How the Hoover Dam Works: A 3D Animated Introduction

When it comes to tourist pil­grim­age sites in the Unit­ed States, the Hoover Dam may not quite rank up there with the Stat­ue of Lib­er­ty, the Lin­coln Memo­r­i­al, Mount Rush­more, the Grand Canyon, or Dis­ney­land. But that’s not due to a lack of impor­tance, nor even a lack of impres­sive­ness. Prop­er appre­ci­a­tion of its man-made majesty, how­ev­er, requires an under­stand­ing of not just the vital func­tion it serves, but the enor­mous task of its con­struc­tion. The guides at the Hoover Dam have been trained to explain just that to its many vis­i­tors, of course, but all of us could ben­e­fit from going in pre­pared with a lit­tle knowl­edge. Watch the hour-long video on the dam’s design and con­struc­tion from Ani­ma­graffs above, and you may be pre­pared with enough knowl­edge to tell the guides a thing or two.

Ani­ma­graffs is the YoT­tube chan­nel of Jacob O’Neal, which we’ve pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture for its acclaimed expla­na­tions on a six­teenth-cen­tu­ry explor­er’s sail­ing ship and the Gold­en Gate Bridge, anoth­er icon­ic con­struc­tion project of the Great Depres­sion. Like those, his Hoover Dam video uses detailed 3D mod­els based on seri­ous research, not least into the pro­jec­t’s orig­i­nal design doc­u­ments.

This allows O’Neal to show each ele­ment of the dam and its com­plex sys­tem of sup­port­ing infra­struc­ture in detail and from every angle, as well as in a kind of x‑ray vision. We’ve all seen pho­tographs of the Hoover Dam, and maybe even bought some from its gift shop, but even the most sub­lime aer­i­al view does­n’t reveal as much about its ambi­tion as a look into its inner work­ings.

And the ambi­tion of the Hoover Dam is one aspect guar­an­teed to impress any view­ers. It required thou­sands of work­ers about five years to re-shape the Neva­da and Ari­zona land­scape at a grand enough scale to make pos­si­ble human con­trol of the mighty — and, more to the point, might­i­ly unpre­dictable — Col­orado Riv­er. With its large tur­bines, the engi­neer­ing and instal­la­tion of which O’Neal explains in full, it man­aged to gen­er­ate enough elec­tric­i­ty to repay its con­struc­tion cost of more than $811 mil­lion in today’s dol­lars by 1987, just over 50 years after it opened. And in an achieve­ment almost impos­si­ble to believe today, it opened more than two years ahead of sched­ule. We hear a good deal today about the con­cept of “state capac­i­ty,” and how the U.S. could regain it. At the Hoover Dam, we behold state capac­i­ty quite lit­er­al­ly made con­crete.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Incred­i­ble Sto­ry of the Hoover Dam

The Genius Urban Design of Ams­ter­dam: Canals, Dams & Lean­ing Hous­es

How Medieval Islam­ic Engi­neer­ing Brought Water to the Alham­bra

The Genius Engi­neer­ing of Roman Aque­ducts

The Bril­liant Engi­neer­ing That Made Venice: How a City Was Built on Water

Dis­cov­er Ansel Adams’ 226 Pho­tos of U.S. Nation­al Parks (and Anoth­er Side of the Leg­endary Pho­tog­ra­ph­er)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. He’s the author of the newslet­ter Books on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Sum­ma­riz­ing Korea) and Kore­an Newtro. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.