This footnote in McCullough's *The Great Bridge* blew my mind. As late as the 1880s, we still didn't know how to build bridges! We would put them up, and many would just collapse.pic.twitter.com/6vjfkQ482H
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Plus the math here ought to go back to Newtonian physics, I would think. Basic concepts of force and mass… some of the first to be quantified. Why wasn't there more theory to be applied here?
Maybe the problem wasn't in making a bridge that could stand, but in all the many random things that could bring it down. Bridges are subject to wind and water, and fluid dynamics is terribly complicated.
Or to take another example, I think I recall hearing about a failure due to iron becoming brittle in extreme cold, not necessarily something you could predict without a lot of materials science.
Also I have to admit I have no idea how many total bridges there were in the country at the time, or how fast they were going up. So I don't even know the order of magnitude of the failure rate here. Still, forty a year!
Anyway, gotta be a fascinating story here. Definitely will cover this in a future @rootsofprogress post!
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So here's an example of a bridge collapse. Diagnosis: the engineer “had not calculated his wind loads accurately”pic.twitter.com/uwtmofMx9U
I'm guess they were trying to work with materials they didn't fully understand yet. Roman's had centuries to understand working with stone. An interesting question.
I dunno… wood? Iron? Pretty old materials. Some grades of steel were new. I kind of doubt this is the main reason though
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