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00:02A perplexing and brutal industrial complex.
00:06It's one of the most claustrophobic places on Earth.
00:11A heavily armed giant rusting away underwater.
00:15That shift in technology and the amount of engineering skill and knowledge that needs to be brought and focused in
00:21was phenomenal.
00:24And one of the world's largest and most secretive weapons ever constructed.
00:29It's almost primitive technology that's just been ramped up to as big as it possibly can.
00:38Once they were some of the most advanced structures and facilities on the planet.
00:43At the cutting edge of design and construction.
00:46Today they stand abandoned, contaminated and sometimes deadly.
00:54But who built them and how? And why were they abandoned?
01:18Out in the remote deserts of Arizona is one of the U.S. Army's most important secret research sites.
01:32Standing in the wilderness is a massive single barreled gun.
01:39Dominating the barren landscape around it.
01:43At 100 feet in length, it has a huge 16 inch wide barrel.
01:51Able to shoot with an unheard of 50,000 PSI.
01:57It's designed to fire 400 pound projectiles over 100 miles.
02:03But why would anyone build such a huge, powerful gun?
02:08And why was it abandoned?
02:12Five, four, three, two, one, zero.
02:18In 1961, the space race is in full swing.
02:22Yuri Gagarin gives the Soviets the first man in space.
02:26And America responds with the Mercury test rockets.
02:30And then the Apollo space missions.
02:37But at a secret test facility in Yuma, Arizona, the engineers and scientists have a challenge.
02:45Can they launch regular unmanned projectiles into space at a fraction of NASA's costs?
02:53I had absolutely no idea that space technology was anything but the cutting edge of rockets sent up into space.
03:03But apparently not.
03:05Apparently you can revert right back to technology that is centuries old.
03:10The gun.
03:11Just get a huge charge and fire it straight up.
03:17Using guns to put something into orbit isn't a silly idea.
03:21In fact, it's quite a cheap and reliable method, potentially, to put something into orbit.
03:26These were the early days of the space era.
03:28Technology was moving out of the Second World War and finding its use in a completely new frontier.
03:34And you don't necessarily know what's going to work.
03:37So it's much better to have the two approaches funded simultaneously.
03:41Your rockets and your big guns.
03:45This is the HARP Supergun.
03:48And its target isn't on Earth.
03:50It's the edge of our atmosphere.
03:53But why would the U.S. Department of Defense, with the help of Canada, use such a huge gun to
04:00launch a projectile into space?
04:06If you want to know conditions up in space before you send a very expensive rocket, then you can fire
04:11cheap sensors up.
04:13Find out a bit about what is going on directly above where you're going to fire this big rocket.
04:18Then you're going to get some really valuable data, surely.
04:21It was a win-win.
04:23Sure, you're going to gather all this information about the upper atmosphere.
04:27Great.
04:28But you're also going to gain a strategic military advantage.
04:31Because now you're going to learn about how you can launch missiles across the world at your enemy.
04:36So that's what they were really interested in.
04:40The HARP Supergun is the brainchild of a Canadian-American ballistics expert named Dr. Gerald Bull.
04:48His aim is to make gun-fired, low-cost spaceflight a reality.
04:55But could he make this ambitious project work?
04:59You look at what he was doing, very much the engineer, very much the scientist, always testing.
05:06When you began thinking of gun-launched technology for suborbital or orbital launches,
05:11there were a lot of people that made Jules Verne jokes about him.
05:14There were others that said, well, even if you could do that,
05:18it's worthless unless you have some kind of a telemetry package on it,
05:22transmitting data back to Earth.
05:25He had this idea that superguns were the way to get cheap access into space,
05:29and a huge amount was learned through that program.
05:34The target for the supergun is the ionosphere,
05:37a layer of electrically charged air that lies on the edge of the atmosphere,
05:4240 miles above the Earth.
05:46But to reach that height,
05:48Kan Bull and his engineers construct the most powerful gun ever built.
05:55The program picked up two 16-inch naval barrels.
05:59One was 69 feet long, and one was 50 foot long, approximately.
06:04And they're welded in the center and braced with the superstructure around it.
06:09Where the big bolts are right back here to the rear,
06:12that's where the two pieces were joined together and welded.
