As you drive along Illinois Route 100, between Alton and Grafton where the Mississippi River bends into an easterly flow, the result of an earthquake, you come across a monster colored high into the stones of the bluff. That’s the piasa (pronounced PIE-a-saw) bird.
Jacques Marquette and Louis Joliet wrote about images of the piasa bird when they embarked on an expedition in June 1673, looking for a waterway that would take them to the Pacific.
“They are large as a calf,” the explorers wrote in their diary to describe the piasa, which takes its name from the Illini Indians, in whose language the word means a bird that devours man. “They have horns on their heads like those of a deer, a horrible look, red eyes, a beard like a tiger’s, a face somewhat like a man’s, a body covered with scales, and so long a tail that it winds all around the body, passing above the head and going between the legs, ending in a fish’s tail.”
Many legends describe the bird, according to a pamphlet from Visit Alton.com. All those legends took place before Europeans arrived in the Mississippi Valley, however. One holds that a selfless chief led a group of 20 warriors to kill the bird. The chief, Ouatoga, offered himself up as bait, and when the bird attacked, the warriors launched their arrows and killed it.
Seeing such a man-made image so high up on the face of a bluff, made clearly before Marquette and Joliet got there, makes me think of the skyscrapers that fill our largest cities. A set of educational activities about skyscrapers can be found on pbs.org, here. The site includes info about the John Hancock Center in Chicago, the Eiffel Tower in Paris, and the Chrysler Building in New York.
In modern times, we use physics to build skyscrapers. In order to support structures as high as a skyscraper, suitable space on the ground must be available for a base, and other considerations need to be taken into account as well.
Last year, a special commission looking into tall buildings in US cities challenged the notion that Chicago’s Willis Tower, formerly called the Sears Tower, was the tallest building in the nation. The new One World Trade Center in New York has a 408-foot extension, which isn’t a “building” but a spire on top of a building, that puts its total height greater than that of the Chicago landmark.
One World Trade Center was built, politically speaking, in defiance of the attacks on Sept 11, 2001, which took down the World Trade Center twin towers, the Wall Street Journal reported. Developers were determined to beat terrorists by erecting what would be the tallest building in the US.
How would you design and construct a device that would allow you to draw the piasa bird on the face of a bluff or similarly inaccessible outdoor place? See Next Generation Science standard HS-ETS1-1 for more information.