Well There‘s Your Problem - Episode 14: The Quebec Bridge

Episode Date: January 30, 2020

In this episode, @donoteat1, @oldmananders0n, and @aliceavizandum talk about the Quebec Bridge, a bridge so nice they built it thrice. here are the slides: https://youtu.be/SjOduiPSF1Q here is the patreon: https://www.patreon.com/wtyppod Info sources: https://www.structuremag.org/?p=9300 https://www.structuremag.org/?p=9399 https://www.structuremag.org/?p=9491 https://www.gandhieng.com/RESOURCES/MEDIA/FINAL%20-%20The%20Failure%20and%20Reconstruction%20of%20the%20Quebec%20Bridge%20-%20K%20Gandhi%202017.pdf https://engagedscholarship.csuohio.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1020&context=encee_facpub Image Sources: slide 1 (quebec bridge) By GBoivinT - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=21845932 slide 2 (forth bridge) By Andrew Shiva / Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=51291330 slide 3 (public domain) By Unknown photographer for Benjamin Baker. - http://www.sbe.hw.ac.uk/staff/arthur/frbpc/ForthBridgePostCards.htm, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=415051 commodore barry By Jim Dietrich - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Commodore_Barry_Bridge_From_Ferry_Rd.jpg, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=988454 tokyo gate By Aimaimyi - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=18740198 hart bridge: Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=39943 quebec bridge eyebars - google maps grand trunk pacific: toronto public library https://www.torontopubliclibrary.ca/detail.jsp?Entt=RDMDC-912-71-M12-1-SMALL&R=DC-912-71-M12-1-SMALL site: google maps cooper: stolen from Structure article phoenix columns: historic american building survey https://www.loc.gov/resource/hhh.pa3994.photos/?sp=8 historical society of the phoenixville area https://www.hspa-pa.org/phoenix_bridge.html bridge of the week http://www.bridgeofweek.com/2015/08/phoenix-bridge-company.html assorted public domain photos last slide By Jean-Philippe Bourgoin, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=19949187

Okay, great. If you're just joining us, I have died. I've caught a USBitis from Riley Quinn, our previous guest. And yeah, it's just it just lives in my chest now and it's killing me. Awesome. Oh, that's a damn shame. I don't know how to do this with only two hosts and a zombie. Welcome to Well, There's Your Problem, a podcast about engineering disasters with slides, which is also in and of itself a disaster. From Beyond the Grave.

Yes. I'm Justin Rosnick. Also, do not eat zero one on the Twitter. And or is it not do not eat zero one on the Twitter, you do not eat one on the Twitter, you do not eat zero one on the YouTube. I'm glad I'm glad I have that we need three people to get this right. You know, that's the thing. Yeah, but really just one person because I rarely fucking know either. Oh, you're attributing a lot of competence to me that I do not have. Well, well, well, well, well, I heard we I heard we screwed up on the airplane episode,

but you know, we don't know anything about planes. So which we were very clear about actually. Yeah, we told them that. Yeah, we we confused a pitot tube with an angle of attack sensor, which is the little wing thing next to the pitot tube, which we're very sorry that we'll do patterns. Yes. Yes. Also, pronouns he, him. That's me. All right. That's that's my introduction done. The walking corpse of Alice Cordwell Kelly. Pronouns for now, she and her pronouns deceased.

Yeah. Watch this space late of this podcast. Yeah, I do a podcast called Trash Future as well as this. You should listen to that. It's very funny, even if I die before we do the next one, it will still be funny. Yeah, did I say pronoun she and her? Yes, you did. OK, then that's it.

That's that's me. Cool. OK. And arriving at my queue on time for once, I am Liam Anderson. I am at Old Man Twitter on it. Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, that's pretty accurate, though. Stunning display of competency to change the name of the group. Sure, pronoun him. Yeah, a shout out to the people who were real fucking mad about the helicopter thread. Ah, y'all give me life, which I have and Kobe Bryant doesn't.

So what was fucking one? Yeah, actually, real quick, like I understand that when people die, it's, you know, sometimes hard to grapple with feelings and a lot of people are feeling a lot of complex things right now. But at the same time, if you're getting mad at an engineering disastrous podcast, which talks about death as like a necessary part of itself, you're looking in the wrong place. Oh, yeah, and I'm on stolen Lenape land, although we don't know of Raza. Yeah, exactly. OK.

Also, if you want some Sheldon Freud, just wait a week for me to die and then you'll be able to like dunk on my corpse. And I assure you, I won't hold it against you. Yeah, same. If the universe ever gets around to striking me dead successfully, go nuts. Hmm. All right. We all die in a helicopter crash. Somehow I'm not getting in a helicopter again, like never.

Nope, nope, nope, nope, can't make it. All right. So you'll see on the screen in front of you, a bridge. Well, two bridges actually ignore the suspension bridge. Notably not collapsed into the water. No, it hasn't collapsed in the water. That's because this bridge, unlike us, has risen from the grave multiple times. This is this is the Quebec Bridge, right?

And we're going to learn about the story of its construction and why it needed to be built three times. Factor of safety. Just like our podcast last week. I did. I did want to say, actually, speaking of bridges, the reason we're doing this is because last week, as you know, we uploaded the Tacoma Narrows Bridge episode. Finally, we finally got around to that.

We're really proud of that. Yeah, you guys were were adamant about getting more bridge stuff. So here we are. You know, we really hope you like it. Definitely go check out the Tacoma Narrows episode. If you haven't yet, we put all of our time and energy and attention to that. And it killed Alice. So, you know, definitely, definitely check that out.

