The team raises obelisks with the help of a system designed by Emilio Castaño Graff ’02. As the kite pulls on the rope, the pulleys rise up. As the tip of the obelisk is lifted, its base slides into place.

How Many Caltechers Does It Take to Raise An Egyptian Obelisk?

The world may soon find out.

One could argue that there aren’t enough Techers on Earth to raise a modest-sized obelisk without power equipment. After all, didn’t it require thousands of workers to put the obelisks and pyramids of ancient Egypt into place? Maybe not.

The task may have been accomplished by a dozen or so people flying the stones into position with a kite. A business consultant from Reseda has proposed this theory, and a few Techers are helping to demonstrate that it’s a possibility.

This summer the team of Techers and friends raised a three-and-a-half-ton obelisk in 25 seconds, with reporters and cameramen documenting the feat. Now they plan to build larger obelisks to demonstrate that even the mammoth 300-ton monuments of ancient Egypt—not to mention the far less massive building blocks of Egypt’s 90-odd pyramids—could have been raised with a fraction of the effort that modern Egyptologists have assumed.

It’s an engineering challenge, says aeronautics professor Mory Gharib, PhD ’83. The idea of accomplishing heavy tasks with limited manpower is appealing, he adds, because it makes logistical sense.

The challenge was posed to Gharib and his colleagues two years ago by business consultant Maureen Clemmons. In 1997 she had seen a picture in Smithsonian magazine of a 340-ton obelisk being raised in St. Peter’s Square in 1586. This feat had required 74 horses and 900 men using ropes and pulleys. Clemmons came up with the idea that ancient Egyptian builders could have used kites to accomplish the task more easily.

She needed an aeronautics expert with the proper credentials to field-test her theory. Gharib was interested. He, in turn, needed a willing undergrad who would devote himself to the problem.
Willing undergrad Emilio Castaño Graff ’02 tells the story from his perspective.

THE UPS AND DOWNS OF RAISING OBELISKS

“I came to Caltech as a Millikan Scholar and did my prefrosh SURF (Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship) with Gharib in the summer of 1998,” Graff recounts. “The next summer, I decided that I wanted to do another SURF with Mory, and it was in the spring of 1999 that Maureen Clemmons had contacted Mory about her ideas. He suggested I work on that as a project, and I agreed.

“The first summer was all about checking the feasibility of the whole idea and designing a basic system.” Graff and Gharib decided they would need to build a simple structure around an obelisk with a pulley system mounted in front of the stone. That way, the base of the obelisk would move across the ground for a few feet as the kite lifted the stone, and the stone would then be quite stable once it had been pulled up to a vertical position. The top of the obelisk would be tied with ropes threaded through the pulleys, through a braking system, and attached to the kite.

“The next summer I worked on the project again,” says Graff, “and the task was to get ready for a two-ton obelisk and get more specific on the design of the system to the point where we could put one together and try the ideas.

“By then, two more people had joined the team. Daniel Correa, from Inca-Block of San Diego, read about the idea in a newspaper and contacted Maureen, offering his construction expertise. Using my drawings, he manufactured two concrete obelisks for us that were made with rebar, or iron rods, to strengthen the massive objects. He also helped in the setup of our structure, and it was his workers who built the first version of it. Maureen had also found our kite expert, Eric May, a kite surfer from Santa Barbara. He taught me how to fly the things so that I could take one control line and he could take the other of our large kite, which is impossible to fly with just one person.”

Graff continued working on the project as a part-time staff member throughout the 2000–01 school year, conducting tests every few months. “Our first field test was in October 2000, in Tecate, Mexico, where the obelisk was built. There was no wind, and it was a bit discouraging.” On a Web site dedicated to the project—www.pyramidiots.org—Graff writes that, in lieu of wind, the kite was replaced with a truck to test the structure and the pulley system. “Very slowly, the obelisk reached about 75 degrees, after which one of the pulleys seized and was ripped out of the structure by the truck’s pull. The rip in the metal caused the whole beam to break, and the obelisk came dramatically crashing down.” The obelisk was essentially destroyed, and “the initial idea to save money on the pulleys and the structure was abandoned.” The team bought larger, more rugged pulleys, reinforced the brake, and redesigned the structure, or scaffolding, to make it stronger and safer.

