Bridge That Gap? A Fading Cheer for the Engineer

The writer G. K. Chesterton rejected the axiom that a thing worth doing is worth doing well. On the contrary, he declared, a thing that is truly worth doing is worth doing badly. Chesterton had in mind the task of loving God and one’s neighbor rather than building great bridges, or indeed, writing history. Henry Petroski begins his study with an equally arresting instruction: “Imagine a world without bridges” (p. 3). Certainly, it is difficult to envisage what life would be like in New York or San Francisco under such circumstances; yet their inhabitants pay little heed to the engineering that underpins their daily lives. Of course, as Petroski demonstrates, there are particularly famous bridges in New York and San Francisco but this kind of fame, acknowledged by painters, poets, or song-writers, does not really extend to the bridgebuilders themselves.

A major part of Petroski’s purpose, therefore, is to install the likes of Theodore Cooper, Gustav Lindenthal, Othmar Ammann, and David Steinman into the American pantheon. This is an aim worthy of Samuel Smiles, whose five-volume Lives of the Engineers, Petroski notes approvingly, “was popular reading in Victorian times” (p. 13). This collective biographical approach to the heroic era of American bridge building from the 1870s through the 1930s, however, may well strike contemporary historians as an outmoded design. At times, Petroski’s habit of giving the place of birth, educational background, business experience (and in some cases) the military service and marriage details of important engineers threatens to turn the book into a biographical dictionary. More importantly, it draws his attention away from other issues.

This biographical focus does suggest one of Petroski’s secondary purposes; namely, to trace the development of civil engineering as a profession. Many of the leading engineers were immigrants whose relocation strengthened the international flow of technical knowledge. Although university-based training had established itself as an entry qualification into the profession by World War I, education “on the job” remained an important feature throughout the period. Petroski makes abundant use of the journal Engineering News and its successors, which chronicled the profession’s evolution, but his account suggests that personal collaboration on major projects constituted the vital component in any engineer’s career. Cooper’s Rensselaer Institute degree was less important to his success than his work for the railroads, the Navy, and, with James B. Eads, on the St. Louis bridge. Gustav Lindenthal’s academic credentials remain in doubt, but his work at the Keystone Bridge Company helped to establish him in the profession.

By the same token, Othmar Ammann’s Swiss engineering degree was of less consequence than his work alongside Lindenthal. Conversely, the personal antagonism between Steinman and Ammann was as significant a determinant of the former’s career as was his assiduous promotion of the profession. This fraternal (there are no female engineers mentioned) career structure had its perils for bridge users as well as their builders. In the late 1930s, the professional authority of such men as Ammann, Joseph Strauss, and Leon Moisseiff, on the design team for the Tacoma Narrows Bridge, encouraged acceptance of a long-span suspension bridge design with a relatively flexible deck. This ignored a series of eight articles on aerodynamics in Engineering News-Record in 1934 and 1935 which pointed to the vertical pressures that would cause the newly finished bridge to fail. (Its collapse was captured dramatically on film.)

Petroski recognizes that disaster commands respect. His history pays due attention to the lessons learned from the above collapse as well as earlier catastrophes—notably the Tay Bridge in Scotland in 1879 and the Quebec Bridge in Canada in 1907. The first incident indicated the reluctance of British engineers to condemn their own kind entirely. The two engineers on the Tay Bridge inquiry board concluded lamely that they had no “absolute knowledge” of how the bridge came to fall. The lay member of the...