Much like Red Dead Redemption in a like a stunning, dramatic twist. I got the virus that's going to kill me while we were recording. The Tacoma Narrows episode. Oh, damn shame. All right, tell me about the bridge that hasn't fallen into the water yet. So I just wanted to say one thing. One thing I've done in the previous podcast is I've not been very good with sources. So I just want to say the bulk of the information from this podcast came

from a three part article in Structure Magazine written by Frank Griggs, Jr. That link will be in the description as will be the written by Frank Grimes. Oh, it's Frank Griggs. Yeah, but I was from the safety guy from the Simpsons, you see. Oh, that would make sense. Yeah, whoosh. Hmm. I was I was I was doing I was doing a joke. Oh, shit.

We can't do jokes on the comedy podcast. You already got canceled about it. That's true. It's your jokes. And I also have image sources. All right. So anyway, what we should start out with is talking about what is a cantilever bridge, right? Hey, that's that thing near where I live.

Yes. Well, relatively near. Yes, it because I live in a tiny country. So everything is kind of near me. It's everything's near everything. Yeah. Mm hmm. So this is the yeah, this is the fourth bridge over the first of fourth. Obviously, the the big famous one, right? And it's still the second largest one in the world.

So what is a cantilever bridge? Well, basically, you have these large big spans here called cantilevers, right? And, you know, there's two cantilever arms on each, right? And then in the middle is this tiny little span here, right? And that tiny little span is supported by, you know, the two cantilever leaves on either side, right? So like if you decided to do a suspension bridge without any suspending, because it's all rigid. Oh, yeah.

And I mean, the famous the famous way to demonstrate this concept was Benjamin Baker's human model, right? This is how they did all engineering until like 1994. Yeah, thank God for that. So you can sort of see the analogous to the fourth bridge up here, right? We have a man in a hat and another man in a hat suspending a third man in a hat, right? Right. And you see, they have like rigid supports, right? Compression, compression, compression, compression, right?

And that's tied down. They're holding a bunch of bricks on one end and on the other end, right? And then what you can't quite see is that they also have ropes behind them, right? Over their arms, right? So tension, tension, tension and tension, right? That's the shittiest game of duck, duck, goose I've ever heard of. So instead of a guy in a hat, you have a series of like structural members in a house.

Also with that. Yes. So yeah, you got to put the hats on. You got to like draw a little hat and egg list to the. Oh, yeah. So and and and. So an egg list to the bridge, you have, you know, the top members in tension. The bottom members are in compression, right? And the way you want to think about this is that. I use another color now.

God, each one of these things here is like a separate structure, right? Which is not interdependent at all on the little span in the middle. So both of these stand alone. And their entire job is to support this little span in the middle. And so this could take a lot of forms, right? It's not just not just the the sort of fourth birth of fourth design. So here's here's three right here, you know, on the top. Wow, this compressed really badly.

Oh, boy. All right. I kind of like that middle one, though. You can get quite artistic with this, I guess. So on the top, we have the Commodore Berry Bridge. This is in Philadelphia, right? So no, it's not. It's in. Tell the people where it is. It's in Chester. It's in Chester.

Right. Thank you. I will not stand for Delco or Razor on this podcast. It goes from Chester to New Jersey, right? So the center span is sort of here is it's it's done in such a way that you can't really tell where the cantilever ends and the center span begins. But then below that is the Tokyo Gate Bridge, where you can see quite clearly the center span

because it doesn't have any trusses, right? And it's just that that middle bit just designed to make you anxious, I think. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Love to feel my car, my my light and friendly car sway around in a wind and just be like, all right, this is fucking it, man. You just look over to the side and there's like no supporting structure at all. Just you and the void. Oh, yeah. Love the void, big, big void fan over here.

And let's go. It's about to get you. And the bottom one, we have the Heart Bridge. This is in Jacksonville, Florida, and it's sort of a suspended cantilever, right? So the center span is up here and then there's cables that go down. I don't know what the purpose of that is. I just want needed an extra picture. Nice. Yeah, it does look nice. So somebody had somebody had an idea and they were like,

yeah, let's let's have a like a suspension bridge, but also not. Oh, yeah. Let's I mean, it's Florida. This is over like a 40 foot trench full of like alligators and jet skis and stuff. So the moat, yeah, you got to cross the moat. Oh, yeah. That's so they can just drop the center span at any time. Like it's like a defensive mechanism. Yeah, they see any invasive species coming up from the Florida Keys.

They can just cut all of those. Yeah, it's like Switzerland. So one of the things about, you know, cantilever bridges is that, you know, sometimes there are structural members that seem like they should be be there, which don't need to be there at all. Right. So this is this is a picture from the Quebec Bridge, right? And you can see down here. Well, I previously highlighted over here, this is about where we're looking at,

where the one big cantilever span interfaces with the center span, right? And so you see this this lattice work up here, right? Seems like that little wall. Yeah, that's all it is is a walkway. Otherwise, the center span just connects, you know, somewhere down there with this large Ibar assembly over here. Of course, our favorite structural member on this podcast.

Yeah, flashing back to high strength steel. We're going to talk more about Ibar's later. Oh, good. Just a little bit, but they will be involved. I assume that's not foreboding it. Well, you were Liam, were you even recording that episode? Or was that before we got you on board? That was the first episode that did is Liam. Oh, yeah, and then Liam got mad because he wasn't on the podcast.

I did, actually, because you and I talked about having a podcast and I was excluded, so I just kind of my way into this. Thanks a lot for my third of the Patriot, buddy. Well, we're glad you did. Love you all so much. Yeah. So, OK, where am I going with this? All right, so the story of why they needed to build the Quebec Bridge, right? Starts with something called the National Transcontinental Railway

of Canada, also known as the Grand Trunk Pacific Railway, because that was the private company that built the railroad, right? With a lot of government subsidies. Not to be confused with the Grand Funk Railroad. No, there's the track. Just the grant. The Grand Trunk ran from Winnipeg East. And then the Grand Trunk Pacific ran from Winnipeg West, right?

Just call it one goddamn thing, man. Oh, no, they they split it into two companies for reasons. I love the idea that the center of the world for geographic purposes here is in fucking Winnipeg. It's right there at Portage in Maine. Yeah. Winnipeg is nice. I'm sure I'm just going off of that one song by the Weaker Lands. Oh, one great study.

