Tower
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.
See also: