The Brooklyn Bridge, London's Tower Bridge, San Francisco's Golden
Gate--bridges can be breathtakingly monumental structures, magnificent
works of art, and vital arteries that make life vastly easier. In
Bridges, eminent structural engineer David Blockley takes readers on a
fascinating guided tour of bridge construction, ranging from the
primitive rope bridges (now mainly found in adventure movies), to Roman
aqueducts and the timber trestle railway bridges of the American West,
to today's modern marvels, such as the Akashi-Kaiky? Bridge, which has
the largest span in the world. Blockley outlines the forces at work on a
bridge--tension, compression, and shear--and the basic structural
elements that combat these forces--beams, arches, trusses, and
suspensions (or BATS). As he does so, he explores some of the great
bridges around the world, including such lesser-known masterpieces as
the Forth Railway Bridge (featured in Alfred Hitchcock's The Thirty-Nine
Steps), and describes some spectacular failures, such as the recent
bridge collapse in Minnesota or the famous failure of the Tacoma Narrows
Bridge in 1940.