Oh, yeah. All right, we should we should edit that in for like outro music. Oh, yeah, we'll get a copyright strike. No, I don't think the Weaker Lands know what copyright is. So all right, so the National Transcontinental Railway was Canada's third transcontinental railway, right? Which was built by the Grand Trunk with some assistance from the Canadian government.

A lot of assistance from the Canadian government. How much assistance from the Canadian government? A lot. And it was. OK, do you mean? Do you mean to say that they weren't just doing this all on their own with their pioneering spirits, just like rolling up their shirts, leaves and building 50 miles of track an hour? No, no, they needed land grants.

But but but my settler mythology. So it went from Moncton, New Brunswick, which we've discussed previously on this podcast. The worst goddamn city in the world. Yeah, the the whole. Yeah, the worst to Prince Rupert, British Columbia, right? Which dumb ass name. Just never, never let yourself be colonized by the British.

Or after you kick us out, all of your place names will be like, oh, Prince Prince Lord Duke Fancington town. Hey, man, Prince Rupert's land is nice. If you like polar bears, then I love polar bears. Well, I highly recommend going and freezing your dick off at York Factory. That that's the plan. I will have to save save myself a trip. Yeah.

And that's like that was like 30 still is 30 miles from the Alaskan border. This railroad gets way up there, right? The whole route survived intact for barely five years or so, because right after they finished it, the Canadian government, you know, well, Canada got involved in World War One. And since it big mistake, by the way, paralleled a previous railroad, the Canadian northern through certain areas, they just decided, all right, let's rip up the rail on this brand new railroad

and ship it over to France and use France and use it there. Right. You need a bunch of little narrow gauge trench railways. Yeah, you know, exactly. Battle of Vimy Ridge all over these motherfuckers. All right. So it was built to extremely high standards for the days. There's low grades, minimal curves, and by far the largest structure on this railroad was the Quebec Bridge crossing the St. Lawrence River, right?

So we'll look at the we'll look at the site here, right? So over here is Quebec City, right? And then the bridge crosses the river over here, right? So St. Lawrence, of course, was a busy shipping channel at the time, still is, right? There's a very tall escarpment on both sides. You know, this big cliff, right? So it needs to be a tall bridge and you need a tall bridge anyway, because, you know, boats, you know, they still have sails at this point, right?

They got to clear the bridge. That's fine. Just just take the mast down for a second and like paddle it under. And just stow it and then everyone gets your hands real long. We'll just doggy paddle our massive coalmines through this motherfucker. Exactly. Yeah. Low bridge, everybody down. I would pay to see a like nautical version of the 11 foot 8 bridge that just shears off all of the like rigging off of the sailing ship.

I think there's ask us about the LNG tankers that come up the Delaware. Well, that they just have to shut down the bridge while it goes over because otherwise I can't remember if it's because it might explode or if it just distracts drivers. A pretty wide range of potential failure there. I mean, to be fair, the thing exploding would be pretty distracting. It would be very distracting, yes. So this bridge needed a bunch of rigidity to handle heavy trains, right?

So suspension bridges were out, right? And, you know, I was going to carry the National Transcontinental Railroad, but also streetcar tracks and potentially some highway lanes, right? So there's a royal charter starting to Quebec Bridge Company and they were going to build this bridge. This is the late is the mid 1890s at this point, I believe. So they hire consulting engineer Theodore Cooper, right? So so this guy is a widely known bridge engineer at this point.

He's educated at Renezler Bollie Technic Institute. I can rent. Rensselaer. God, I don't know how to pronounce. You went to you went to a school that had a dorm named after that family. That's true. Yeah. Well, I that's right. Rhymes rhymes with engineer. I never figured out how to pronounce that that thing, though. But thank you, Alice. That's that's actually really useful.

I don't take him seriously, though. He doesn't have a hat, which, as we've seen, is the essential part of any, like, structural bridge design. That said, he has quite a haunted gaze. This is true. I've seen some shit here, like his bridges that are going to go kill some people. Maybe it's just that he's someone else's just mispronounced his name and he's just like, ah, Cooper is pretty easy to pronounce.

I don't trust you. Oh, mispronounced the name of his school, whatever. I don't care. Maybe they did mispronounce Cooper. Maybe they just called him Coupierre. Big C. They called him Big C. Because Kebukwa, right? Like, oh, you lost big English.

Yes. Yes. Welcome back to the Plains of Abraham. Now, Cooper worked at he after he graduated from RPI, I'm not going to say the name. He worked at he worked at Midvale Steel in Philadelphia for a while. He designed a few big bridges to my knowledge. None of them survive now, but he was very well respected in his day. And so they brought him on as the consulting engineer for the Quebec Bridge. He basically became the man in charge of basically everything.

He had the final say, right in doing his Brunel act, I guess. Yes. Victorians loved that shit. They loved having like a consulting engineer who was just a guy in like a frot coat who just kind of bossed everybody around. Oh, yeah. Not with like any like actual accountability or anything. You just you just had a guy. Now, you got to introduce the next player, the Phoenix Bridge Company, right? So the Phoenix Bridge Company operate out of Phoenixville, Pennsylvania.

They're notable for inventing something called the Phoenix Column, right? Um, which is this thing here. Well, all of the stuff here is pictures of it, which is a sort of wrought iron column, which is made out of uniform pieces of wrought iron, which is much stronger than the solid iron columns, which had predated this design, right? So this is like, you know, we have a we have a new fund structural member in addition to I bars being introduced on this podcast.

That's like what they're notable for. That's not really going to come into this too much, though. But they're there. So they had a design engineer working at the firm named Peter Zalapka, right? And I think he was Polish. Sounds Polish, you should be able to pronounce that perfectly. I should be able to. There's a lot of Polish people involved in this in this in this series of events.

