11 Ups and Downs of Bridges 159

18 deed overcome whatever might go wrong and thus defy Mur-

1hy's Law.
Both construction projects encountered their share of setbacks,
THE UPS AND DOWNS ot the least of which involved the new materials they employed
OF BRIDGES n critical structural components. James Eads actually adopted
hrome steel, of which many metallurgists of the time were skepti-
11I, only after he could not get satisfactory carbon steel parts for
is bridge. And John Roebling's son Washington, who oversaw
the construction of the Brooklyn Bridge after his father's untimely
eath, discovered-only after a certain amount of steel wire had
already been spun into the bridge's cables-that inferior material
1,
T he first book of riddles published in English appeared in 11 was being provided by the supplier. Rather than undo what had
and it posed, among others, the question "What thing is it, th, lready been done, Roehling increased the amount of wire that
less it is the more it is dread?" And the answer was given would make up the cables so that the weaker strands would be
"a bridge." Then, as now, bridge builders were apparently look in compensated for. That inferior wire remains in the cables today,
for ways to make their structures lighter for aesthetic and ec a testament to the factor of safety concept, to the corrective mea-
nomic reasons, even as they were making them span ever-great sures that can be taken in design and construction, and to the fact
distances. And because of the psychological and structural strua, that flaws per se do not necessarily lead to failure.
gles between less and more, the history of bridges is crisscross Those who doubted the structural success of the designs of Eads
with interrelated examples of colossal failures and spectacula and Roehling were answered when the bridges were finished. The
successes, providing many technological riddles, lessons, and sur, Eads Bridge was completed in May 1874, and progressively
prises. heavier railroad trains passed back and forth across it into mid-
For over a hundred years now, the Eads Bridge has crossed the June. The final test seems to have occurred when an elephant
Mississippi at St. Louis in three chrome-steel arches while th crossed the bridge without hesitation, for it was popularly believed
Brooklyn Bridge has been suspended over the East River in New that such beasts had instincts that would keep them from setting
York from four steel-wire cables. These two bridges represent foot on an unsound bridge. On the Fourth of July, 1874, a parade
some of the earliest uses of pneumatic caisson technology and steel celebrated the completion of the bridge between southern Illinois
in bold new structural designs, and both stand as unequaled and St. Louis, and in his speech Eads acknowledged and dismissed
achievements of their era. They both involved several simulta• the doubts about the bridge's safety: "Yesterday friends expressed
neous leaps of engineering and hence invitations for something to to me their pleasure at the thought that my mind was relieved after
go wrong. Yet, like the Crystal Palace, the Eiffel Tower, and other testing the bridge," he stated. "But I felt no relief, because I had
unique structures of the nineteenth century, these bridges are felt no anxiety on the subject." But if Eads was confident his stone
dramatic examples that great and daring engineering projects can and steel structure would last as long as the pyramids, he was to
162 e Ups and Downs of Bridges 163

John Roehling lived in a time of suspension bridge failures, a counterexample to Stephenson's claim about suspension bridges
his notable successes-the double-decked Niagara Bridge, t and a model for future bridge designers to attempt to surpass.
Cincinnati Bridge over the Ohio River, and the Brooklyn Brid ltoebling used many of his own innovations from the Niagara
-owed the stability of their long spans under both traffic an Bridge-among them a deep, stiffened roadway and diagonal ca-
wind loading to his understanding that the collapse of so man bles to counter the wind forces-in his Cincinnati and Brooklyn
suspension bridges of his contemporaries was due to a deck th Bridges, but later suspension bridge designers made roadways
was not properly stiffened against those loads. But the succes: progressively longer and less deep, thus making them more flexi-
of Roebling's designs stood more as symbols and encouragement ble not only under the traffic but also against the wind, and at the
than as lessons to future bridge engineers, who were present same time eliminating the diagonal cables that are almost a trade-
with challenges to span wider rivers and bays with more economl• mark of Roebling's bridges. Thus suspension bridges evolved
cal structures. through the first third of the twentieth century into longer and
Roehling himself rose to the challenge of spanning the Niagat1 sleeker designs that included the George Washington Bridge, the
River gorge with a radical design for its age, even though some Bronx-Whitestone Bridge, and the Tacoma Narrows Bridge. This
of his contemporaries said it could not be done. Robert Stephen, last, of course, took slenderness beyond any reasonable limits of
son, the great British engineer whose Britannia Bridge was built experience.
