the abbreviated reign of “neon” leon spinks

OOPS 54
lighter, and more flexible. But they had also cataloged a per sistent prob-
lem with such designs: the lighter and more flexible the bridge, the more
it tended to move in the wind.
Engineers then didn’t fully understand the destructive potential of
“lift”—the physical force capable of raising a heavy airplane into the air—
but they realized that something was clearly wrong with those delicate
bridges, and not just because travelers often reported getting seasick while
crossing them. The first recorded wind-buffeted collapse of a suspension
bridge was in 1817, when a 260-foot footbridge across Scotland’s river
Tweed went down just six months after it was finished. The Menai Straits
suspension bridge in Wales, which opened in 1826, was badly damaged
and nearly fell during an 1839 gale.
In 1854, in Wheeling, West Virginia, wind wasted a 1,010-foot span
across the Ohio River that had been the world’s longest suspension bridge
when it was completed five years earlier. According to Henry Petroski,
author of the 1985 book To Engineer Is Human: The Role of Failure in Successful
Design, the West Virginia bridge’s final moments were chronicled
by a reporter for the Wheeling Intelligencer in language that could have
been used to describe the final moments of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge
nearly a century later. The bridge was “lunging like a ship in a storm” as
it “twisted and writhed” and fell “with an appalling crash and roar.” Wrote
Petroski: “If the designers of the Tacoma Narrows had known the story of
the Wheeling suspension bridge . . . they would have had no excuse for
overlooking wind as a possible cause of failure to be anticipated during
design, not a problem to be dealt with after construction.”
The last major suspension bridge failure before Tacoma Narrows
was in 1889, with the wind-whipped collapse of the Niagara-Clifton
Bridge between Niagara Falls, New York, and Clifton, Ontario, Canada.
Other lightweight suspension bridges had survived, but most had had to
be retrofitted with stiffening trusses. In all, Petroski wrote in 1994’s Design
Paradigms: Case Histories of Error and Judgment in Engineering, ten