So Zalapka Bridge with the screen door on it. It didn't actually do anything to hurt the bridge. That was just incidentally a screen door. Yeah, we don't know what to do. So we put this here. We this feels right. So the Phoenixville Bridge Company assisted in a preliminary design for the bridge, right?

Just to have something to send out for bid and they designed something with a 1600 foot clear span across the St. Lawrence River, right? That was in 1897. And then they got in five bids on the project, right? Including, of course, the Phoenixville Bridge Company, which had a bit of a competitive advantage, right? And Cooper suggested maybe we could make a longer span than 1600 feet and it might be more economical since then you can build the foundations

closer to shore or on the shore, right? But. Also. He would then be building a bridge with a clear span longer than the Firth of Fourth Bridge. This is why you don't just have a guy in a frot coat. You like you, Bruce? Just punching out a collapsible opera hat and being like, ah, yes, my grand fucking plans are going to like

dwarf my various rivals, all of whom look as ridiculous as me. I Lord Fancington will take my rightful place. Yeah, there's there's just like Lord Fancington decides to put an extra story on the bridge because Lord Fancington's rival Lord Danforth is like looming over the horizon, twirling his enormous moustaches, several moustaches. Yes, these subtitles are going to be fun. So so, of course, Zalapka decides, all right,

I'll revise the design from a 1600 foot bridge to an 1800 foot bridge. Phoenixville Bridge Company wins the wins the tender. And they're they're here to, you know, they all ship up to Quebec and start building the bridge. Yeah, so that was selected by Cooper June 30th, 1899. OK, so here was the first design for the bridge, right? It's it's not pretty, but, you know, it works. I would say the reverse of that, actually.

Oh, good. Oh, so so we can we have the aesthetic difference where I don't think it's perceived that you do, but we can't really substantively disagree on how well it works. Yes, it almost it almost works. There's a lot more ornamental iron work on this one than on the one that actually got the one that got the one that is there today. But so by 1903, construction was underway, right?

Iron work was going up. Now, Theodore Cooper, the consulting engineer who had final say on everything, was not in great health, right? Right. So he did all of his consulting engineering from his office in New York City. I mean, that's relatable, you know, to be to be a small bean who must have anxiety. Yeah, sure. Oh, God, I don't want to make the the one and a half days journey

to the back city every once in a while. Yeah. Yeah, one and a half days. If you're a fucking coward, we have done it even far less time than that. It's 1899, Liam. Trains. It takes a train, which probably doesn't go substantially slower than the train up there now. Liam getting a GCI hole. Oh, this is old Redbeard.

Yes, they'll hit V-Max and Doofahdland for some reason. I got the course GTI, yet defeated high octane hay. But Cooper never actually visited the site after Steel started going up. Nice. Makes sense. I mean, building sites that loud, you know, they're in Quebec City, which you don't want to go to. To French. Don't want to deal with it.

Yeah. Every episode, we talk about the French. As we know, bad things do not happen by and large when you're just communicating plans, say, over the telephone. Or was it installed at this point? A telegraph. I was going to say telegraph. I don't fucking know. All right. God, imagine how much worse we would be at doing this if we had to do it through a telegraph.

Fuck you. Dot, dot, dot. Strong letter to follow. Stop. So all right. So that the South Canneleaver arm was completed in 1906. And that's when Slapka from the Phoenixville Bridge Company realized something was wrong, right? Good. That sounds promising. The bridge was a lot heavier than he had calculated, right?

Oh, fuck. And that's because the deadweight estimate that Slapka has used was for the earlier 1600 foot span, your joke. As opposed to the 1800 foot span, which was under construction. He didn't change his his calculation of how much it was going to weigh with when he added an extra 200 feet of iron, because a guy decided that he wanted to outmatch Lord Faunselroy. I mean, they probably had to get, you know, the bid done real quick.

You know, figure out, do the later, put in a change order. So he relayed this this information to Cooper and Cooper said, well, it's a seven percent increase in weight. I think that's within tolerances. I think we're good. He keep building Jesus fuck. What was having for the margin margin of error? It's a safety factor.

You have a safety factor. Well, you got to remember of it on a specially good one. As it turns out, you got to remember that Cooper invented the the standards for railroad bridge construction, which are we're still in use today, which is I think it was the E 10 standard is what what they called it, which was like, you know, the the basically the standard for what the bridge had to handle was, I believe it was two steam locomotives hauling an infinite number of freight cars.

And plus one. Yeah, and plus and plus one. E 10 was the standard of the time we're now up to E 72, which is seven point two times that. Seven point two steam locomotives hauling an infinite number of wagons or seven point two infinite wagons. Yeah, I was going to say every every time a wagon goes over, I add seven point two more wagons to the end of the.

Yes, yes, absolutely. Yes, it's complicated. If I had more time to put this together and explain it better right now, I'm stupid, though. So. We we're doing gamer excuses for our engineering podcast. Like this has been up for like four hours. There's lag. I can't shoot so good.

That's the point. I guess my mouse is broken. One of us is going to say the N word and then not apologize for it. And then donate to a bunch of Nazis and then get bad when someone calls us on it. What else we got? I think they're pretty much covers most of the like heated gamer moments. Yeah, I forgot. I was going to say, yeah, we will get canceled again.

We have to redeem ourselves. I finally beat you. You're trying to you're trying to decide which slur you are going to. The only way we can redeem ourselves is by finally beating up PewDiePie in a royal farms. Donate to the Patreon so that could happen. Yeah, exactly. All right. OK, next slide, please. Yeah, exactly. All right.

So seven percent increase should be well within tolerances, right? It shouldn't be a problem. All right. So here's here's a nice picture of the bridge being built the day before the incident, right? So you can see I love a photo taken the day before the incident, whatever that incident is. So you can see, as I said before, you know, there's a little bit more ornamental iron work on this one.

