How To Keep a Skyscraper From Falling Over

Hinzugefügt: 2026-06-04

[00:00:00]Why is this 600 ton steel ball hanging from the ceiling in Taipei 101, Taiwan's tallest building? It's because Taiwan sits right on the Ring of Fire, home of 90% of the world's earthquakes. So, when you build one of the tallest buildings on Earth here, shaking isn't a rare emergency, it's a weekly occurrence.

[00:00:17]Which is why the solution wasn't to fight the movement, it was to work with it. Because normally, if you were to add a fixed weight to the top [music] of something, you would just increase its instability, making it way more top-heavy. However, this weight isn't fixed, it's suspended, allowing essentially 100 elephants to swing freely, perfectly counteracting the natural sway of the building to keep it [music] in place in hurricanes and earthquakes.