up of huge rectangular tubes of steel through which railroad train The paradox of engineering design is that successful structural
could pass because he did not believe a suspension bridge could concepts devolve into failures, while the colossal failures contrib-
ever carry trains, wrote to Roehling about his proposed suspension ute to the evolution of innovative and inspiring structures. How-
bridge to carry railroad trains across the Niagara: "If your brid ever, when we understand the principal objective of the design
succeeds, then mine have been magnificent blunders." Th process as obviating failure, the paradox is resolved. For a failed
Niagara Bridge did succeed, but then so did Stephenson's "blun• structure provides a counterexample to a hypothesis and shows .us
der." His design carried trains across the Menai Straits for ove incontrov·ertibly what cannot be done, while a structure that
one hundred years. It was replaced by an arch bridge only after stands without incident often conceals whatever lessons or caveats
being destroyed by a fire in 1970. it might hold for the next generation of engineers. Nowhere is the
Robert Stephenson could view his tubular bridge as a potential constant back-and-forth interplay between success and failure so
design "failure" (even though it was a structural success) because dramatic as in the history of suspension bridges, though daring
his contention in designing it had been that no structurally moro new buildings whose roofs behave not unlike bridges may hold
efficient bridge could be built for the heavy, moving loads of some important lessons for the future. Othmar Ammann, who
railroad trains. His contemporary William Fairbairn actually designed the George Washington and other monumental bridges,
blamed the success of Stephenson's tubular iron bridge, which did has written:
not even need the support of cables from the towers provided for
them, for a number of "weak bridges" built after 1850, perhap: ... the Tacoma Narrows bridge failure has given us invalu-
overconfidently, in the wake of the Britannia's success. Roebling's able information.... It has shown (that] every new structure
achievement in the Niagara Bridge provided at the same time a which projects into new fields of magnitude involves new
 164 The Ups and Downs of Bridges 165

problems for the solution of which neither theory nor practi• gracefulness but insured their structural safety. Subsequent de-
cal experience furnish an adequate guide. It is then that we signs were tested in wind tunnels much the way new airplane
must rely largely on judgment and if, as a result, errors or designs are.
failures occur, we must accept them as a price for human The possibility of failure of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge in a
progress. crosswind of forty or so miles per hour was completely unforeseen
by its designers, and therefore that situation was not analyzed. On
The Tacoma Narrows Bridge was one of the most spectacula paper the bridge behaved well under its own dead weight and the
failures in the history of engineering. This first suspension brid11 light traffic it was to carry. Since its use was projected to be much
connecting the Olympic Peninsula with the mainland of Washin•• less than that of the similarly designed Bronx-Whitestone, the
ton State had a narrow, two-lane center span over a half mile lon8 , Tacoma Narrows Bridge was only two lanes wide as compared to
It was an unconventional design in that the depth of the roadway the ~ix-lane width of its sister bridge in New York. The Bronx-
structure was diminished by employing .a stiffened-girder design Whitestone had opened a year earlier than the Tacoma Narrows
rather than the then-customary and necessarily deeper open truu , and had already had extra cables and stiffening devices installed
This innovation gave a slender silhouette whose appearance wa to reduce the surprisingly large motions exhibited in the wind.
