Bragging Found In The Wild

I used the piece of an old magazine above a while back to illustrate the cross-section of a Phoenix column: a group of arc segments with flanges that allow them to be riveted together into a circular column. I haven’t seen that many Phoenix columns, in part because most of the remaining structures with them are bridges and I typically don’t work on truss bridges, but I came across a few last week.

I love the old practice of rolling the company name into the surface of a piece of steel. In this case, some rust and a lot of failing paint make it hard to read.

Here’s one of the other columns:

PHOENIX IRON CO.
PHILA. PA

The Phoenix column is interesting from a history of technology viewpoint because it was not obsolete when it fell out of use. It wasn’t killed off by a better steel column, it was killed off by standardization. When the Phoenix column was first used in the 1860s, in wrought iron, there was pretty much no standardization of metal construction. By 1900, there was a standard for steel shapes that did not include this proprietary column. That standard became the ASTM A6 specification shortly after, and is still in use.