Take 4,360 cubic meters of concrete (enough to pave a single-lane highway from San Francisco to New York), add 21,000 workers (but deduct an average of 50 a day due to injury or death), stir in 5 million, 8-cubic-meter buckets of cement and 950 km of steel piping, then garnish the lot with a dog that has its own bank account. What have you got? A bunch of immediately forgettable statistics and one of the seven wonders of the American engineering world: the Hoover Dam.

This sucker's big! Dedicated by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in September 1935, it weighs 6.5 million tons, stands 221 meters high, and is 201 meters wide at the base. Hoover's also marvelously designed; a triumphant mix of utility and beauty. Winged statues representing liberty and vigilance loom high. There are Art Deco interiors and terrazzo floors influenced by Amerindian art. And the sweeping Modernist curves definitely seduce the eye. Unless you have vertigo. In which case they'll make you feel seriously ill.

This extraordinary undertaking was named after Roosevelt's predecessor, the 31st president of the United States, Herbert Hoover, who did a great deal of moving and shaking to make the project possible and enable the first concrete to be poured, in June 1933. After Hoover had become an ex-president, the new Secretary of the Interior decided that it should be renamed the Boulder Canyon Dam -- mainly because he didn't like Mr. Hoover. But Hoover sort of rolls off the tongue, and the original name stuck. Congress officially called it the Hoover Dam in 1947.