Sciotoville Bridge (photo credit 4.28)
The Sciotoville Bridge is a striking example as to what may be accomplished by the use of continuous bridges. It is the longest of that type ever constructed and now gives to America the proud distinction of having the longest spans for every type of bridge construction, namely, the Sciotoville Continuous Bridge, the Hell Gate Arch, the Quebec Cantilever, the Williamsburg Suspension, the Metropolis [Illinois] Simple Truss Span, and the Willamette River Draw Bridge.
Lindenthal seems to have been drawn not so much to sheer size as to monumentality, however, and his definitive professional paper on the Sciotoville Bridge was in a sense a monument to the achievement of its engineers. His principal assistant engineer on the Sciotoville project was, as on the Hell Gate, Othmar Ammann, who might have been expected to write up and present a description of the project for the archival transactions of the American Society of Civil Engineers had he not been called to military service in his native Switzerland. As in the Hell Gate project, Ammann was succeeded by David Steinman, but it was Lindenthal himself who wrote up the Sciotoville Bridge, which in his own words was a “detailed, although somewhat belated description.” However, unlike Ammann’s paper on the Hell Gate, which was read within months of the completion of the bridge, Lindenthal’s Sciotoville paper did not appear until five full years after that bridge was completed. Nevertheless, the paper was awarded the same Rowland Prize that he had won thirty-nine years earlier for his description of the Monongahela bridge. Lindenthal closed his paper on the design and construction of the Sciotoville Bridge with acknowledgments of his assistants “in this unusual work, bristling with new problems and difficulties.” First to be mentioned was Ammann, and second Steinman, but understanding why the seventy-two-year-old chief engineer prepared the paper, rather than assigning it to his chief assistant, who by then had returned from Switzerland, remains for a subsequent chapter. Whatever Ammann’s disposition, however, Lindenthal was busy with many projects, including writing endeavors, and it is understandable that his report on Sciotoville was not contemporary with the bridge. He seemed more inclined to write about future projects, like a North River Bridge, than completed ones, like Sciotoville, no matter how inspired or gigantic they might be.
A decade after the Sciotoville Bridge was completed, Lindenthal was asked to be responsible for the design and construction of three bridges across the Willamette River in Portland, Oregon, following a political scandal there regarding the awarding of municipal bridge contracts. The bridges—the Burnside, Sellwood, and Ross Island—were completed in the mid-1920s in that city, the largest bridges on the West Coast until the great structures at San Francisco were built in the next decade.
Lindenthal’s group of Portland bridges, like his New York spans, stands today as testimony to what was often said of him, that “he never built two bridges alike.” The memoir of him in the Transactions of the American Society of Civil Engineers expanded on this truth to speak of “his habit of looking on each bridge problem as new and unique, a problem whose proper solution could hardly be the same as that of any prior bridge problem.” Furthermore, “he took up each bridge project broadly, seeking first a conception of general form that would offer the best solution and going on to stresses and details only as the last step.” It takes nothing away from Lindenthal to say that this is a habit shared by all great bridge designers.
Not all bridges are of the scale of the great ones Lindenthal designed, however, and not all engineers always agree on what is the “best solution” for a given problem, as the Manhattan Bridge debate so clearly demonstrated. And nothing seems to provide so good an opportunity to discuss such differences of opinion as the publication of a major book and the reviews it may elicit. While the Hell Gate and Sciotoville bridges were still under construction, a two-volume illustrated treatise of well over two thousand pages was published by John Wiley & Sons and sold for the remarkable price of ten dollars. The treatise was titled simply Bridge Engineering, and it was written by “one of the masters of the art,” J. A. L. Waddell.
