That photo is real. It shows the right arm of the Statue of Liberty as it stood in Madison Square between 1876 and 1882. The statue’s sculptor, Frédéric Bartholdi, created the arm and torch first so they could be used to raise funds and generate excitement for the project among the American public. That effort was …
Tracing The Load Path – Short And Psychedelic Version Read More »
John Roebling, the engineer who designed some of the most important US bridges of the middle third of the nineteenth century, is today somewhat overshadowed by his oldest son, Washington Roebling. After John’s death by accident during the earliest stages of the work on the Brooklyn Bridge, Washington became the chief engineer for that project. …
The close-up above shows a critical element in the development of skyscrapers and, non-coincidently, one of the reasons I keep talking about late 1800s truss bridges. Tall buildings were largely responsible for the creation of my profession, structural engineering for buildings. Prior to the the construction of large numbers of tall buildings in the 1880s …
That’s an action shot of the construction of the Lethbridge Viaduct by the Canadian Pacific Railway, in southern Alberta, sometime between mid-1908 and early 1909. Everything about this is fantastic, in both meanings of the word. The viaduct, like most such structures, is quite simple. A series of braced towers sit on foundations in the …
The title of that early 1900s photo is “During a performance at Hammerstein’s Paradise Gardens, New York”. The first three words are obvious, and Hammerstein is a name with a long history in New York theater, but the phrase “Paradise Gardens” is a red flag of sorts. Salesmanship appears to be intruding on reality. What …