dramatic and graceful, but the shallow, narrow span was also very These corrective measures held the up and down motion of the
flexible in the wind. roadway to a matter of inches, but th~ unduJations continued to
The roadway of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge undulated be noticeable to the , occupants ·or cars advancing stop and go
dramatically during construction and continued to behave abnor- across the-bridge during rush hour. Many an afternoon, commut-
mally for months after it was opened to traffic in 1940. The bridge, ing home to Long Island from the Bronx, I saw and felt the bridge
which came to be known as Galloping Gertie, drew thrill seekers move through unsettlingly large distances as I waited in traffic
who wanted to experience the drive-on roller coaster. On the day jams caged midway between the towers and the open walls of steel
of its coUapse the bridge's roadway gave fair warning of its final that were added to stiffen the bridge after the Tacoma Narrows
fling, and it was closed to traffic before conditions got too danger• collapse. As late as the 1980s additional corrective measures were
ous. The last spectacular motions of the roadway being twisted to being taken to further reduce the motion of the bridge in the wind.
destruction were recorded on newsreel film even as engineers were The motions of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge were measured in
trying to understand the phenomenon of its aerodynamic instabil- feet rather than inches, however, and it did not survive long
ity with a scale model. The film of the last minutes of the Tacoma enough after its opening for corrective measures to be taken. Even
Narrows Bridge is a classic. as it was being ripped apart by the wind, a scale model was being
Subsequent analysis of the Tacoma Narrows failure confirmed tested at the University of Washington to understand the phenom-
that the bridge span acted much like an airplane wing subjected enon and to see what could be done. A similar model of the
to uncontrolled turbulence. This aerodynamic aspect of bridge Bronx-Whitestone existed at Princeton University, and while both
design was one that is no longer overlooked, and susceptible were able to reproduce the disturbing motions of the bridges,
bridges contemporary with the Tacoma Narrows were quickly neither exactly explained them. It took the headline-grabbing
stiffened against crosswinds with steel that may have ruined their story of the collapse of Galloping Gertie to bring forth the phe-
166 The Ups and Downs of Bridges 167

nomenon of aerodynamic instability in suspension bridges as cause of failure to be anticipated during design, not a problem to
explanation of how a slender bridge deck can act like an airplan be dealt with after construction. After surviving for five years, the
wing in the wind. Wheeling bridge was destroyed in a storm. The technical literature
Among the first hints of the true cause of the bridge's failur1 did not go into details and thus deprived contemporary and later
was a letter to Engineering News-Record from Theodore von K4r, engineers-including those of the Tacoma Narrows-the lesson of
man, then director of the Daniel Guggenheim Aeronautical Labo, the disaster, but a local reporter immortalized the bridge's last
ratory at the California Institute of Technology. His letter, In moments on May 17, 1854, in the Wheeling Intelligencer:
which he employed the differential equation for an· idealized
bridge deck twisting like an airplane wing as the lift forces of t ht With feelings of unutterable sorrow, we announce that the
wind want to bend it one way and the steel of the bridge another, noble and world-renowned structure, the Wheeling Suspen-
is a model of conciseness and what is known as back-of-the■ sion Bridge, has been swept from its strongholds by a terrific
envelope calculation. He showed that in cases where the suspen• storm, and now lies a mass of ruins. Yesterday morning
sion cables provide the principal resistance to twisting a simpl thousands beheld this stupendous structure, a mighty path-
solution to the equation can be obtained to predict the critical way spanning the beautiful waters of the Ohio, and looked
wind speed at which a bridge deck of narrow and shallow dimen• upon it as one of the proudest monuments of the enterprise
sions can be expected to twist dangerously. Von Karman's analy• of our citizens. Now, nothing remains of it but the disman-
sis was capable of expressing the facts that the Tacoma Narrow tled towers looming above the sorrowful wreck that lies be-
Bridge was narrower than the Bronx-Whitestone Bridge by u neath them.
factor of about three, and shallower in comparison to its own span, About 3 o'clock yesterday we walked toward the Suspen-
then the third longest in the world, by a factor of about two. Thu sion Bridge and went upon it, as we have frequently done,
von Karman could demonstrate that the Tacoma Narrows Bridge enjoying the cool breeze and the undulating motion of the
should have exhibited the phenomenon of aerodynamic instability bridge. . . . We had been off the flooring only two minutes
more dramatically than any bridge extant. Indeed the bridge fell and were. on Main Street when we saw persons running
in a wind not ten miles per hour lighter than that calculated in the toward the river bank; we followed just in time to see the
letter, which had appeared within two weeks after the accident. whole structure heaving and dashing with tremendous force.
