The Hidden Engineering of Mount Rushmore

There is something unusual about Mount Rushmore. Unlike most sculptures which look painstakingly crafted Mount Rushmore almost seems  like it formed out of the mountain naturally and not by the work of a great sculptor. The reality is Mount Rushmore is not only a work of art but an engineering masterpiece.

Despite having zero artistic experience an enormous team of gold miners managed to bring these giant heads into existence using jackhammers, dynamite, and some clever engineering. We modeled the entire thing to show you how they mapped the design onto the mountain using ancient Greek technology and how all of this was done without losing a single man. But in order to understand why Mount  Rushmore exists in the first place But in order to understand why Mount Rushmore exists in the first place we need to go back in time.

In the early 1920s the state of  South Dakota was just a few decades old and it was struggling to get its foot in the door. State historian Doane Robinson saw how tourists from all over the country had been flocking to a new sculpture in the state of Georgia, and this gave him an idea. He reached out to the sculptor Gutzon Borglum and asked if he'd like to make an enormous sculpture of America's Wild West Heroes.

Borglum was excited by the idea, but thought that more National figures like presidents would draw more attention. And so, in the summer of 1925 he traveled to South Dakota and came across Mount Rushmore a 500 foot tall cliff edge made from fine grain granite. He knew that this would be the perfect blank canvas for his project.

With the mountain secured, he started studying photographs of the presidents and put together a 1:12 scale model Now he had to figure out how he was actually going to make the real thing. At the time Mount Rushmore had nothing No roads, no electricity and no way for workers to even climb the mountain and so, in the summer of 1927 a road was built that could carry goods and people to the site. Soon after, an entire village popped up around the base of the site with tool shops, blacksmiths and houses for the workers.

An enormous staircase was built to the top of the mountain and a cable car was set up to carry tools and materials back and forth. A winch house was also built at the top of the mountain where operators could raise and lower the brave workers on small seats to any point on the mountain. With all of this in place the team team could finally start carving out the first head of George Washington.

With the help of carefully placed  dynamite the crew started tearing off large chunks of surface rock until they had a rough egg-shaped head. From here, it was up to the workers to carve out the face using jackhammers. But handling these 30 kg jackhammers on the side of a cliff would be a huge challenge and powering them would require  more clever engineering.

The jackhammers ran on compressed air and so a building at the base  of the mountain was set up to power them. It contained 3 massive air compressors that ran on electricity provided by the local gold mine. These would run all day, compressing air into a pipe that ran for 2,000 feet all the way up the side of the staircase and into a building at the top of the mountain.

From here, up to 16 jackhammers could be connected at a time. To stop the jackhammers from jumping all over the rock, they developed their own techniques. Sometimes installing chains to grab onto and sometimes using their own feet to guide the jackhammer into the rock.

The workers became experts at operating the jackhammers but without any artistic or sculpting experience how did they know where to drill? On the Stone Mountain Memorial, Borglum used a large projector to map out his design but Mount Rushmore was much larger and the 3D nature of the faces would make this method impossible. He had to figure out how to transfer the data from his model onto the mountain.

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In order to turn Mount Rushmore into a reality Borglum had to figure out how to map his 5 ft model onto the 60 ft cliff edge. He took inspiration from the Greeks who were able to make identical copies of Roman statues using a pointing machine. This was a tool that could measure specific points on a sculpture relative to a reference point.

This could then be transferred onto a different sculpture giving the artist a guide to carve to. By doing this for thousands of points the exact shape of the sculpture could be replicated. This worked well for replicas of the same size but in order to scale up his design Borglum would have to get creative.

He came up with his own pointing machine which was essentially a metal arm with a weighted point at one end that could swing around a fixed axis. By placing the weighted point somewhere on his model He could get three measurements the angle of the point, its horizontal distance and its vertical distance. By simply multiplying these measurements by 12 the exact same point could be  transferred onto the mountain But for that Borglum would need to make a much larger pointing machine on top of Mount Rushmore and so that's exactly what he did.

Using this giant machine thousands of points could be marked directly onto the mountain showing the workers where to drill and exactly how deep they should drill. Instead of carving out the entire part the workers would drill a series of holes close together in a honeycomb pattern then the rock between the holes would be hammered out. After a couple hours of solid drilling a steel worker would come down on a harness with replacement bits to keep the workers drilling.

The work was tough and the men spent 8 hrs a day dangling over a 500 ft cliff edge for just 50 cents an hour. Over the next few years work progressed and eventually George Washington's head was done. Borglum had assembled a well-oiled team and so he turned his attention to the finer details.

One of the trickiest parts about this sculpture was the eyes. Typical Greek sculptures have perfectly smooth eyes which look flat and lifeless. To give the eyes a realistic shine he cut out a hole that was deep enough to always be in shadow then at the center of the pupil a square section would be left uncut to give the impression of a reflection in the eye.

This was an extremely risky process since the rock could fall under its own weight at any moment. Its effect was amazing and when viewed from far away these square sections gave the eyes a shiny texture. To finish off the heads, workers would do a process called bumping which would smoothen out the surface and pulverize it, turning it into a whiter color.

The carving of Mount Rushmore went on for 14 years but in the end it was never quite finished. The original plan was to have each president carved down to their waist and a secret tomb designed with  lavish decorations had only just been started when the project came to an end. The second world war took away all of the attention and money from Mount Rushmore and just a couple years later Gutzon Borglum passed away.

Ultimately, Borglum and Robinson achieved their goal of putting South Dakota on the map. And now, time for the Primal Space Giveaway. The winner of the previous giveaway is Sam.

Congrats! In the next video we'll be giving away one of these awesome metmo cube desk toys. Precisely machined out of solid stainless steel.

All you need to do is sign up at the link below, like the video and leave a comment saying what you think about Mount Rushmore. Thank you very much for watching and I'll see you in the next video.