Coral Castle
Successful accomplishments come in all shapes and sizes. Take the gigantic feat of the mysterious Coral Castle in Florida for example. Weighing in at 100 pounds and only standing at 5 feet tall, Ed Leedskalnin began building massive structures out of coral in 1920. Heartbroken that his true love had left him, Ed decided that he was going to build a castle out of coral and dedicate it to her.
The part of Florida that he lived in had an abundance of coral which in some places was 4000 feet thick! Ed somehow managed to cut huge coral blocks with only hand tools and move them to his house by hand. He carved furniture for many rooms of his castle and beautiful enormous sculptures. His accomplishments are unexplainable because no one ever saw him work. A few of his magnificent pieces were a rocking chair that weighs thousands of pounds and a 5,000 pound coral rock heart shaped table. And these were just a few of the hundreds of items he carved!
Amazingly in 1936, Ed moved 10 miles from his home in Florida City to Homestead and brought his entire coral castle with him. He borrowed a friend’s truck to help him move the pieces, but people never saw him use any other machinery to move these massive blocks of coral. Once relocated to his new property, Ed set to work carving an 8-foot tall wall around his property. Each section of the wall weighed 13,000 pounds! These walls fit together with amazing accuracy and no cement was ever used to hold them in place. In all, Ed quarried and sculpted over 1,100 tons of coral rock for his castle, using mostly tools that he fashioned from junkyard auto parts. He never revealed his secrets of how he was able to single handedly move such large and heavy pieces of coral. When asked, he would only answer that he understood the laws of weight and leverage. Oddly, he only had a fourth grade education.
Engineers and scientists alike have been baffled by this small man and his colossal creation. How do you think he did it?
