The World's Biggest Gadget

OK, I admit it, this is not quite a gadget, per se, but it's one of the most impressive pieces of technological equipment (and I dare to call it that) I've read about in quite some time. I'd even go so far as to say that this might be a glimpse at the future of residential buildings as we know them. Why? Well, simply because we're talking about a huge apartment tower, capable of rotating at 360 degrees only on the power provided by a large number of solar panels placed on its face.

According to the article by Robert Ditcham for Gulfnews.com, the Dubai Property Ring company has announced that its future apartment complex, dubbed Time Residences, will be like nothing the world has ever seen. And that's because the structure will have 30 stores and an overall weight of around 80,000 tons. Imagine how difficult it would be to move such a huge beast; but on solar power only?! That seems sheer insanity. Not according to the developers, though.

"We didn't want to build just another building or tower, we wanted to create something unique - a precious place to live - a genuine contender to be one of the great buildings in the world," said Tav Singh, director of Dubai Property Ring, according to the aforementioned article. And it seems that this is exactly what they're going to get, since they've hired one of the best engineers out there for this task, namely Nick Cooper, managing director of Bennett Associates, the British engineer who designed the drill machine that bored the English Channel Tunnel. And according to Mr. Cooper, this amazing project is possible due to state of the art bearing systems installed at several points in the tower, which will allow a power plant to rotate the base of the tower at 5mm per second using only 21 electric kettles' worth of solar power.

The Time Residences will offer around 200 apartments, but honestly speaking, I don't even want to think about the possible price of such a residence, as it will most certainly be quite prohibitive.

Photo Credit: gulfnews.com.

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