06:15They built this superstructure to stiffen,
06:18to keep them from coming apart, plus give it strength when you're up vertical.
06:23Because, you know, when you fire a gun like that,
06:25you might get a little whip and things like that,
06:27and you definitely don't want any tube droop or anything of that nature.
06:32After multiple years of development,
06:34Bull and his engineers first test the Harp Supergun on the island of Barbados,
06:40in the Caribbean, in the early 60s.
06:43Positioned just north of the equator,
06:46it allows projectiles to be launched into the atmosphere,
06:49and then recovered from the sea.
06:52The Supergun is designed to fire up into the sky at an angle of 85 degrees.
06:58But the velocity of the launch has a significant impact on the surrounding community.
07:06There were more than 2,000 firings of this gun in the period from 1962 onward into the 70s.
07:13That is quite a lot of sonic boom.
07:17And it was a heavy boom.
07:21Barbadians felt this boom from here up to almost the top of the island.
07:26The reverberations were terrible.
07:29Houses were shaken to the foundations,
07:31and quite a few cracks in houses were reported.
07:35Barbadians felt generally that this was all to the good of the island.
07:39It seemed as though it would project Barbados into the stratosphere of world prestige.
07:49But this ambitious project has other significant disadvantages.
07:56As well as advantages of using a giant gun, there are drawbacks as well.
07:59So to get something to the speed that you need to get it high up in altitude,
08:04you have to accelerate it very fast.
08:06And your objects may not be able to withstand the forces, the g-forces that are experienced.
08:11And then there's also an issue of mass as well, because you can't launch particularly heavy things using this kind
08:18of technique.
08:18So you're limited to small objects.
08:22Will the Harp Supergun actually send a successful projectile into space?
08:28And why was it abandoned?
08:40In the barren deserts of Arizona, the so-called Harp Supergun is an unexpected marvel of American space engineering.
08:51Built in 1961, the same year the Soviets got the first human into orbit,
08:56its ambitious aim is to launch non-man payloads into space,
09:01at a fraction of the costs of NASA's Mercury and Apollo programs.
09:09But how will this project actually collect vital information on spaceflight and the ionosphere?
09:16And will it actually work?
09:20To get something up into space, apparently it doesn't need to be rocket science.
09:26It can be so much simpler than that, as we see with the Harp gun.
09:30It's almost primitive technology that's just been ramped up to as big as it possibly can
09:37to fire a projectile 111 miles straight up.
09:43The projectile in question is something called a martlet.
09:47A revolutionary dart-shaped missile that is encased in the firing tube with a tight wooden ring called the sabo.
09:58The martlet was an aerodynamic shape. Think of it as a large dart with fins.
10:02So the idea of the sabo is to fill the void of the cylinder of the tube.
10:06In this case they used plywood. Each third called a pedal.
10:10And the gases would then exert push this thing out the barrel.
10:14Then the pedals would fall away and you would then have this very aerodynamic shape within the nosecone a telemetry
10:21package.
10:21And then the aft end, the ability to eject certain materials depending on what your test was.
10:28There is some detailed engineering going on here, but what I love about it is it's primitive technology with modern
10:35engineering applied to it
10:36to achieve something that's record breaking, firing that projectile that high up.
10:45Huge amounts of propellant are needed to blast the martlets higher into the ionosphere than ever before.
10:54Every firing generates colossal forces within the supergun itself.
10:59And with that comes real dangers.
11:03You can see the massive size of this breach and the interrupted screw design that would allow it to lock
11:08in.
11:08And just the length of it just shows you the mass of this breach to be able to handle those
11:12charges and pressures that they're firing.
11:15They were looking at pressures PSI around 50,000, I think, with some of the testing.
11:21You need to think about the materials, the size of the explosion through the propellant that you're going to use.
11:28You need to make sure the recoil is not going to just tear the gun apart.
11:32And that you've got a barrel that's long enough to project something that far up.
11:38There's a lot that goes into it and there's a lot of thought and design that goes into achieving this.
11:45But at the heart of it, it's still very primitive engineering and I love that.
11:54On the 18th of November, 1966, in Arizona, the Harp Supergun fires a martlet traveling at 7,000 feet per
12:04second, 111 miles into space.
