In 1502, Sultan Bayezid II decided to build a bridge across the Golden Horn to connect Istanbul and the neighboring city of Galata. Among the responses from the leading engineers of that time, the project of the notorious even then Italian artist and scientist Leonardo da Vinci distinguished itself with extreme originality. The traditional bridges at that time were a noticeably curved arch with spans. A bridge over the bay would require a minimum of 10 supports, but Leonardo sketched out a design for a bridge 280 meters long without a single support. The project of the Italian scientist was not accepted. We cannot see this wonder of the world. But is this project working? This was answered by MIT engineers, who, according to the sketches of Leonardo model of the bridge on a scale of 1:500 and tested it for the entire range of possible loads.
In reality, the bridge would consist of thousands of hewn stones. There was no other suitable material at that time (scientists tried to get as close as possible to the technologies for building bridges at that time and the available materials). To make a model of the bridge, modern specialists used a 3D printer and divided the model into 126 blocks of a given shape. The stones were successively laid on scaffolding. After the installation of the cornerstone at the top of the bridge, the scaffolding was removed. The bridge remained standing and probably would have stood for centuries. The Italian Renaissance scientist took into account everything from the seismic instability of the region to the side loads on the bridge.
The shape of the flattened arch chosen by Leonardo made it possible to provide navigation in the bay even for sailing ships with raised masts, and the structure diverging towards the base provided resistance to lateral loads and, as experiments with a scale model showed, seismic stability. The movable platforms at the base of the arch could move to a considerable extent without collapsing the entire structure. Gravity and no fastening with mortars or fasteners - Leonardo knew what he was offering.
Source: 3dnews.ru