I sometimes watch people setting up scaffolding and marvel at the sheer scale of the effort required. Those poles are heavy and a danger in themselves, if one should slip when being manually manoeuvred at a great height above the street.
They don’t need to be nearly as strong as they are -except when they are located at the base of the scaffolding, supporting all the other poles, men, equipment materials and kit.
Today’s invention is therefore to create two different types of scaffold poles. Red ones would be as per normal and used for the first few floors from street level. White ones would be exactly the same in outer dimensions but with a greatly reduced wall thickness. This would make assembly faster and less effortful, without compromising safety.
If anyone made a mistake and used a white pole near the base, it would be immediately obvious, even to passers-by (It might, however, be simpler to use white poles everywhere in the horizontal direction and red ones vertically).
A more elaborate solution would be to create a standard light steel pole and a range of external nylon tubes of differing thickness (and colour). This would allow a rainbow scaffold to be built with linearly-varying strength from bottom to top.