John Alexander Low Waddell, a contemporary of Lindenthal’s, was born in Port Hope, Ontario, Canada, in 1854. Waddell graduated from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute with the degree of C.E. in 1875 and worked in Canada as a draftsman and engineer on field work before serving as an assistant professor of rational and technical mechanics at Rensselaer. He then took up studies again, this time at McGill University, receiving both a bachelor’s and a master’s degree in 1882, after which he went to Tokyo to become professor of civil engineering at the Imperial University of Japan. He returned to the United States four years later to join the Phoenix Bridge Company, and soon opened an office to serve as an agent for the company and as a consulting engineer in his own right in Kansas City, where he spent much of his early American bridge-building career. It would develop into a distinguished one.
While in Japan, Waddell published two books, with the pedestrian titles The Designing of Ordinary Iron Highway Bridges and A System of Iron Railroad Bridges for Japan. In 1898, he published a small “pocket-book,” which he titled in the tradition of Latin treatises, De Pontibus, and for which he was much better known. The 1916 Bridge Engineering was a much-expanded form of the pocket book, and in an editorial Engineering News explained the difficulty “of finding someone to prepare a critical review … who will be, at least, a peer of the author in reputation.” Thus the journal was proud to announce that it believed it had “rendered a notable service to the profession in securing the consent of Gustav Lindenthal, the Nestor of American bridge engineers, to review Mr. Waddell’s great work.” Engineering News also no doubt wanted to give its readers some explanation for Lindenthal’s lengthy review, which was “very much more than a book review.” It was, in fact, much more of a scathing challenge to the authority of Waddell’s treatise than the editors may have expected, and the editorial closed with an acknowledgment that, though Waddell’s book was “destined for many years to come to rank as an authority in its field,” it was also of great value to have “a critical study made of its recommendations, so that the engineer may know in what parts of the book there is a disagreement among doctors as to the soundness of the principles which are there stated.”
Lindenthal’s “illuminating review” is a model of the form, and he discussed not only the content but also the style of the work. He found the latter to lack uniformity, which he speculated was due to “the fact that parts of the book were prepared by different assistants, to whose helpful labor the author gives proper credit in the preface.” Perhaps Lindenthal, who has been described as being throughout his life “too active to find the leisure necessary for writing books,” did not know or made no allowance for the fact that Waddell kept his staff employed with work on the book during a period of increasing war and decreasing bridge building. Lindenthal also criticized the generally “breezy and often gossipy narrative form” that Waddell apparently preferred because he intended the book to be somewhat autobiographical. Among the mannerisms that Lindenthal singled out for criticism was “an affected, though innocuous, punctiliousness in attaching to names inconsequential titles, as Esquire, C.E., member of, etc., as if marking some for social or professional distinction while others, not less distinguished, go without it.” Perhaps Lindenthal was a bit oversensitive to this topic because of his own uncertain background, and it was easier for him to attack Waddell than to correct him and the record.
As could be expected in a book comprising eighty chapters, there were some inconsistencies of style and substance, but the sixty-page index was excellent. Thus Lindenthal could easily look up references to himself on seven pages, and what he found on some of those pages must have galled him. Waddell’s first mention of the Hell Gate did not associate it with Lindenthal, but in a discussion of it six hundred pages later its designer, “the noted bridge engineer, Gustav Lindenthal, Esq.,” is acknowledged as the source of data and a picture of the bridge, which is described as being “certainly
of aesthetic appearance” and reflecting “great credit upon the artistic ability of its designer.” Elsewhere, the engineer is described as “Gustav Lindenthal, Esq., C.E.,” but the unearned degree must have been less galling than the unwelcome criticism.
In his chapter on cantilever bridges, Waddell began his treatment of Lindenthal’s Blackwell’s Island structure by describing how a refiguring of the stresses in the completed bridge found them to be “so great (due to both ambiguity of stress distribution and overrun of dead load) that some of the roadways had to be omitted.” After beginning with such sharp criticism, Waddell continued his discussion of the design with ridicule that is suggestive of the common modern characterization of chaos theory, in which a single flap of the wings of a butterfly in Australia is said to be able to affect the weather in Philadelphia:
A New York engineer connected with the bridge once remarked that the structure is so complicated that, if a man were to stand at the first panel point of the farthest span and were to spit into the river, his doing so would affect the stress in every main truss member of every span in the entire structure—and the statement is actually correct. The layout of this bridge is a constructive lie. The top chords of the long spans were made into a continuous curve to resemble the cables of a suspension bridge, the object being aesthetics; but the attempt thus to beautify the structure was a failure, and the damage done to the bridge by the omission of the suspended span is measured by millions of dollars.
