Early Suspension Bridges

The societies that lived in South America, Africa and Asia thousands of years ago strung twisted vines attached to trees to cross over rivers. They added branches to create a flat surface to walk upon.

First Modern Suspension Bridge

Thomas Telford designed the first suspension bridge in 1822, and it was completed in 1826. It is located on Bangor-Chester Road in Wales, Great Britain, at the foot of Conwy Castle

In a suspension bridge, the traffic-carrying deck is supported by a series of wire ropes that hang from massive cables draped between tall towers. The Brooklyn Bridge in New York City and the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco are two of the most famous suspension bridges. The Akashi Kaikyo Bridge in Japan, which was completed in 1998, contains the world's longest suspension span (distance between support towers)6,529 ft (1,991 m); the entire bridge, including the portions between the towers and the shores, totals nearly 2.5 mi (4 km). Construction of the Akashi Kaikyo Bridge took ten years, cost $3.6 billion, and involved only six injuries (no deaths). A century earlier, construction of the Brooklyn Bridge, with a span of 1,600 ft (490 m) took 14 years and resulted in the loss of 27 lives.

Background
Suspension bridges are one of the earliest types devised by man. The most primitive version is a vine rope linking two sides of a chasm; a person travels across by hanging from the rope and pulling himself along, hand over hand. Such primitive bridgessome as long as 660 ft (200 m)are still being used in areas such as rural India. Somewhat more sophisticated designs incorporate a flat surface on which a person can walk, sometimes with the assistance of vine handrails. By the eighth century, Chinese bridge builders were constructing suspension bridges by laying planks between pairs of iron chains, essentially providing a flexible deck resting on cables. Similar bridges were built in various parts of the world during subsequent centuries. But the modern era of suspension bridges did not begin until 1808 when an American named James Finley patented a system for suspending a rigid deck from a bridge's cables. Although Finley built more than a dozen small bridges, the first major bridge that incorporated his technique was built by Thomas Telford over the Menai Straits in England.

Completed in 1825, it had stone towers 153 ft (47 m) tall, was 1,710 ft (521 m) long, and boasted a span of 580 ft (177 m). The roadway, which was 30 ft (9 m) wide, was built on a rigid platform suspended from iron chain cables. The bridge is still in use, although the iron chains were replaced with steel bar links in 1939. Another American, John Roebling, developed two major improvements to suspension bridge design during the mid-1800s. One was to stiffen the rigid deck platform with trusses (arrays of horizontal and vertical girders that are cross-braced with diagonal beams). Experience had shown that wind or rhythmic traffic loads could send insufficiently stiffened decks into vibrations that could grow out of control and literally rip a bridge apart. Roebling's other important innovation involved construction of the bridge's supporting cables. Around 1830, French engineers had shown that cables consisting of many strands of wire worked better than chains to suspend bridges. Roebling developed a method for "spinning," or constructing, the cables in place on the bridge rather than transporting ungainly prefabricated cables and laboring them into position. His method is still commonly (though not exclusively) used on new bridges. The history of suspension bridges is liberally sprinkled with examples of successful bridges that were widely believed to be impossible when proposed by a visionary engineer. One example was a railway bridge Roebling constructed between 1851-1855 across the Niagra River gorge. The first truss-stiffened suspension bridge, it was supported by four 10 in (250 cm) diameter cables strung between stone towers. Forty years after completion, the bridge was successfully carrying traffic 2.5 times as heavy as it was designed for; at that point it was retired and dismantled.

A steel worker lying cable stands for the suspension cable of the new Tacoma, Washington, Narrows Bridge on October 21, 1949.

