Engineers of Dreams
In his previous books, Henry Petroski has initiated us into the hidden mysteries of such everyday artifacts as the lead pencil, the paper clip, the zipper, and the Post-it note. Now, with Engineers of Dreams, he makes a jump in scale to contemplate those "dry paths" across the rivers and inlets of our cities, those "hard crossings" over the gulches and ravines of our countrysides, those eminently practical but inescapably aesthetic edifices that persist in taking our breath away (when we're not taking them for granted): bridges. The great era of American bridge building - which from the 1870s through the 1930s gave us such landmarks as the Eads Bridge across the Mississippi, the Hell Gate Bridge across the East River, the George Washington Bridge across the Hudson, and the Golden Gate Bridge at the mouth of San Francisco Bay - called for a special breed of engineer: equal parts dreamer, inventor, and entrepreneur. Since the building of any bridge is necessarily a collaborative effort, engineers of dissimilar philosophies and all-too-similar egos were thrown together on project after project, making for an ongoing, interwoven human and technological drama.
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What Hacker News says
- Whenever there is a bridge failure (or similar, highly-visible civil engineering failure) I recommend to engineers of all stripes that they go read the works of Henry Petroski. In particular:
- To Engineer Is Human: The Role of Failure in Successful Design (1985) [1]
- Design Paradigms: Case Histories of Error and Judgment in Engineering (1994) [2]
and
- Engineers of Dreams: Great Bridge Builders and The Spanning of America (1995) [3]
He also wrote a salient op-ed after the 2007 bridge failure in Minneapolis: Learning from bridge failure. [4]
[1] https://www.amazon.com/dp/0679734163
[2] https://www.amazon.com/dp/0521466490
- It's familiar because it's a not uncommon comment. Well, except that most such comments refer to the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, which has a longer span than the Golden Gate. For examples:
- Guinness Book of World Records (1973) made it with the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge - http://books.google.com/books?ei=93b7U_XoBuT5yQPkqYGIBQ&hl=s...
- So did Henry Petroski in Engineers of Dreams: Great Bridge Builders and the Spanning of America: http://books.google.com/books?id=1J9qUcgoUvkC&pg=PT460&dq=cu...
- and Popular Science in December 1995 http://books.google.com/books?id=7n5BWbJWMXMC&pg=PA102&dq=%2...
It's not unique to the V-N Bridge. Here's a generic version in:
- a NASA report from 1978, Skylab EREP Investigations Summary, says "For example, the support towers on each side of a long suspension bridge are several centimeters further apart at the top than at the bottom because of the curvature of the Earth" http://books.google.com/books?id=MEYgAAAAIAAJ&q=%22bottom+be...
and two links for the same observation for the Humber Estuary Bridge in:
- The Guinness Book of Records (1993) - http://books.google.com/books?id=RsNPAAAAYAAJ&q=humber+estua...
- Transport, Volumes 1-2 - http://books.google.com/books?ei=sX77U-DMN8bmyQOUr4KgBQ&id=X...
That said, for Golden Gate-specific comments, see:
- Ghost Hunter's Guide to the San Francisco Bay Area (2005) ("The engineering is so perfect that the towers are actually five inches further apart at the top than the base to account for the curvature of the Earth.") http://books.google.com/books?id=oD52WFx2mykC&pg=PA71&dq=gol...
- Practical Digital Wireless Signals (2010) ("As an example, for the Golden Gate Bridge at San Francisco the tops of the towers are further apart than the tower bases by about 9 cm due to the curvature of the Earth") - http://books.google.se/books?id=itG9Zwf7eHAC&pg=PA261&dq=%22... .
Therefore, do you really believe that you are the originator of that fact, and due special attribution?
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