12:08A record that still stands to this very day.
12:11And using telemetry, the martlets successfully gather critical information about space flight and global surveillance.
12:23But because of souring relations between Canada and the United States over the Vietnam War, the Harp program ends in
12:321966.
12:36And today, the guns sit abandoned, a potent reminder of both the dangers of the space race and our eternal
12:44quest for the stars.
12:47The future of space exploration may well be dependent on billions of dollars worth of investment into technologies that we
12:56don't even know about yet.
12:58I'm not saying you're going to get a man on Mars by firing him out of a gun all the
13:02way up.
13:02That's not going to happen.
13:04But if we're talking about getting payloads and objects into low Earth orbit, which could then be assembled as part
13:11of a project to then go off further and space more than we ever have done before.
13:17And it just makes me smile, the thought of that, that you could have this combination of technologies and of
13:22engineering eras that come together to give us something that is, well, at the moment, out of this world.
13:376,000 miles away, off the southwest coast of Japan, near the port of Nagasaki, is a most mysterious place.
13:50Out in the East China Sea, this abandoned 16-acre island is 550 feet wide and just over 1,600
13:59feet long, the length of only four football fields.
14:04But it has the remains of dozens of buildings and housed 5,500 people.
14:12This island represents one of the greatest engineering achievements of the 20th century.
14:19Incredibly, it's almost entirely man-made, constructed from reclaimed land.
14:26Reclaimed land is actually a massive engineering challenge because you're working with water which moves.
14:33The levels come up and down, it can be quite acidic, quite salty, it corrodes man-made materials quite easily.
14:41And then what you're trying to do is bring stacks of new material and pile it up within this moveable
14:47medium and create a solid, stable structure that you can then live and work in and build huge buildings on.
14:55It was not called the island without green for no good reason.
15:00It's one of the most claustrophobic places on earth.
15:05Over 5,000 people lived in a really tiny community.
15:09But the funny thing is they got used to it.
15:12And when they went on to the mainland, they felt uncomfortable.
15:14But tourists go there today and they tell me they can't wait to leave.
15:20But how did this tiny island become the most crowded working environment on the planet?
15:26And why was it abandoned?
15:321890, Hashima Island.
15:35From this half an acre island, Japanese engineers are trying to tap a massive coal vein 650 feet under the
15:45seabed.
15:46They drill a deep shaft down to reach the coal deposits.
15:50And it works.
15:54Over the course of the next eight decades, Japanese energy demands increased dramatically.
16:01They eventually mine coal over half a mile beneath the sea.
16:07To meet these demands, engineers expand the island to 16 acres by the 1970s.
16:15But one thing is constant.
16:17The working conditions are unbearable.
16:22It was a really dangerous place.
16:26Stones often fell from the ceiling.
16:29It was like doing hard labor in a steam bath.
16:34How was this island built to sustain the millions of tons of coal extracted?
16:40And why was this marvel of modern commercial engineering abandoned?
16:55Hashima Island in Japan is one of the engineering marvels of the modern world.
17:01At its peak in the early 1970s, this tiny 16-acre island produces nearly half a million tons of coal
17:09a year.
17:10The mine runs continuously for 365 days a year, 24 hours a day, with over 5,000 workers sharing three
17:21shifts.
17:23It's hot, crowded, noisy, and heavily polluted.
17:29The increasing number of workers who come to live and work here puts space on the island at a premium.
17:36And that poses another significant problem.
17:42I think Hashima is an incredible engineering achievement.
17:47You're talking about digging a 200-meter-deep mine in the sea next to this tiny little island.
17:53And you think about, well, fine, I've got this mine and I've got all this material coming up, but where
17:58am I going to send it?
17:59Where am I going to store it? There's no space to actually, you know, position it.
18:03So you have to think about conveying it out.
18:06How far can the ships actually come to the island?
18:09How are you going to get the material from the island to the ship?
18:11And then the ship can sort of disseminate it back to the country.
18:14It's an incredible logistical challenge.
18:16And I think something that they seem to have done really, really well.
18:24What really strikes me about the island Hashima is that it's almost this self-propagating entity.
18:30The deeper you go into the mine, the more material you're bringing up.