The Tacoma Narrows Bridge was the third largest suspension span bridge in the world and only five months old when it collapsed on Saturday, November 7, 1940. The center span, measuring 2,800 ft (853.4 m), stretched between two 425 ft (129.5 m) high towers, while the side spans were each 1,100 ft (304.8 m) long. The suspension cables hung from the

towers and were anchored 1,000 ft (304.8 m) back towards the river banks. The designer, Leon Moisseiff, was one of the world's foremost bridge engineers. Moisseiff's intent was to produce a very slender deck span arching gently between the tall towers. His design combined the principles of cable suspension with a girder design of steel plate stiffenersrunning along the side of the roadwaythat had been streamlined to only 8 ft (2.4 m) deep. The $6.4 million bridge was nicknamed "Galloping Gertie" by people who experienced its strange behavior. Forced to endure undulations that pitched and rolled the deck, workmen complained of seasickness. After the opening, it became a challenging sporting event for motorists to cross even during light winds, and complaints about seasickness became common. State and Toll Bridge Authority engineers were more than a little nervous about the behavior of the slender two-lane span, which was only 39 ft (1 1.9 m) wide. Its shallow depth in relation to the length of the span (8-2,800 ft [2.4-853.4 m]) resulted in a ratio of 1:350, nearly three times more flexible than the Golden Gate or George Washington bridges. Engineers tried several methods to stabilize the oscillations, but none worked. Witnesses included Kenneth Arkin, chairman of the Toll Bridge Authority, and Professor Farquharson. By 10:00, Arkin saw that the wind velocity had risen from 38-42 mi (61.167.6 km) per hour while the deck rose and fell 3 ft (0.9 m) 38 times in one minute. He and Farquharson halted traffic. Leonard Coatsworth, a newspaperman, had abandoned his car in the middle of the bridge when he could drive no further because of the undulations. He turned back briefly, remembering that his daughter's pet dog was in the car, but was thrown to his hands and knees. By 10:30, suspender ropes began to tear, breaking the deck and hurling Coatsworth's car into the water. Within a half hour, the rest of the deck fell section by section. Engineers looking into the problem of the twisting bridges were able to explain that winds do not hit the bridge at the same angle, with the same intensity, all the time. For instance, wind coming from below lifts one edge, pushing down the opposite. The deck, trying to straighten itself, twists back. Repeated twists grow in amplitude, causing the bridge to oscillate in different directions. The study of wind behavior grew into an entire engineering discipline called aerodynamics. Eventually no bridge, building, or other exposed structure was designed without testing a model in a wind tunnel. With the development of graphic capabilities, some of this testing is now done on computers.

In 1869, Roebling died in an accident while surveying the site for the Brooklyn Bridge, which he had designed. His son, Washington Roebling, spent the next 14 years building the famous structure. This was the first suspension bridge to use cables made of steel rather than wrought iron (a relatively soft type of iron that, while hot, can be shaped by machines or formed by hammering). Each of the four 16 in (40 cm) diameter cables consists of more than 5,000 parallel strands of steel wire. More than a century after its completion, the Brooklyn Bridge carries heavy loads of modern traffic. Another landmark suspension bridge was built across the Golden Gatethe mouth of San Francisco Bayfrom 1933-1937 by Joseph Strauss. The Golden Gate Bridge is 6,450 ft (1,966 m) long, with a main span of 4,200 ft (1,280 m). Its two towers are 746 ft (227 m) tall; they support two 7,125-ton (6.5 million kg) cables that contain a total of 80,000 mi (129,000 km) of steel wire. Despite rigorous safety precautions, 11 workers died; 19 were saved by a safety net hanging below the deck during constructionan innovation that became standard on later bridge projects. One of the most famous bridge failures in America was the 1940 collapse of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge on Puget Sound in the state of Washington. Then the third-longest suspension bridge in the world, it had been designed to be exceptionally sleek. Only wide enough for two traffic lanes and side-walks, the span was 2,800 ft (853 m) long. Rather than being stiffened with trusses, the deck was reinforced by two steel girders that were only 8 ft (2.4 m) high, with some cross-bracing connecting them. This design not only provided less rigidity than trusses, but it also allowed the wind to exert strong forces on the structure rather than passing harmlessly through an open truss arrangement. Four months after it was completed, the bridge was set into a pattern of increasing oscillations by 42 mph (68 km/h) winds and tore itself apart. The replacement bridge, built a decade later, was designed with a deck stiffened with a steel truss 33 ft (10 m) thick.

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