Photographs of Falkirk Wheel

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The Falkirk Wheel is the world’s first and only rotating boat lift connecting the Forth and Clyde Canal with the Union Canal.
The difference in the levels of the two canals at the wheel is 24m (79 ft), roughly equivalent to the height of an eight storey building. Historically, the two canals had been joined at Falkirk by a flight of 11 locks that stepped down across a distance of 1.5km, but these has been dismantled in 1933, breaking the link. The Wheel was opened by the Queen on 24 May 2002.
Boats entering the Wheel’s upper gondola are lowered, along with the water that they float in, to the basin below. At the same time, an equal weight rises up, lifted in the other gondola. This works on the Archimedes principle of displacement. That is, the mass of the boat sailing into the gondola will displace an exactly proportional volume of water so that the final combination of ‘boat plus water’ balances the original total mass. The whole thing takes just 1.5kw of electricity to turn it. Amazing.