18:33And to use that to backfill and make your island slightly bigger,
18:38to maybe then house more miners so you can go even deeper,
18:41it kind of keeps going round and round.
18:43Where does it stop?
18:46Over the years, the workforce grows massively.
18:50And over time, engineers gradually increase the massive concrete seawall surrounding the island,
18:56to protect it from the storms.
18:59This makes Hashima resemble a warship.
19:02It's known locally as Gunkanjima, or Battleship Island.
19:10When I saw the island from a ship for the first time,
19:13I had a very strong impression that the island does look like a battleship.
19:19The first thing I was surprised by was the reinforced concrete buildings.
19:25I didn't know much about the island,
19:28so I never even dreamt about seeing so many tall, reinforced concrete buildings everywhere on the island.
19:36It's a master class in designing and engineering with concrete.
19:42It seems like reinforced concrete was almost designed for something like building on a small island at Hashima.
19:49You don't have much space to move around and to bring in and have lots of stores of materials that
19:54you're going to build.
19:55So, reinforced concrete's great for that.
19:57You pour it where you want it, job done once it's set.
20:00The other advantage of using Hashima is that it's pretty much fireproof.
20:06You can't set fire to reinforce concrete.
20:08And when you're dealing with a coal mine, it's probably the material you'd want best.
20:15Though practical, the rigid and imposing architecture of Hashima Island affects the way people live.
20:23There were so many people here, so many people that you couldn't believe it.
20:30I lived in building 30 with my three other family members.
20:35We shared one room that we'd all live in together.
20:39It was extremely small.
20:42There was no elevator at all in these high-rise buildings.
20:48So people moved about horizontally.
20:52There were lots of passageways.
20:54They didn't need to go downstairs to go around apartment buildings.
20:59They moved horizontally between apartments.
21:06There was a kindergarten, elementary school, junior high school, hospital, pachinko parlor, hostess bar, barber and a florist.
21:19Considering that 80% of our populations are going to be living in cities in the next few decades,
21:24I think there's going to be a lot more skyscrapers and height to fit all these people in.
21:28And I always imagined there to be these kind of futuristic air bridges joining buildings up
21:34so that you don't need to kind of go down and then come up again.
21:37And it's fascinating for me that Hashima did this decades ago.
21:41So I think that there's a real interesting model there for us to think about now.
21:47Maybe there is an element at Hashima that the kind of human factor and well-being of everybody
21:55and just having some space to not be crowded, not feel so imposed upon.
22:02Just not sure that was ever considered.
22:05All they wanted to do was make it functional.
22:07Hashima was there to be functional.
22:10And outside of being efficient at work, I'm not sure much more was thought about.
22:18The tight quarters especially affect the children.
22:24Children used their imagination to play here.
22:28They played cards on the stairs, played marbles wherever they could find tiny spaces.
22:33The rooftops of all the buildings were their playgrounds.
22:39We thought carefully about how to play baseball in our own way.
22:44We used our brains a lot to play on this island.
22:49But with the 5,000 inhabitants adapting to life here, and with half a million tons of coal extracted each
22:56year,
22:57why is Hashima Island abandoned?
23:11By the 1970s, the island of Hashima's population grows to over 5,500 people.
23:18All crammed into less than half of the 16-acre island.
23:23Making Hashima one of the most densely populated areas on the planet.
23:28Ever.
23:30Population density on Hashima got to the point where it was double what civic engineers at that time would have
23:37recommended as being the maximum.
23:39So, I mean, talk about crowded.
23:41You might think you live quite close to your neighbors now.
23:44That's nothing compared to what would have been at Hashima.
23:49In its 84-year history, the Hashima mine produces an incredible 16 and a half million tons of coal.
23:57Its workers endure some of the hardest working conditions on earth.
24:04It was such hard work. No days off.
24:08So, it's true to say, I wanted to leave the island as soon as possible.
24:13But eventually, its coal deposits are exhausted and the mining operation closes in 1974.
24:21And when the island's heart stops, its community dies too.
24:27Today, Hashima is abandoned.
24:30Aside from occasional use for movies like James Bond's Skyfall, it's mostly left to the mercy of the elements.
24:43Approximately 6,000 miles away, across the Pacific, is one of the most unusual and brash transport projects ever undertaken.
