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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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
these examples are extreme, but a lot of structural failures were more simple—like "the tensile strength of the wires holding this up isn't enough for the load we send over it but we don't know what tensile strength is"
They didn't know what tensile strength was by the 1880s?
Fatigue was proposed long ago but it was not too sound until many years later. IIRC, the real push to better understanding and creating models was due to catastrophes such as early passenger airplanes, somewhat recently (1950-ish). (Not lecturing BTW)
Thanks, any good references on this?
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