Cranes

How are cranes made?

I live in Kanton Zug, a very small county within a very small country; Switzerland.

Due to a very business friendly approach to corporate taxation Zug is the powerhouse within Switzerland for international business. It is bucking the current boring & dull trend for recession and austerity. Zug is booming and has been booming ever since I arrived here 10 years ago. It is also in a perpetual state of construction, ever since I can remember Zug is being built. 

I imagine Zug will be nice when they eventually get around to finishing it.

Everywhere you look you see building sites; houses, apartments and office buildings going up, all being built in anticipation of further and continued growth and this brings me back to my original question.

From my house the horizon is littered with cranes, the meccano type cranes. The ones which are very tall, very thin, have huge concrete blocks one side to counterbalance the weights it is going to lift and look like they might just fall over at an moment. 

One day there is a hole in the ground marking the start of a new construction and the next one of these spindly, stick insect, metal goliaths have appeared.

So how did it get there? In all my time living in this construction site I have never seen one going up.

Is there another, bigger crane which goes around the world lifting these things into place? A so-called super crane?

I don’t believe there is a super-crane because I cannot imagine anything that big.

So this only leaves me with the following logical options:

1. Thousands of sweaty ben-hur slaves using wooden rolling logs, pulleys and a team of evil looking barrel chested men with whips shouting ‘PULL’ at regular intervals.
2. They are already built somewhere and they are just driven in and roll around the country moving from building site to building site like a scene from some 50s alien invasion movie.
3. They grow them with magic beans.

I recently placed a time-lapse camera at a newly started building site to figure this out and the morning after the metal monsters appeared I retrieved it to review the recording. Sadly it was inconclusive as at the critical moment the camera failed, only to strangely restart after they had appeared.

I can only conclude that I have uncovered an engineering conspiracy, one where they, they being evil engineers and architects, are hiding their black magic from the general population but I am not sure why.

These are only cranes…..or are they?