It's much thinner and more spindlier bridge, right? So this is August of 1907, right? And some of the beams on the lower cord, the lower cord being this bit that goes down here and then comes back up here, right? I started bowing under the excess load as more steel was erected at the end of the bridge. You can see, you know, they're building out there. Should have started Airbus.

Ah, damn, you beat me to it. Motherfucker. Should have started Bombardier. God, people got mad about that, too. Well, they sure did. Yeah, we don't care. They're they're kebab, they're a kebab, fuck off. But that's the slur.

You do the game at a moment, but it's just for like the Q word. Habs are bad. Yeah, bring back the Nordiques. So. All right. So in the words of Frank Griggs from the article in Structure magazine, I mentioned earlier, almost immediately after the beginning of the construction of the suspended span, which is this part starting about here, right? In July, problems with member eight L started

setting into motion, one of the most bizarre set of miscalculations, miscommunications and plain incompetence in the history of bridge building. I was just talking about the podcast for about 20 days after these deflections were noted between August 7th and August 27th. Messages are relayed both by telegram and by letter between the building site and Cooper's office in New York City, determining what to do while the work preceded is normal, right? Bridge bridge has crack stop.

Oh, the crack in the bridge has stopped. Yeah. And meanwhile, you just wait two weeks for a letter that's like an old timey cursive and it's covered in like ink blots and stuff. Yeah. And it just says the bridge. Stop. So and of course, I can't send pictures or anything, you know, because they haven't invented that technology. You just look at this picture. It's barely there.

So so Cooper is trying to root out the cause of the Boeing in the in the in the in the members, right? Oh, I just got the joke. You're talking about Boeing is in the aircraft company. Oh, holy fuck. Look, we're all sleep deprived. Yeah. I'm delirious from exercising, actually. Well, at least you have a good excuse.

It's about to say Alice is Alice is more about. Yeah, that's true. Well, I am I am dying of consumption or some other Victorian novel disease. Well, that's it's very attractive to teenagers, though. So yeah, that's true. I have to look on all like pale on my sick bed. Yes. So it did.

Cooper is trying to root out the cause of the Boeing in the in the in the in the beams here, right? He's like, is it manufacturing defects? Is it improper installation? The one thing no one's prepared to consider was that maybe the bridge was overstressed. Oh, no. But they asked him about it like he said to him, so he.

Well, I guess he said it's well, it's fine or should be fine. But yeah, I don't understand why you wouldn't be like, you sure about that hot shot? That seems that seems really easy because he's the guy with the front coat and he's the guy who like designs the bridge. And if the guy and the front coat with the hat tells you it's fine, you're not going to be like, well, maybe it's not. Yeah, exactly.

And this is this in 1907. They sent you to go get killed in the fucking Sudan or something if you do that shit. Yeah, exactly. So eventually. There's this guy, Norman McClure, right? Troy McClure, got it. Hi, you may remember me from such bridge collapse as as.

You know, so he finally goes after after they've been exchanging messages for 20 days. Just messages to just saying just like you up. You up, stop. Love to get a telegram at like three in the morning and it's like all misspelled and shit. That's fantastic. He finally goes to New York City on August 29th

and he personally tells Cooper that the the Boeing here is not for manufacturing defects and also mentioned that it was increasing. It had gone from three quarter of an inch to two and a quarter of an inches, right? They're still building at this point, right? Like, while he's telling him that they're throwing more bridge over the thing, right? Yes. Cool. So again, I believe the the biggest problem member was back here or so.

I'm going to put a link in the description with the little more. It's a research paper that has a little more detail, if anyone wants to know that information, right? So they can visibly see that something is going not good and they're just going to keep fucking going anyway, is that all right? Well, a lot of the people on the site were a lot more concerned than the engineers who had the final say over what to do. Oh, good.

That's I'm glad that has not been a theme. Yeah. Never let engineers telecommute. No, you just have to do all of your communications and stuff. And like all of your planning from like Boson's share, suspended from the end of the bridge. Oh, yeah. Yeah, love me a Boson chair.

That's I don't I don't love a Boson chair. Coward. I am a coward. I will not do that. So eventually, so McClear comes down to, you know, Cooper's office and says, hi, I'm Norman McClear. You remember me. You may remember me from such buildings as the Quebec Bridge.

And he says, all right, after a while convincing, he managed to convince Cooper that, yes, the the deflection here is increasing. And then it dawns on Cooper. Oh, hell of an audio recorder. You've got your hands out there. Yeah, he tried. He tried to, like, get them to stop building the bridge,

but he just sent them a telegram saying stop. They just like, OK, OK, well, no, the actual story is worse. Oh, God. Of course it is. All right. So this happened, I believe, sometime in the morning, August 29th. Oh, crap. What year is it? 1907. Yes.

So, you know, obviously, obviously, the bridge is over stress. This is a major problem. They need to stop construction, right? So Cooper, his first action is to telegram the Phoenixville Bridge Company and tell them what the situation was and say, look, we've got to figure out a way to shore up all these structural members, make sure nothing gets worse, right? And he personally sends McClear to Phoenixville

to tell the bridge company, you know, stuff in more detail, right? OK, right. So McClear gets there at about five thirty p.m. You know, eastern time, right? And, you know, closing time. Exactly, right? No, I was joking. So he gets there and, you know, it's closing time. So they're like, all right, you know, let's let's see what we can do here.

You know what? They're about to stop work on the bridge day anyway. Everyone's going to leave. We're going to sleep on it. Oh, of course. They decide. I got to take my union required eight hour sleep break. Well, you deal with this in the morning, right? Just putting on a big sleeping cap and a big pair of slippers

and like climbing into one enormous bed. So, you know, again, quitting time, everyone goes home. And then, all right. So what happens over at the bridge? Now, it's also five thirty there. Same time zone, right? And oh, boy. So the last train of the day dropped the last dropped off the last steel

that was going on the bridge. The workers bolted the steel on the bridge. And the whole damn thing collapsed just before quitting time at five forty five. Oh, God, damn it. God, damn it. One more fucking thing you've got to deal with. You're just trying to go to the oldies saloon. In French, though. You like you have the big comical sleeping cap in your hands.

