khufu. But I didn’t think the Egyptians had block and tackle, so I envisioned rough ropes being pulled over a fixed block (pulley), say a granite stone shaped like a pulley with grooves in it that were concave in line with and to hold the rope and convex to change the angle of pull. People could lash onto a stone on one side of the pyramid, drape it over pivot points at the top, and walk away with the rope in hand on the other side of the base of the pyramid.
Excited, I made a rough draft of my idea and sent it to Willeke Wendrich, Ph.D., UCLA, who wrote me back and asked me to look at Page 211 of Dr. Mark Lehner’s book The Complete Pyramids (hardback, 1997). There, Dr. Lehner had shown what I’d conceived, found them at Giza, recognizing it as a proto-pulley, calling it the “Mystery Tool.”
Let me insert a bit on Bosco Rasche, Joe’s favorite old instructor at Virginia Tech, which Joe and they then called “V.P.I.”
The Technique
Please don’t get wigged out at my lack of engineering capability, math, etc. I was never trained in those.
I sent a copy of my finished work to Drs. Willeke Wendrich, Mark Lehner, and Zahi Hawass, and I spoke with Dr. Hawass on the phone while he was at Marina Del Rey, I believe it was, but I think they were doing other things. I talked with Zahi Hawass on the phone about it while he was visiting Marina Del Rey, I think it was. He said to send him a copy, which I did, though I never heard back from him. Willeke Wendrich went on to other things, I believe, as pyramid building is not her area. Mark Lehner never got back to me; this technique was not what he promoted. Nothing ever came of my idea that I know of.
Doing it this way gives the pullers on the other side of the pyramid have a mechanical advantage, not unlike using a sailboat’s block and tackle system.
Bosco Rasche Invitationals
At the house, Joe and I would periodically have a “Bosco Rasche Invitational,” a large backyard party with some kind of engineering gimmick.
For one, our dog, Troi, sent out the invitations without my knowledge, saying we’d use a rocket to put a beer mug in orbit—and with Joe as her daddy, who knew?—so I had to make it look good.
I built a “rocket” in our “Skunk Works” (garage) and told guests we’d send it up in honor of Bosco Rasche. And it did have a beer mug on it, but during the party, when I lit it off, all that happened (because I put a servo in its gear) was that it fell over and smoked. Ah! What a letdown. So we had to party more. 🙂
At another, I built an ornithopter in our Skunk Works, and we had a Bosco Rasche party on that. It looked like Fred Flintstone built it, maneuvered under its own power due to a compressor motor, flapped its wings mightily. I’d get on it, goggles, rev it up…the thing shaking its hemp rope loose, and I’d yell to the crowd, “You want me to lift the nose gear off the ground?” They’d yell, “Yes!” So I’d take my hand off the throttle and work a 2×4 lever brake that pried the nose gear up about an inch.
I used the ornithopter as a gag at Camarillo Airport for a couple of years afterward, drove it around the airport during the air show.
Joe used to tell me stories about Bosco Rasche, seeming to me to be a genius, cantankerous, crusty old codger whom Joe respected and loved to joust with. Joe would tell me Bosco would have some sophomore draw a cogwheel and then tell them sternly, “There is no such THING as a cogwheel!”
So for my Egyptian pyramid building idea, it was a real Bosco Rasche Invitational, though it was more serious. It was a real experiment to prove something. Bosco would have probably chewed me up and spit me out, Joe would have smiled in joy, and I would have laughed and offered Bosco another Diet Coke: “What ‘re you talking about?” I’d tease. “It’s real! Look at it!”
Proving in Experiment
In about 2010, I built an apparatus in the back yard at the same angle as the Great Pyramid in Egypt, used a wooden slide up the “side,” as I envisioned could have been done, greased the whole slide and the hemp rope with lard, thinking they probably had lard back then. The pulley at the top was also greased and fixed so it could not rotate, imitating a proto-pulley that was found by the pyramid.
The BRI is always a feed, so I set up to make burgers for 50, and let ‘er rip.
Put several people on a rope on the other side of the pyramid, they’d only pull a few pounds each and with a mechanical advantage during the early part of the pull. Guests and neighbors quickly found that putting the 2×4 at the end of the rope on their hips made it effortless. It’s in the book.
Building a pyramid incorporating this technique would be fast.
It would take more time to get the stones TO a pyramid site than it would to get them UP onto it—which would only take a few seconds each—and you could use several of these apparatuses along the width of the half-finished pyramid, so you’d have people standing around waiting for more stones to arrive.
(Sounds like a Bosco Rasche Invitational back then, too. ) 🙂