There were not calculations but experiences a century old that For a few moments we watched it with breathless anxiety,
should also have alerted the designers of the Tacoma Narrows to lunging like a ship in a storm; at one time it rose to nearly
the kind of failure predicted by von Karman's solution to a differ- the height of the tower, then fell, and twisted and writhed,
ential equation, however, and those chronicled disasters provide and was dashed almost bottom upward. At last there seemed
some of the strongest arguments. that engineers should be familiar to be a determined twist along the entire span, about one half
with the history of technology. If the designers of the Tacoma of the flooring being nearly reversed, and down went the
Narrows had known the story of the Wheeling Suspension Bridge, immense structure from its dizzy height to the stream below,
the longest span in the world when it was completed in 1849, they with an appalling crash and roar.
would have had no excuse for overlooking the wind as a possible For a mechanical solution of the unexpected fall of this
168 TO ENGINEER IS HUMAN The Ups and Downs of Bridges 169

stupendous structure, we must await further developments. as the behavior of the Tacoma Narrows did in 1940.
We witnessed the terrific scene. The great body of the floor- If failures remembered can be responsible for better bridges,
ing and the suspenders, forming something like a basket structural successes can be responsible for better bridge builders.
swung between the towers, was swayed to and fro like the The Brooklyn Bridge inspired David Steinman, who grew up in
motion of a pendulum. Each vibration giving it increased its shadow, to become a builder of suspension bridges himself. As
momentum, the cables, which sustained the whole structure, the Tacoma Narrows Bridge was twisting itself apart, he was
were unable to resist a force operating on them in SQ ._many beginning to write the story of John Roehling, his son Washing-
different directions, and were literally twisted and wrenched ton, and Washington's wife, Emily, who represented her husband
from their fastenings. . . . at the construction site when an accident in one of the tower
We believe the enterprise and public spirit of our citizens caissons crippled him and confined him to his room overlooking
will repair the loss as speedily as any community could possi- the bridge. Steinman, the designer of over four hundred bridges
bly do. It is a source of gratulation that no lives were lost by of his own, claimed to have taken five years out of his professional
the disaster. life to repay his debt of inspiration to the Brooklyn Bridge by
researching and by writing the story of the Roeblings, and he was
This is as graphic a report as any of the newsreels that recorded subsequently entrusted in 1948 with the task of rebuilding the
the failure of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge almost a century later. historic structure to enable it to take the heavier traffic of the
Though no lives were lost in that accident either, and though the modern age. Thus the bridge that had almost become a monument
Narrows were bridged by a replacement span within a few years, by the late 1940s was rejuvenated to carry a full complement of
it is not "a source of gratulation" that such a failure could occur six lanes of automobiles where it had once been restricted to two.
in the middle of the twentieth century after there had been not Steinman designed his own ·masterpieces, including the great
only the example of the Wheeling Bridge but also Thomas Tel- Mackinac Bridge between the upper and lower p~ninsulas of
ford's Menai Straits suspension bridge. A gale only a month after Michigan. Yet, ironically, its structural success no doubt owes
it opened in early 1826 caused such drastic motion of the bridge more to the collapse of the Tacoma Narrows than to the Brooklyn
that several vertical suspender rods and many floor beams of the Bridge. By understanding what went wrong with Galloping Ger-
then major 550-foot span were broken. A contemporary account tie, Steinman could take steps to obviate that happening in his own
of the failure is not so dramatic as the Wheeling reporter's, but it structure. Other bridge designers countered the lessons of the
does make it clear that the Menai Straits structure failed due to Tacoma Narrows with other solutions, however, and the Severn
undulations of its roadway. It was repaired and strengthened but Bridge linking southeastern Wales and southwestern England
suffered extreme motions and major damage in subsequent storms. across the estuary of the same Severn River spanned by the very
Other examples from history presaged the failure of the Tacoma first iron bridge in 1779 has turned out to be an embarrassment.