In the meantime, the team conducted a February kite test at a new site in the Guadalupe Sand Dunes north of Santa Barbara, California, where a steady breeze was assured. It didn’t go perfectly, but it did yield “an actual measurement that the kite could pull at least 500 pounds in 7-mile-per-hour winds,” says Graff. “This gave us a boost in confidence that it would work.” Subsequent rains and the impending arrival of the snowy plovers (birds that have priority to nest in the area) sent the team packing. The setup was moved to Quartz Hill, near Palmdale.

“Our first field test there was also plagued by a lack of wind,” says Graff. “But suspecting that the obelisk did not weigh 4,000 pounds, we did some tests and found that in fact it weighed nearly 7,000. The rebar had added weight that I did not factor into the size calculations.

“The next time we went we finally had wind, but Eric May was not able to make it. With another inexperienced flier at the other end of the kite, we lifted the obelisk after wrestling with the kite for an hour and a half or so. The second successful field test, with Eric May and slightly stronger winds, resulted in the obelisk being raised in just 45 seconds.

“Then on June 23, 2001, we had our first public field test,” which was well attended by members of the national press. “Although the winds were not as smooth as we would have liked, we managed to bring the obelisk up in two tries, requiring a total of about 25 seconds of kite airtime.” The force generated by the wind actually lifted the obelisk off the ground, where it swung for a few seconds before the team lowered it into an upright position.

WILL THE IDEA FLY?

One reporter, who covered the event for The Chronicle of Higher Education, posed the question, “Does Ms. Clemmons’s theory hold air?” Egyptologist Barbara Lesko answered no. “Even if it is technically possible to do this, the Egyptians left us no documentation that shows they knew of kites or used kites,” said Lesko, a research associate at Brown University.

Graff considers the historical question from an engineer’s perspective. “I think that the whole kite idea is great,” he says. “First, it gives more credit to the creativeness of the Egyptians. If they were smart enough to design buildings like the pyramids so perfectly, then it just seems wrong that they would not devote any of this intelligence to construction methods, and that they would have everything done with human power. Aside from that, the kite method would be much faster and less strenuous. And it would require fewer people.

“Although there are some difficulties that we have not yet experienced with our smaller obelisks, imagine how difficult it must be to coordinate thousands of workers. To move their larger obelisks, weighing up to 300 tons, they would have required at least 2,000 workers pulling on one or more parallel ropes, and all 2,000 would have had to pull at the exact same time with all their strength. And somehow, between pulls, they would have had to prop the obelisk up with something so it wouldn’t fall back down. And they would have had to do this for hours or even days.

“Meanwhile, with the kite method, they would have had to fly a kite or a stack of kites, with at the most a couple of people for each control line and a minimal support crew to operate the brake, lubricate the pedestal as it slid, and guide the obelisk into place. With steady winds it would not take nearly as long and it would be much more graceful than a bunch of Egyptian men with hernias at the end of the day.

“A lot of people say that we are wrong and that this doesn’t prove the Egyptians did it this way,” Graff continues. “Part of that feeling I think is honestly not believing in our idea, while part of it is simply not being open enough to accept the first serious theory that does not involve thousands of workers in heavy labor for hours if not days. They are right about the fact that we have not proved the Egyptians did it this way—not with our obelisk one-tenth the size of the smallest Egyptian variety; not with our nylon parafoil for a kite; not with our steel pulleys and steel structure and braided yachting rope. But what we did is the first step in trying to prove the Egyptians may have used this method.”

ON TO BIGGER, MORE ANCIENT THINGS

“Now that we have seen the tremendous forces that the wind can develop when its power is properly harnessed, we will get ready to gradually downgrade our technology to the level that the ancient Egyptians may have used,” says Graff. “And we will eventually increase the size of the obelisk until it reaches Egyptian size.”

Graff himself may be off designing race cars by that point. He plans to graduate in a year (in engineering and applied science, with a concentration in aeronautics) and pursue this long-held goal.
Future SURF students take note. Gharib says the team is “preparing to replace the steel scaffolding with wooden poles and the steel pulleys with wooden pulleys like the ones they may have used on Egyptian ships.” Now that he, Graff, and cohorts have shown that a kite can raise a huge weight, they plan to progess to a 10-ton and then perhaps a 20-ton stone. Eventually they hope to receive permission to raise one of the 40-ton obelisks that still lie in an Egyptian quarry. “We may not even need a kite,” Gharib suggests. “It could be we can get along with just a drag chute.”