The bigger the better
If you wander onto a construction site, you can catch a glimpse of a towering crane or a multi-story dump truck, but for the most part, the world’s largest machines operate away from the public eye. Massive mining equipment or tunnel-boring drills work far underground or in remote regions, while huge cargo planes are rarely seen at commercial terminals.
The world’s largest machines are not all about work. Fifty-foot robotic creatures and three-story vending machines show that mechanical inventions can sometimes focus on fun instead of providing industrial muscle.
Here are some of the world’s largest machines, and the important, fun or sometimes controversial jobs that they are built to accomplish.
Large Hadron Collider
The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is the world’s biggest particle accelerator, and the largest (or at least "longest") machine in the world by some definitions. The collider consists of rings of superconducting magnets that run through a tunnel at a facility near Geneva, Switzerland. The total length of the LHC is nearly 17 miles. The electromagnets accelerate particles to nearly the speed of light before, basically, crashing them into one another. To reduce resistance, the magnets are kept at minus 456 degrees Fahrenheit — colder than the temperature in outer space.
Why do this? Such collisions allow scientists to advance the study of particle physics by helping them gather data that offers insights into the composition and behavior of subatomic particles. This glimpse into the subatomic universe is available only in the brief moments after the violent, microscopic collision.
Berjaya Times Square Vending Machine
The massive Berjaya Times Square hotel and retail complex in Kuala Lumpur created the world’s largest capsule vending machine. When the weeks-long construction was complete, the gumball-machine-shaped structure stood 32 feet tall and the capsule stretched to 15 feet in diameter. It was built to mark the building’s 10-year anniversary, and the Guinness Book of World Records verified the "largest vending machine" claim in 2013.
Visitors who came to the anniversary celebrations dreaming of thousands of pounds of gumballs were disappointed. The vending machine distributed prizes (or vouchers for prizes) instead of candy. People purchased tokens or redeemed receipts from the mall’s retailers for tokens. They could then try their luck at winning iPhones, televisions and computers.
Antonov AN-225
The double-decker Airbus A380 and the legendary Boeing 747 dwarf other passenger jets, but the largest airplane in the world carries cargo, not people. There is only one six-engine Antonov AN-225 in operation; it's the only one ever built. The AN-225 was designed in the 1980s to carry Soviet spaceships on its back. It's now a Ukrainian-flagged plane named Mriya (which translates as "dream") that specializes in flying oversized cargo. The largest payload was a 247-ton piece of oil pipeline.
Exactly how big is Mriya? Its landing gear has 32 wheels, and it boasts a wingspan of 290 feet. Its maximum total weight at takeoff is 640 tons. It's available to hire at a cost of about $30,000 per hour. Because of this price tag and the fact that smaller cargo planes will suffice for most transport jobs, Mriya spends a majority of its time in a hangar at Gostomel airport in the Ukraine.
FAST: 500-meter Aperture Spherical Telescope
FAST stands for Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Telescope. This massive telescope is located in a natural depression in rural Guizhou Province in Southwestern China. Known as Tainyan (Heaven’s Eye), it is the largest filled-aperture radio telescope in the world. As its acronym suggests, the dish has a diameter of 500 meters; that’s 1,640 feet.
FAST took five years to design and build. It began operating in 2016 and enjoyed early success, discovering two previously unknown stars soon after it went online. One of these stars, a so-called white dwarf star, was 16,000 light years away from earth.
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