Waddell was referring to the indeterminate nature of the structure from a calculational point of view. By omitting a true suspended span, Lindenthal had indeed made the stresses in the structure so interdependent with its deflections that a small movement or a change in the load at one point on the bridge did affect it everywhere else. As for the faux-suspension criticism, it may be that Lindenthal brought that on himself by so liking eyebar suspension bridges that he consciously or unconsciously mimicked the form in a continuous cantilever.
Perhaps the aspect of Bridge Engineering that most irritated Lindenthal was what must have seemed to be Waddell’s slighting of him. Whereas no engineer might have minded having his name omitted from criticism such as that leveled against the Blackwell’s Island Bridge, reference to another of one’s bridges without one’s name attached might have been a different matter. Furthermore, in a discussion of impact loads on bridges, a 1912 paper of Lindenthal’s on the subject was described to have “much valuable information; but the formula proposed is far too complicated, being based on many theoretical assumptions,” and some of its statements and deductions were criticized as being “not in accord with the latest experiments on impact.” Though Waddell allowed that Lindenthal was “one of the most prominent” bridge engineers, they nevertheless disagreed on the subject of continuous truss spans. The author of Bridge Engineering believed that the Sciotoville Bridge, in which Lindenthal “resurrected” the subdivided triangular truss form, worked only because foundation conditions were “exceedingly favorable” at the site. But perhaps the single most difficult part of Waddell’s book for Lindenthal to take was the treatment of the suspension bridge, his form of choice. In discussing proposals to bridge the North River, Waddell mentioned three and offered his opinion on their likelihood of being realized:
Messrs. Geo. S. Morison, Gustav Lindenthal, and Henry W. Hodge have made designs for that crossing; and it is not at all unlikely that the last-mentioned engineer and his financial associates in the not very distant future will succeed in consummating the enterprise. For the sake of the engineering profession as well as for other good reasons, it is to be hoped that they will be successful. The building of such a structure as the one they contemplate would be a fitting climax to an already brilliant professional career.
Hodge’s plan alone is illustrated, and it is described by Waddell in some detail compared with those of Morison and Lindenthal. Lindenthal’s is given especially short shrift, being in fact merely referred to as being “made in the late eighties” rather than described. Indeed, as we shall see, Waddell seems to have made the proper assessment at the time, and Hodge and his associates might very well have been the ones that first bridged the North River had Hodge, fifteen years Lindenthal’s junior, not become ill and died before bridge building was revitalized after the war.
Henry Hodge’s proposed Hudson River Bridge (photo credit 4.29)
Though Lindenthal may have had a personal ax to grind in writing his devastating review of Waddell’s treatise, the sweeping contents of the two large volumes did leave room for disagreement. Waddell had established his reputation on, among other things, the Halsted Street Lift-Bridge in Chicago, which, when completed in 1895, certainly solved the technical dilemma of spanning the Chicago River at street level while making provisions for water traffic to pass. However, the Halsted Street Bridge did so in an arguably ugly way. A swing bridge would have worked at the location, of course, but with a midspan pivot on an undesirable pier in the river channel or with a land-based pivot about which the span swung into such a position as to obstruct valuable riverside property that otherwise could be used for wharves or piers. Bascule or leaf drawbridges, like the contemporary Tower Bridge in London, were another possibility, but they presented different mechanical problems. Indeed, all bridge designs with movable spans presented major aesthetic problems, and they have been among the most criticized for their appearance. Though the tall structural towers of Waddell’s Halsted Street Bridge did allow the 130-foot span to be raised over 140 feet in one minute, they were an eyesore whether the span was up or down, and the bridge had an ungainly look. To those who drove the streets of Chicago or plied the waters of its river, however, the function may have excused the form, and it was to such clients, or, rather, their elected representatives, that the bridges had to be sold.
