Bridge Facts for Kids

Forget a short walk—this bridge is a record-breaker! The Danyang-Kunshan Grand Bridge in China stretches for a whopping 164.8 kilometers (that’s over 102 miles!).

To put that in perspective, it's nearly three times as long as the entire U.S. state of Rhode Island is wide.

This massive viaduct was built as part of the Beijing-Shanghai High-speed Railway, meaning you could ride a bullet train over it for ages!

The famous Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco hangs on two huge main cables, and each one is made of 27,572 individual wires!

If you unspooled all those wires from both cables, they would stretch for about 80,000 miles combined.

That’s enough wire to wrap around the Earth nearly three times! Talk about strong!

The piers are the giant legs that hold up a bridge! The piers of the Noney Bridge in Manipur, India, are the tallest bridge piers in the world, soaring 141 meters high.

Imagine stacking over 40 regular school buses on top of each other—that’s how tall one of these support legs is!

They had to use special techniques to build these giants across the steep Himalayan hills.

The Pantheon in Rome, finished around AD 126, has a giant dome made completely of concrete—with zero modern steel supports inside!

It measures 43 meters (142 feet) across, making it the largest unreinforced concrete dome ever built. That’s an engineering secret the Romans kept well!

It has survived for nearly 2,000 years, proving Roman concrete was truly super-strong.

The Eiffel Tower in Paris is an iron lattice tower, and its metal structure alone weighs an incredible 7,300 tonnes.

That is about the same as 1,460 big African elephants! Wow, that’s a lot of weight held up by iron beams!

Even with elevators and shops added, the total weight is only about 10,100 tonnes—it was designed to be light for its size!

Meet the Pons Fabricius, the oldest bridge in Rome that is still completely intact and in use! It was built way back in 62 BC.

This stone arch bridge, which spans half the Tiber River to Tiber Island, is older than almost anything else in that city!

It replaced an older wooden bridge that burned down, and the Romans made this one to last!

When the Brooklyn Bridge opened in 1883, it was the first-ever steel-wire suspension bridge. They used a new way to bundle the wires.

Each of the four main cables contains 5,282 strong, galvanized steel wires packed together!

Because building over water was so dangerous, many workers got a mysterious sickness from the air pressure in the underwater construction areas, now called 'caisson disease.'

While not a single bridge, the Great Wall of China is an epic structure that snakes over mountains and valleys! The best-preserved parts, built by the Ming Dynasty, stretch for about 8,850 kilometers (5,500 miles).

The very first walls were built way back in the 7th century BC, making this a 2,700-year-old construction project!

It’s so long that it includes natural barriers like rivers and mountain crests, not just built walls.

The Akashi Kaikyo Bridge in Japan is an amazing suspension bridge that took 10 years to build, starting in 1988.

During construction, the massive Kōbe Earthquake hit in 1995, shaking the towers and pushing them more than 1 meter farther apart!

Engineers had to adjust the plans right then, and they still finished the bridge on time in 1998!

We need to know the difference between tall (how high the towers are) and high (how far the road is from the ground).

The Huajiang Canyon Bridge in China is the highest in the world, with its road deck 625 meters above the canyon floor.

That means you could stack the Eiffel Tower (330m) on top of itself almost two times below the bridge deck!