Tower

Categories: Towers

For other uses, see Tower (disambiguation).

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The Eiffel Tower

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Fire-observation watchtower in Kostroma, Russia.

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The air traffic control tower at Bristol Airport, Bristol, England

A tower is a high structure, usually man-made. The sea can erode the land and make a tower known as a sea-stack.

Purposes:

being impressive or beautiful
saving surface area
for the view
- for tourism
- for guiding: air traffic control tower, in particular at an airport, harbour control towers at harbours
- 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 (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 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 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
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)
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.

Skyscrapers are sometimes not thought of as towers. In the UK, tall domestic buildings are referred to as tower blocks. In the USA the now-destroyed New York 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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Tower

See also: