Tower
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This article covers man-made high structures.
- For other uses, see Tower (disambiguation).
A tower is a tall man-made structure, always taller than it is wide. Towers are often built as landmarks to be impressive or beautiful, however the main concept of towers is to save surface area. Skyscrapers are often not classified as towers, although most have the same design and structure of towers. In the United Kingdom, tall domestic buildings are referred to as tower blocks. In the United States, the now-destroyed World Trade Center had the nickname the Twin Towers, a name shared with the Petronas Twin Towers in Kuala Lumpur.
A tower wagon is a mobile tower for construction work, firefighting, rescue work, window cleaning, filming. A railroad tower allowed railroad employees to view the tracks and switches near the tower; it now refers to any location housing interlocking equipment.
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History
Probably the oldest tower still standing is the Leaning Tower of Pisa in Pisa, Italy built from 1173 until 1372. The oldest towers in the United States are the Milwaukee City Hall, built in 1895 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin and the Woolworth Building, completed in 1913 in New York City.
Design and structure
Most towers hold similar but varied designs, towers are always tall and often include an antenna or spire at the top.
Purposes of towers
Possible purposes of a tower:
- being impressive or beautiful
- saving surface area
- for the view
- for tourism
- for guiding: air traffic control tower, in particular at an airport, harbor control towers at harbors
- for security against coming in or getting out: a watch tower at a prison, concentration camp, fortress/castle, border/defensive wall; in some of these cases also to fire from.
- for watching out for fire, especially in a forest (fire tower)
- for spreading light (light tower, lighthouse)
- for spreading sound: church tower with church bells, minaret of a mosque, bell tower.
- for showing the time (clock tower)
- as storage for grain (storage silo)
- for increasing communications distances: radio masts and towers
- for use of the gravity (water tower, drop tower)
- for meteorological measurements in different heights (measurement tower)
- as part of a suspension bridge or cable-stayed bridge
- for supporting power and signal cables (pylon)
- for access to rockets in order to prepare them for launch (service tower, supply tower)
- for the guidance of unguided rockets at launch (launch tower)
- for physical experiments (drop tower, BREN Tower)
- for testing elevators, as the Express Lift Tower
- for solar thermal power stations
- as chimneys
- for fixing nuclear bombs at tests (bomb tower)
- for drilling in the ground (drilling tower)
- in a swimming pool for jumping or diving from a height
- for fun of climbing in it, for example on a children's playground
- the tower of a high slide, for supporting it and with stairs for reaching the starting point
- for gaining wind power
- as support structure for aerial tramways ( Aerial Tramway Support Pillar)
- to gain access for maintenance or cleaning, e.g. scaffold tower
- for mounting thyristors in a HVDC (thyristor tower)
- as a heat exchanger for an industrial plant, a power plant or large building air conditioning plant, a cooling tower
- for attacking a walled city (siege tower)
- to reach heaven (legendary Tower of Babel)
- In Tarot, the symbol of Paradigms
- for the production of bullets, a shot tower (German:Schrotkugel)
- for ski jumping and ski flying
- formerly, for drying of hoses in a fire station.
See also:
cs:Věž da:Tårn de:Turm (Bauwerk) es:Torre (construcción) ko:탑 it:Torre (architettura) nl:Toren (bouwwerk) ja:塔 ms:Menara no:Tårn nn:Tårn pl:Wieża (architektura) pt:Torre ru:Башня sq:Kulla simple:Tower sk:Veža (stavba) sr:Куле sh:Toranj fi:Torni sv:Torn zh:塔 (西式)