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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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
It's harder than that, because why structures break is actually pretty hard material sciences stuff. One take-away from this book was how limited our knowledge was for a long time... stuff just seemed to break and we couldn't figure out why!https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/245344.Structures?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=xFWc5UJs72&rank=4 …
Second rec for this book, I will definitely check it out! Thanks
Would high variance in quality/properties of materials make these calculations mostly meaningless? My hunch would be that stress failures are really hard to envisage/model
Yeah maybe?
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