the abbreviated reign of “neon” leon spinks

IGNORE THE PAST AT YOUR PERIL 51
by Moisseiff with a fatal engineering fl aw—a flaw its Latvian- born,
Columbia-educated engineer-designer should have foreseen based on nu-
merous suspension-bridge failures of the past. But thanks to the triumph
of beauty over brains, as well as the amplifying effect of having amateur
filmmakers and a newspaper photographer capture for posterity the absurd
fi nal moments of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge, Moisseiff went from
being one of America’s best-known bridge designers and theorists one day
to the butt of endless jokes the next.
Only a few today remember his name, and the panel that investigated
the bridge collapse eventually decided to blame the entire engineering
profession rather than Moisseiff in partic u lar. But an official history of
the incident complied by Richard Hobbs for the Washington State Department
of Transportation notes with some understatement: “After November
7, 1940, [Moisseiff’s] services were not in high demand.” Moisseiff
died three years later, before the film footage and photos of his big goof
became an enduring pop-culture metaphor for hubris, careless planning,
and aesthetic folly, and before the study of his judgment errors became
part of the core curriculum in engineering schools around the world. But
from the moment the Tacoma Narrows Bridge went down, the pieces of
the fallen structure became what surely is every bridge builder’s worst
nightmare, and what it remains today: a magnificent underwater reef.
The “Search for the Graceful and Elegant”
Proposals to bridge the Tacoma Narrows had been circulating
since 1889, when the Northern Pacifi c Railroad first studied the possibility
of building a functional train trestle across that part of Puget Sound.
Momentum grew, and between 1928 and 1938 no fewer than seven different
bridge plans were developed and discussed. So how could a group of
intelligent and well-meaning civil engineers spend four decades coming
up with a bridge that eventually crumbled into infamy after just four
months of use?
The answer involves the quest for aesthetic elegance that was so