Yes. So, yeah, it collapsed, you know, fifteen minutes after they decided to sleep on it. Of eighty six workers on the bridge. Seventy six were killed. They were mostly mostly iron workers. They were they were of the Mohawk tribe from the nearby Kanawake Reserve. I'm assuming I'm mispronouncing that.

We forgive you. Yes. Yeah. OK. I'm going to continue to. But of course, though, because those guys, you know, they're not important and they can't telecommute in fucking like in 1907, it's difficult to move iron into place with telegrams. Yeah, with that goddamn attitude, it is. So because they were doing actual work instead of just like grotesquely misunderstanding their own calculations and then

trying to send a telegram at like five thirty and being like, I'll do it tomorrow. All of those guys die. Yes. Yes. Yeah, because no one could be bothered to send a goddamn telegram. Well, we begin to see some class character become evident here. I suspect just a little bit. Yeah. How did you know? You're going to get that one, that one guy who wants us not to be communists mad at us again. It's wouldn't. This wouldn't happen while Luigi.

No, yeah, that's not what I was going for. But yeah, that works. This would not have happened if the telegram office had been open later. I assume they probably all closed down too. I have no evidence for that speculation. Anyway, so that's that's one view here. Here's another view of the bridge having collapsed. That is an extremely collapsed.

They put that on the ground and see a whole lot of I bars here. Our friend and over here. Love to love to do a call back to episode. A lot of I bars, which have, you know, sort of gone all wavy. Yeah, I don't think they're supposed to do that. All right, there's a lot of stuff that looks wrong with this bridge right now. Yeah. Yeah, it's not like above stuff. It's kind of on there.

Going to just on the ground. Yeah, having murdered 70 odd people. All right, so investigation, right? OK, so the Royal Commission is appointed the day after they interviewed Cooper for like a week. They talked with the Phoenix Bridge Company and they talked with engineers building the only comparably sized bridge at the time, right?

Which was the Queensborough Bridge, including including Ralph Pujetsky, who we're going to talk a little bit more about in a second. They interviewed all of them. They were all just like, I walk in here and just slap the roof of the bridge. So the report was released in March of 1908. I found the collapse was a result in errors in judgment of, you know, Theodore Cooper and Peter Zalapka. I also said these errors of judgment cannot be attributed

to either a lack of common professional knowledge or to neglect of duty or a desire to economize. The ability of the two engineers was tried in one of the most difficult professional problems of the day and proved to be insufficient for the task, right? It's like, yeah, the next time I fuck something up that badly, I'm going to use that. Yeah, that's what that's what I want as well. My ability was tried in one of the most difficult professional problems of my day and it proved to be insufficient.

I just so they said that it couldn't be attributed to incompetence, cheapness or neglect, right? And those were the three things I was going to attribute it to. So I'm kind of, yeah. Yeah, I was going to say. Yes. Yeah. I mean, you know, just because it's the biggest bridge in the world doesn't mean you can't just doesn't mean that some cosmic force to cause you to fuck it up.

The report also noted that Cooper, of course, who wanted to build the biggest bridge in the world so badly, took too small of a fee for his consulting work, which. Really? So wait a second, the view of this guy was not only was he too good an engineer, but, you know, honestly, you're not paying him enough. Because he took too small of a fee,

he couldn't hire enough staff to properly supervise the project. Oh, OK. Yeah, no, hubris. Again, he thought he could do it all himself. That's not a desire to economize, though. When you don't hire enough people to do the thing. Yeah, apparently not. I think I've identified a few a few sort of holes in this in this commission. No, no, you haven't. That's a lie.

So. God, but whenever we do like a 19th century one, I'm just like, I'm like, I'll never complain about the shitty FAA of 2020 again. And then I always do, but. Understandable. Yeah. Captive. Yeah. So no one faced criminal or civil charges, but Theodore Cooper's reputation was absolutely ruined.

He I don't think he ever did any significant work ever again. But the thing is, the bridge still needed to get built. Right. Right. Mm hmm. So. Onto the second bridge. Oh, good. So the Quebec Bridge company is disbanded. The Transcontinental Railway Commission takes over and they appoint three engineers, right?

There's H.E. Vata lay Vata lay, I think, I assume. That's right. The former former engineer for Canadian Pacific. This is engineering, the building stuff sense, not engineer in the driving the train sense. You can tell because of the difference in hats. Yeah. You know what I should have put in here is there's a good there's a good photo of all three of these people wearing hats.

I didn't put that in the presentation. Oh, damn it. They appoint Maurice Fitz Maurice. Perfect, really. Yeah, I was not joking about everybody in the like early 20th century being named something like Fawn Till Royham Chance. It's just that key and peel skit. And he worked on construction of the Firth of Fourth Bridge, right?

Experienced in building this sort of thing. And then they brought in Ralph Majedzky, right? Who we may remember from such bridge disasters. So he was he was built on the Queensborough Bridge at the time. You know, he's a very prolific bridge builder. If he built bridges all over America, including, say, the Ben Franklin Bridge in Philadelphia. Very rich. Yeah.

Well, once at my old job, the one of my co-workers brought out one day, like a bunch of a bunch of plans of the Ben Franklin Bridge. And he was like, look, it's the signature of the man himself. I was like, wow. Wow, that's Ralph Majedzky right there. But yeah, I believe the second most famous Polish American after Richard Kuklinski.