Catalogues of bridges previously designed and constructed, or heavily illustrated reports of major projects, were important to consulting engineers like Waddell and bridge-building companies alike, for it was through such catalogues that they often made their initial contact with prospective clients. Most catalogues showed a sense of design themselves and presented their bridges from the most attractive perspectives. Since consulting engineers often evolved their associations and partnerships as new and different design challenges, conditions, and opportunities arose, the same bridge may often have appeared in the catalogues of seemingly different firms, creating a confusion of attribution. J. A. L. Waddell, for example, after his return from Tokyo, practiced under his own name in Kansas City until 1899, when he began a series of partnerships: with Ira G. Hedrick, as Waddell & Hedrick (1899–1907); with John Lyle Harrington, as Waddell & Harrington (1907–17); with N. Everett Waddell, as Waddell & Son (1917–19); alone, as J. A. L. Waddell, after his son’s death, until 1927, during which period Waddell moved from Kansas City to New York; and with Shortridge Hardesty, formerly his principal assistant engineer, as Waddell & Hardesty (1927–45). Though Waddell’s name remained associated with the firm for some years after his death in 1938, it was dropped in 1945, when Clinton D. Hanover, Jr., joined Hardesty to form Hardesty & Hanover, which now identifies itself as one of the oldest consulting-engineering firms in the United States, tracing its origin back to Waddell. As late as the early 1990s, Hardesty & Hanover’s current brochure listed major and recent projects of the firm dating back to 1890, and included an illustrated entry for the Halsted Street Bridge. In contrast to the handsome layout and attractive photographs in Hardesty & Hanover’s catalogue, including some movable bridges that can be described as being pleasing to the eye, a Waddell & Son catalogue dating from about 1917 does not at all present their bridges in the most attractive context. That the difference in catalogues is not just a matter of different graphical standards is demonstrated by a catalogue contemporary with that of Waddell & Son. In contrast to the weedy and littered foregrounds in some of the Waddell pictures, a Strauss Bascule Bridge Company catalogue from about 1920 presents bridges, at least some of which are just as u
nsightly, in thoughtfully cropped photographs that show the structures in a much more favorable light.
Waddell’s lift bridge across the South Branch of the Chicago River at Halsted Street (photo credit 4.30)
Waddell seems to have paid considerably more attention to photographs of himself than to those of his bridges. The frontispiece of Bridge Engineering, for example, is a photographic portrait of the author. Waddell’s forelocks appear to have been deliberately curled, his long mustache combed and waxed, and his lapel pinned with two medals, one probably that designated him Knight Commander, Order of the Rising Sun, presented to him in Japan in 1888. The other medal is most likely the one designating him Knight First Class, Order of Société de Bienfaisance of Grand Duchess Olga of Russia, presented to him in 1909 for his services as principal engineer of the Trans-Alaskan-Siberian Railroad project. In the three-quarter-length portrait of a standing Waddell that appeared as the frontispiece of his Memoirs and Addresses of Two Decades, published in 1928, his head and facial hair appear unchanged, his dress is even more formal, and he sports three new medals. These probably were for the Order of Sacred Treasure, Japan (1921); Order of Chia Ho, China (1922); and Cavaliere of the Crown of Italy (1923). Waddell must have presented an imposing figure, and in his obituary the London journal Engineering conferred upon him the title “Pontifex Maximus,” which it noted that the English poet Robert Southey had bestowed on his friend Thomas Telford. Waddell, like Telford, the journal reasoned, had been in “possession of a constitution apparently indifferent to the rigours of field work in all weathers.”
Engineers of Dreams: Great Bridge Builders and the Spanning of America Page 24