24:55In the middle of a 350-mile route that runs between San Diego, California and Phoenix, Arizona, is a very
25:04unusual stretch.
25:06This road is made entirely out of wood.
25:12Each plank used is 8 feet long by 4 inches wide and 1 inch deep.
25:18And it runs for 6 and a half miles, using thousands of wooden planks snaking through the shifting sands of
25:26the California desert.
25:29It's a beautiful kind of American sheer audacity of taking on such a project.
25:35Yeah, why not? Of course I'm going to do it. Nothing's too much of a problem for me.
25:39A road through the desert? Hell yeah.
25:43Deserts are very, very dynamic landscapes.
25:47You've got wind, you've got these sand dunes, and when they interact with each other, it just completely changes the
25:54surface.
25:54Things move, they get lower, they get higher.
25:57So trying to build a road on that seems like a pretty crazy thing to do.
26:02It's almost like the simplest idea was the best.
26:05We're dealing with fast-moving, shifting sand.
26:09And when you think about a road, you think it as something solid, something that doesn't move.
26:13With the sand continuously moving, they needed something that was going to be a little bit flexible.
26:18It's a very simple idea, but maybe it was that simplicity which actually meant that it worked.
26:25Why was this incredible road made?
26:27How great are the problems that the engineers face?
26:30And how does it end up being abandoned?
26:36In 1912, Los Angeles is the final hub of America's transcontinental railroad.
26:42But without any direct connecting routes to the east, nearby San Diego risks becoming an economic backwater, blocked by an
26:52expansive desert which is considered impassable.
26:56But local businessman Ed Fletcher demands that the Southern California Road Network use San Diego as its hub.
27:05Ed Fletcher is one of these great unsung American heroes.
27:09He takes the initiative, he sees the challenge, and he seizes it.
27:15Let's build a road across the desert.
27:18Oh, really? How are you going to do that?
27:19Wooden planks. Is that the best idea?
27:21He does it anyways.
27:23People think California is full of crazy people.
27:27Well, you know what? Maybe they always were, but you have to admire that ambition.
27:33Fletcher calls his novel creation the Plank Road.
27:38We're talking about an engineering achievement here, but it's planks laid out through the desert, which is the kind of
27:45solution I might have come up with as a seven-year-old thinking about it.
27:49But it's the fact that they laid this out, 13,000 planks laid one after the other, after the other,
27:56after the other, which you might say, hang on, that's just not possible.
28:00Fred Fletcher, anything was possible.
28:04What prevents each wooden plank from moving in the shifting sands is the engineers' inclusion of the three metal rods.
28:13Nailed into each plank, they hold the planks together, despite constantly moving terrain.
28:21Amazingly, Fletcher's improvised road is so successful that in 1915 it's incorporated into California's state highway system.
28:32If I'd picked up a map back then and navigated my way to San Diego and it happened to take
28:39in the plank road, to get there and actually see literal planks forming the road, I think I would have
28:46been extremely shocked.
28:48It's not what you'd expect.
28:50It's completely bizarre and utterly surprising to me that two planks of wood in this moving sand desert can be
29:01part of a highway. It's incredible.
29:04Despite its name, the plank road wasn't a joke. It wasn't just a bunch of timber laid out rustically in
29:13front of you.
29:13There was thought and process and design that went into building the road right down to the construction technique that
29:21they used.
29:23Having a contraption that was specifically made to lay out each section of the road in front of it, which
29:29you could then roll the contraption onto to lay down the next bit in front of you.
29:34It's kind of how tunnel boring machines work nowadays, but they weren't boring a tunnel. They were building a wooden
29:40road through the desert.
29:42For 10 years, the plank road is in constant use, not only by local traffic, but also by tourists who
29:51come to enjoy this incredibly bumpy ride across the desert.
29:57Fletcher's plank road becomes a success because it's a novelty. It's the path less taken. It's an adventure. People want
30:06to drive on it.
30:07They know it's going to be an experience. And that's what it's all about. It's sort of the original thrill
30:12seekers.
30:13People would brag to each other. Have you been on the plank road? I have. It's amazing. And everybody wanted
30:18to do it.
30:20But with its popularity peaking, why is the plank road abandoned?
