The Red Brick Times

Good pictures of the Jamestown bridge being blown down, Tony. There is a brief early 20th century History of Jamestown and Newport, RI posted as part of the Jamestown RI visitor information page that puts the area in perspective for us foreigners. Or you can Design your own bridge truss. Then check A bridge spotter's guide to bridge design which offers 60 different types (including covered bridges) at the Bridges and Tunnels of Allegheny County and Pittsburg site. And lest we forget, there is always the Tacoma Narrows bridge to remind us. Since 2002, they have been building a new Tacoma Narrows bridge (open spring 2007) to parallel the current (1950) suspension span, that replaced the one that fell down four months after it was completed in 1940. See the construction cameras with different views of the current project.
Posted 12:11 PM by Andy (1) comments

       Comments:

I have been using the bridge truss designer with the bridge spotter diagrams to figure out the static stresses that our predecessors knew from trial and error when they built the wooded covered bridges. And then I started thinking about the early builders (Roman, Medieval) who got it right from a lifetime of absorbing from a previous master builder and of working up to the big leagues from benches and footbridges. Then I translated to the Tacoma Narrows bridge where the work that might have taken a century in the middle ages is being done in half a decade. The two Tacoma bridge towers are over 500 feet tall, and were built in stages of 17.5 feet of discrete concrete pours. There are 18,000 miles of wire strands in the 2-mile long suspension cables. And everything was put together, one stick at a time, by hand. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

# posted by  Andy : April 19, 2006 8:07 AM
 
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