Narrows Bridge, but their lessons were apparently not heeded by Held up as an innovative solution to the problems of wind loading
the modern designers. And if the potential for disaster in a bridge when its superstructure was designed in the early 1960s, the Sev-
or any structure is not caught in the blueprints, then it may take ern Bridge has a roadway whose cross section has been described
the engineers and the public as much by surprise when it happens as a wing. The lightweight box girders comprising it were de-
170 The Ups and Downs of Bridges 171

signed, as was the Brooklyn Bridge, to take the kinds of traffl reproduce a bridge with an equivalent batch of construction
loads projected at the time of its conception. But whereas the materials and with the equivalent quality of construction, we
Brooklyn Bridge served traffic for over a half century before it ho would halt progress of commerce in the region served by the
to be strengthened, the Severn Bridge began to feel the increase, bridge, for that would load the bridge beyond its prior experience.
load of traffic within fifteen years of its opening. Yet even the poets and painters who adopt the Brooklyn
The inclined hanger cables began to fray and have had to bl Bridges and Eiffel Towers as their artistic symbols do not expect
replaced, and use of the bridge has had to be restricted.to one Ian them to remain static words on paper or paint on canvas. The
of traffic in each direction. These measures have been necessary bridge of Hart Crane and Joseph Stella was called upon over the
because the bridge apparently was designed with only a small mar• years to shoulder more and more significance in their creations.
gin of reserve strength, and the traffic load was a significant pro• As their art evolved, so did their symbols. Just as no one expects
portion of the bridge's weight. While the bridge sits steady to th there to be a final avant-garde, so there should be no expectation
eye in the high winds on the Severn, its cables and its roadway feel that there will be a final bridge. The great bridges, like the great
excessive load ranges that are aggravated by the corrosive action artistic creations of Shakespeare and Michelangelo, urge the
of the moist air trapped within the roadway girders and blowin younger generation to do more than copy the masters. While
through the distinctive but destructive pattern of its hanger cables, copying might be all right during one's student years, one does
which hardly evoke the diagonal lines of the Brooklyn Brid eventually want to create something of one's own, and that some-
either structurally or aesthetically. Thus the grand successes of th thing, which might be a bridge as easily as a poem, will be an
Stephensons, Roeblings, and Steinmans give models and inspira• excursion into the unsure. If an inspired design relies on sound
tion-but not rules-to their successors. The great bridges live on principles and does not try to extend the limits of art or engineer-
as symbols that innovation need not be doomed, but at the sam ing too far too soon, it stands a good chance of joining the canon
time these symbols can be sources of false confidence. of successes.
Structural failures and surprises might all be ended if we wer, If structural successes egg engipeers on to more daring designs
to stop innovating altogether. Every new bridge could be an exact and cause them to be overconfident in what appear to be designs
copy of one that already has stood the test of time, but traffic on that do not seem particularly inno·vative, then structural failures
the new bridge could never be allowed to surpass that on the old, are reminders that they may have gone too far too soon. Thus
No new materials could be used, and no new bridge could bo structural failures are often the subject of extended investigations
located on a river that did not possess the exact foundation and not so that we may gloat over another's mistakes, but so that all
wind conditions of existing successful bridges. We could virtually engineers may understand more fully what some apparently did
end all risk of failure by simply declaring a moratorium on innova• not.
tion, change, and progress. And it would be a moratorium on
progress, for without allowing change we would in effect not allow
any bridge to be built where one had not been built successfully
before. For no place is quite like any other, no traffic pattern quite
like any other. Even should we convince ourselves that we could