30:36The plank road out in the middle of the Californian desert is one of the most daring and extraordinary engineering
30:44projects of the early 20th century.
30:46Made out of more than 13,000 large wooden planks, this popular but rugged road stretches nearly seven miles and
30:57forms the critical link of a 350-mile highway from San Diego, California to Phoenix, Arizona.
31:06But despite the iron railings that hold the road in place, the planks are still very susceptible to the wind
31:14and the moving sands.
31:18In 1926, San Diego businessman Ed Fletcher replaces the wooden planks with a professional asphalt surface built up on a
31:28sandbank.
31:31Analysis was done on the moving sand and it was found that the sands moved a lot more when it
31:36was lower. Anything that was raised up slightly was less susceptible to the moving sands.
31:42And so when the more permanent road was put in with an asphalt surface, that was put in on a
31:49kind of raised bank, whereas the original plank road was right down where all the shifting sand was.
31:57With the new asphalt highway in place, the plank road is sidelined in the desert.
32:03It slowly disappears under the sand and is largely torn up by scavengers wanting its timbers.
32:10But Ed Fletcher shows what can be done with just a little imagination and a lot of determination.
32:18I love the iterative process that designers and engineers went through here from going from the two parallel rows of
32:25planks that you have to keep your wheels onto to the continuous rows of planks just laid out in front
32:31of you as a more solid structure.
32:32But you've still got planks. It's not great big slabs of concrete. Driving across that, I'm sure in the kind
32:40of cars that they would have been driving at the time, would have made a heck of a racket and
32:44would have been quite a bone-rattling ride.
32:46I'm sure you would have been relieved to get to the end of it, whichever way you were going.
32:55Today, the plank road lies abandoned out in the California desert.
33:01A powerful but decaying reminder of humanity's unquenchable desire to cross this planet's vast expanses to connect our cities.
33:15On the opposite side of the planet, on the southern coast of Australia, is a sunken wreck that was once
33:23at the cutting edge of maritime technology.
33:30It is 225 feet long and 45 feet wide and weighs 10,000 tons.
33:38And it's made almost entirely out of iron.
33:43Tons of iron.
33:46Its 13 coal-fired steam boilers provide nearly 1,400 horsepower, powered through two 13-feet diameter propellers.
33:57Four 10-inch guns are on board, each weighing 18 tons, which are fired from two huge solid-iron gun
34:07turrets.
34:10The beauty of gun turrets is that you can rotate them pretty much 360 degrees, so you can fire in
34:16any direction.
34:17One at the front, one at the back of the ship, you're good to go.
34:21You can maneuver your firepower wherever you need it very, very quickly.
34:26For me, that's a revolutionary time in the design of battleships, because that design with the two gun turrets, one
34:34at each end of the ship, lasted us then for, well, decades to come.
34:40But who built this warship? And why was it abandoned?
34:47In 1870, the crown colonies of Australia are just under 100 years old.
34:54As a fledgling state, vying for its place in the Pacific Ocean, Australia faces an imminent threat from a far
35:02bigger and more established country, Russia.
35:08In the late 1870s, the Russians actually had two plans in case of war with Britain.
35:14One was to attack Singapore, the other was to attack the Australian ports.
35:19So they would have attacked Sydney, Melbourne, then headed off and hid in the West Coast ports of America, which
35:25were neutral.
35:26To defend its waters, the Australian government commissions the most advanced warship of its time.
35:33The HMVS Cerberus.
35:37The willingness of people in the state of Victoria in Australia to put their hands in their pockets to pay
35:43out for this warship to protect themselves against Russian attack sounds a bit nutty on the surface.
35:49But actually, there was a good reason why they did that, because in 1864, the Times reported that the Russian
35:56Pacific fleets very much a danger to shipping right across the Pacific.
36:01And therefore, the purchase of the Cerberus, which was quite ahead of its time in terms of military technology, this
36:07ironclad with quite powerful guns, would have played a very practical purpose to deter the Russians.
36:14Will the world's most powerful warship stem the looming threat from Russia?
36:19And why is the Cerberus now underwater?
36:33On the eastern coast of Australia is a sunken wreck that was once at the cutting edge of design and
36:40technology.