God damn it. Yeah, it's it's it's it's him. And then like the whole cast of season two of The Wire. Yes. So at Kazenski there somewhere. So what happens here? And I guess we'll we'll sort of look at this diagram here. Is is Vaudelay from the Canadian Pacific Railroad

decides I'm going to design the whole damn thing. I'm going to do the whole preliminary design. And you can sort of see there's some funky stuff going on with these cantilever spans, right? Like note all these these cross members that are like at angles, right? And then there's whatever's going on here. I'm seeing some things like some words like probable. Which I feel like you don't want to see.

Maybe not. What's life without a little risk? Oh, probable line of rock. Well, that's that's geotechnical investigation. I mean, there's not much you can do about that. Well, that's for sure. I guess the highest water on record. All right.

Well, we're doing our best to fix that. His title. All right. So he designs the whole damn thing and they send it out for bids, right? And of course, immediately we get a clash of personalities. The firms come back with a variety of designs and only one of them even vaguely resembles Vaudelay's design. I believe that was from I believe that's that's this one up here, right? And of course, you can see here, the Pennsylvania Steel Company

comes back with a design for suspension bridge of our favorite design, which is self-anchored using rocker towers with I bars. Oh, shit. That's that shit I like. Yeah, just just just pause now, go back and listen to episode one. We hadn't really figured out the whole podcasting thing, but we had a hell of a lot better handle on it than they did bridges. You know, it's good when we look more confident by comparison.

Oh, yeah. All of all of the comments there are just like, who's this dumbass who keeps interrupting Justin? And then I fixed this by getting another dumbass. You fucking thought, folks. All right. So so Vaudelay is agitating for this one design up here, right, which looks kind of like his.

And and meanwhile, Mujetski and Fitzmarice, they prefer another one down here by the St. Lawrence Bridge Company, which, you know, is a little more conservative, makes a little bit more sense, right? And looks a little bit more like the fourth bridge. Oh, yeah, just just in case you were wondering about the like ego going on here because they want something more than the two thirds decision. I believe that the the Transcontinental Railway Commission

appointed two more engineers to the to the board to make the decision. And they side with Mujetski and Fitzmarice and Vaudelay decides to resign out of petulance. And after my own heart. Great moments in French Canadian history. Yeah. So, you know, a lot of egos that work here, building the world's longest clear span, right? So they start building a bridge, right?

Over here, obviously. So it's big. It's ugly. It's beefy. And it's very simple compared to Cooper's much lighter design, right? Why are you talking shit about me? You want to come in there? I'll come in there. First, first on air murder in a in a podcast. If I die, you have to edit this.

Oh, no, no, I'm not helping. I'm at death's door already. So the two cantilever arms, as we can see here, constructed without incident, right? Here they are. They're up, you know, and they decided rather than what Cooper did, which was they would build the center span out, right? Poorly drawn arrows here. You're doing good.

What they would do is instead, they would bring it in. They'd bring the center span in on a barge and they prefabricated earlier and they would then lift it into place. Right? Oh, some IKEA. Oh, yeah, I like that. You just you get the little Allen key and you're like fucking around with it and then you drop it like 50 feet into the water. Shit, cool. That's gone poorly.

Bring me another. I don't have metric Allen keys. In Canada, that's just irresponsible. Canada didn't do metric at the time. I don't. Oh, my God. This is the first use of the metric system in Canada. Was the Allen keys to put the bridge in place? I'll start small or big and then in tragedy.

All right. So this is the fateful day September 11th, 1916. The other other 9-11. Yeah, the other other 9-11. Yes, it's 9-11 Salvadori and then this. Yes. So they thought that maybe they should do this the previous week when conditions were favorable, but they decided, no, we're going to actually spend a little extra time to sort of drill the workers

into what the procedures are and make sure this goes off without a hitch, right? Because the bridge had already fallen down once. They don't want to do it again. Yeah. Why? Yeah, exactly. We have to like show the entire workforce, the like the Ikea drawing thing with the confused guy with the hammer and like as like a what not to do. Yes. So we're on the bridge just as team left.

Yes. But but instead of having like the the phone with the question mark over his head, he has like a telegraph machine. So they had very favorable conditions that day for lifting the bridge, right? There was no wind. It was high tide. So they start floating the bridge out of the facility. I think it was about 440 in the morning and they get the bridge out there at about 635 in the morning.

They attach it to the big hydraulic jacks, right? That's those are these these guys hanging down here. And they start jacking up the span, right? Two feet at a time, starting at 740 a.m. And so they get it about 20 feet up, right? Sure. And then everyone broke for lunch. Oh, good. Yeah. Quitting time.

Yeah, it's lunchtime. Yeah. Once again, there's a whole bunch of journalists there, the press are there. And you know, there's a lot of engineers there to observe. A lot of them were standing on the span itself as it was being jacked up. Oh, sure. But, you know, lunchtime is like, all right, everyone off. We're going to go get lunch. Yeah.

It's the lesson of this going to be never take breaks ever. Just continue working as sleep deprived and exhausted as you can. Who would do that? So at 1030, they fire up the hydraulic jacks again. They start bringing her back up, right? And at 1050, there's a there's a sharp crack, right? That doesn't look ideal. No. And the whole span fell in the river.

Yeah. Well, that sucks. Then you got a jacket all the way back up there. You see, it's it's not looking not looking so good. I don't know they'll be able to reuse that one. It's fine. It's just a little dent. It'll buff out. All right. So that killed 13 people.

14 were injured, right? Not just on the span itself that fell in the river, because both of these two spans here, they had deflected downwards by about seven inches. Oh, fuck. When when they added the new span. So they shot right back up like springs. Ideal.

And it just, yeah, exactly. You just get thrown into the river by this fucking catapult. Yeah, exactly. That's that's a pretty like some way to go. Yeah, I would say I was going with comical. It could be both. It's both. You're just kind of flying upwards off this bridge and like your stovepipe hat thinking, oh, how was that?

This happened. So the first thought was that since this was, I believe, 1916, the first thought it was German sabotage, right? Hmm. But they later found out it was a failure in one of the castings on one corner, right? That sounds German. Yep. I'm going to be a 9-11 truce.

