The first general principle of the construction site was to separate the energy brought by men (using their weight) from the one brought by nature (gravity or Archimedes thrust) that applied to a counterweight or a float.

The second principle was to employ ballasts in the form of copper bars of manageable weight to lift loads too heavy for human strength. These bars were piled up onto the counterweights, or floats, and thanks to gravity, it brought the necessary force to lift these heavy blocks.

This compensation principle is straightforward to understand: to lift a ton, a ton has to descend. Read more.

On the winch placed on the course, workers used the same rope over and over to go down. The worker would jump to take the rope at 2.5 meters high and then curl up while descending 2 meters before letting go of the rope. He would then land on a slide to soften his landing, and a previous worker waited for him to help him get up before going back in line to repeat the operation.

Therefore, using his strength and body weight while falling, the worker supplied the mechanism with energy.

The floats worked as follows: the workers went down on the plateau and then climbed the stairs in the cage nearby. The energy that resulted from this was the product of their weight multiplied by the fall’s height point and was transferred to the float while they were going down on the platform.

The key to this method was to limit the movements of the workers during their hard work. Indeed,

under the blazing sun of the Giza plateau, they could be easily exhausted from just walking 50 km (31 miles).

The area of the workstation was limited to prevent workers from walking great distances and to allow workers to work in the shade.

The workers could be compared to the professional athletes of today because they were well-treated and well-fed, and they were also motivated.

They could work at a sustained pace for hours, producing a power of 200 W (which equals the effort produced by a professional cyclist) thanks to the device, but to preserve the workers’ energy, they were limited to an average daily power production of 80 W and worked in turns. This means that the worker had to produce for a day of work 1 kWh, to be solely directed on the stone if possible.