36:42Commissioned to defend against Russian invasion, and with two huge solid iron gun turrets, HMVS Cerberus is one of the
36:51most formidable weapons ever built.
36:53It's the forerunner of some of the 20th century's most powerful and deadly battleships.
37:05The guns are absolutely enormous. You can see the scale of the figure here. They're about 18 tonnes each.
37:10Wow.
37:11About 20 men were inside this in a wartime operation.
37:15Two guns from this turret in the water on the other side, and the two from the aft turret on
37:20the seabed.
37:21Amazing bit of artillery.
37:23Cerberus was the answer to the American USS Monitor.
37:27A great improvement in that she had a central superstructure known as the breastwork.
37:32This enabled the turrets to be raised well out of the harm's way of water flooding them, which is what
37:37had happened to the USS Monitor.
37:39One of the advantages Cerberus had was that she could take on 490 tonnes of water, thereby lowering her profile
37:46and being a smaller target.
37:48If you put yourself in the shoes of a naval engineer in the mid-19th century, the challenges you come
37:54up against would probably seem almost endless.
37:57It's not just changing the material of the hull from wood to iron.
38:01You've then got to think about the armour.
38:03And as you change your armour on your ships, your opponents will be changing their armour on their ships.
38:09So then you need to think about your firepower.
38:11You need to be able to pierce through their armour.
38:14That's a whole new way of thinking.
38:18But Australia faces an even greater problem.
38:22The HMVS Cerberus is made in Great Britain.
38:26And in 1870, getting the ship to Australia is no easy feat.
38:32This iron warship, primarily designed to patrol shoreline waters, must sail a whopping 10,000 miles.
38:41To get it there, they actually took out the guns and shipped them over separately and filled the turrets with
38:48coal.
38:49Coal in every available space on this ship to try and make sure they had enough fuel to cover the
38:5710,000 miles.
38:58But just in case they didn't have enough, what did they have on board?
39:03Just a little bit of extra power?
39:06Masts and sails, reverting back to old technology.
39:11After nearly five gruelling months at sea, the 10,000 ton Cerberus makes the epic journey from England to the
39:19far end of the world.
39:22But it just goes to show how impressive this ship was and the engineers behind it.
39:29The war and the battle that they had to fight, not against a human enemy, but against a natural enemy.
39:36To get that ship that far, the ship that was only really designed ever to be 30, 40 miles away
39:44from a coastline.
39:45It's an impressive feat.
39:48The Australians hope this ironclad war machine can defend its waters from the threat of the great Russian Navy.
39:58For 50 years, HMVS Cerberus valiantly guards the Australian shoreline.
40:04And perhaps, not unironically, the Russians don't invade.
40:11Cerberus, like the nuclear deterrent today, worked very well.
40:14The Russians never came, peace was preserved, Port Phillip Head was never bombarded.
40:20In her day, Cerberus was one of the most powerful warships out there and could easily have taken care of
40:27her contemporaries.
40:27As it happened, she never had to fire her guns in anger because the pace of technology picked up so
40:34quickly.
40:35The design of battleships moved on enormously within a couple of decades.
40:40You would never have got to where that naval technology went without the design and engineering that went in to
40:47designing Cerberus.
40:49She was part of that iterative process to get to the World War I battleships.
40:54By 1918, at the end of the First World War, Cerberus has still never fired her guns in battle.
41:02As more advanced battleships emerge, she is no longer needed.
41:09So, what can you do with 10,000 tons of floating iron and steel?
41:15The Australians sink it and turn it into a coastal breakwater to protect the harbor.
41:22Cerberus was lucky that it survived because it had been mothballed in Port of Melbourne for many years and that
41:28saved it really.
41:29And then the opportunity came to sink the vessel here as a breakwater.
41:34The defender of the harbor became the defender of the coastline.
41:38For me, Cerberus is so much more now than a rust bucket being dumped out at sea.
41:44It marks the very start of Victorian engineering and the Industrial Revolution being applied at sea in a military sense.
41:54All that knowledge and skill and drive that the Industrial Revolution had on our shores.
41:59The metal rolling, development of steam technology, all in one place that we ruled the waves with for decades and
42:08decades to come.
42:09And Cerberus there now is a reminder of that.
42:13The
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