So not for the Pentagon, but only for this specific bridge. Yeah, Canada did 9-11, but it's this 9-11. What you can sort of see is that like over here, the bridge is twisted by 90 degrees. And over here, it's it's not, right? Is it slid up? One casting failed that was securing it in place and it slid off one corner

and then it twisted 90 degrees and it sank into the river 200 feet down along with the Allen key that had just four bastards. He probably didn't. They probably didn't tighten it up well enough with the Allen key beforehand. Well, that's a good point. Can never be too careful. Those Alices will get you. This this investigation went a little more quickly.

They found out pretty quickly it was the failure of the casting. St. Lawrence Bridge Company took full responsibility and they well, they rebuilt the bridge. They built a new bridge. They lifted it in place properly the second time. And well, it's still there. Oh, terrific. Yeah. Well, there's your bridge.

It only took three tries. Who would do that? Only killed 88 people. At least we didn't kill 88 people. That's true that we know of. The original span is still sitting there in the bottom of the river. Is it rose? Love it.

Just being just being an artificial. Just doing stuff, doing dead bridge stuff. The first train crossed the span in 1919, 20 years after construction got under way. I like. And then it's rumored in Canada that the original bridge was reused to create the order of the engineer rings that you get in Canada, because this is such a cultural memory that it's like, you know, we need especially that we need to like mythologize engineering to make sure that people

don't screw up this badly again. Did that work? Or I mean, I mean, there's never do we have any future Canadian episodes in the pipe? No, there's there's never been an engineering disaster in Canada since this bridge. Nope. No, no, absolutely. Zero because of the rings. Yeah, because of the rings. So the Quebec Bridge is still there today.

It's now a combined rail and road bridge because they took out one of the tracks to add more car lanes, which is dumb. But yeah, it's still very ugly. They didn't even like they didn't paint it like the the fourth bridge. It looks a lot worse in photos that aren't this one. You've captured it's like glamour shot with like the Instagram filters and stuff. It looks sick.

It looks like my lungs feel like why is that bit of it green and that bit of it gray? And it looks like when you leave like mints in the fridge for two. Well, I've I've seen this in real life at least once. And oh, yeah, it does. Didn't we cross the Quebec Bridge? Yeah, yeah. But we did not die. Yeah, we didn't die.

Yeah, stuck it. Podcast dislikers. Yeah, exactly. Not killed by Quebec Bridge. But yeah. So there it is still the world's largest cantilever bridge or largest single span cantilever bridge and Scots. Mad.

God's bad. Ho's bad, etc. Got to show mad. But anyway, that's the story of how it only took three tries to put up this bridge. And obviously, you know, the next episode will be where it only took two tries to put up a bridge, which will be the Comaneros Bridge. Oh, yeah. Yeah, no, we we're going to do a re-up, I think.

I mean, I know we had some issues. So we're going to kind of do a second part of that. So look forward to that. Yeah. Yeah, I'm not sure. I'm not sure we did it justice in episode 13. But like, sound off in the comments to episode 13. Let us know what you think. Yeah, we took forever, we know, but we hope it's worth it.

Hopefully people stop thinking that it's just a dumb meme that we're doing, like it's just a running joke. Yeah, I hope so. I mean, you know, we really do want to give the people what they want. So. Yes. Mm hmm. All right. So that was the podcast commercials, commercial time.

Do you commercial? Listen to Trash Future. It's on podcasts. Also pray for our girl, Alice, as she slipped into death. That's about to say. Do do do pray for me. Five times a day. Yes. All right.

Ross, go watch my YouTube channel. Join Philly Transit Union. Um, I don't know. Subscribe to the Patreon. We should have we should have the next bonus episode up by the time this episode is up. It's on Liam's van. I can't wait. Oh, you just go to the Philly Transit

right as union and everybody there is yelling at you about Franklin. Almost certainly. That's bound to happen eventually. Yeah, I'll do it. Once we're done recording, I assure you are loyal. Let's just I will go into his room, scream at him about assets until it's uploaded. I'm doing it and I'm doing work. Work is happening. I know, I know, I know.

That's the process. No, look, I know that will be another bonus episode. It's just my opinions on the Philadelphia 76ers and why my girlfriend is wrong about everything. My sweet baby. Sticking to sports. So, but yeah, well, you know, last I am Liam Anderson.

I am at Old Man Anderson on Twitter. Nailed it. Um, please continue to get mad at an engineering disasters podcast for doing what it says on the 10. Um, yeah, definitely. I am very excited about the bonus episode on my van. And also, it's so good that that's with Riley Quinn from Trash YouTube. Before he died, before he died tragically in the USB accident.

Exactly. And can we we tell the people we're we're making merch or are we cutting that out? Well, I mean, we've we've agreed to commission it, right? So we can just say that it's coming in the future. Yeah, by our shit. There will be merch in the future. Yeah, buy it by the stuff. We're at everywhere.

We're at the job interviews. We're to like formal settings, we're to a wedding, to a funeral, probably for all occasions. This is so much funnier when you know what the merch design is going to be. Yeah, I want I want to design that just says that just has a tin of Copenhagen on it. And it just says, Scott Wagner, what's cut in front of me and lied at his sheets. You're just abusing this process to get shirts that are just for you. Yes, but I see nothing wrong with that.

And we don't want to make merchandise that people will buy. Well, someone was mad at us for making two minutes worth of in-jokes on an hour plus podcast. So I don't know what to do about that guy. Yeah, that's more like the ratio is off. We do more like two minutes of out jokes and then the rest is in. Yeah, I think so. All right.

Is that it for everybody? I think so. Yeah, I believe so. Shorter than I thought it would go. Oh, that's that's good. That means we're getting better asset. We didn't say bye, everybody. Yeah, it's true when you say bye.

Bye, everybody. Bye, everybody. All right, all right, we're out.