History
The aqueduct was commissioned by Catherine II of Russia to engineer Friedrich Wilhelm Bauer. Catherine authorized 1.1 million rouble expenditure and 400 soldiers. Builders used second-hand stone left by demolition of Bely Gorod fortifications. Construction, frequently interrupted, dragged for 25 years, as the soldier engineers were summoned to the war with Turkey (1787-1792) and various other jobs. In the process, both Catherine and Bauer died. Colonel Ivan Gerard lead the project after Bauer's death in 1783. Catherine's son, Paul I, had to issue 400,000 roubles financing; Alexander I added 200,000 roubles. Finally, the aqueduct was completed at an unprecedented cost of 2 million roubles, thus the name Millionny Bridge.
Read more about this topic: Rostokino Aqueduct
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—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face; we, through their eyes. Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe? Why should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs?”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“The disadvantage of men not knowing the past is that they do not know the present. History is a hill or high point of vantage, from which alone men see the town in which they live or the age in which they are living.”
—Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874–1936)