Are you tired of politics, night after day after night? Yeah, me too, so let’s do something else. We like to talk about our world being built on the shoulders of giants in political philosophy but it’s even more true in the physical world. Like say, engineering. Let’s start here…
There’s a term in engineering: elegance. Unlike (usually, anyway) its meaning is different than it is in fashion and such. In engineering, it means the exact form that does the indicated job for the intended period, without wasting excess material or capital. There are two culprits here, that stupidly silly fake suspension nonsense which does nothing but add more wind resistance, and a lack of torsional rigidity due to only having the one truss in the center. And I think they need more work on trying to move such an assembly. I certainly see its usefulness, but it seems not well suited to compression trusses.
There is a term I learned in computer science long ago, too. That one is Garbage in = Garbage out. The input to their modeling program (according to this was so far from reality that it was what is called in engineering ‘a blunder’ akin to putting a ship’s propellor above the waterline.
Too often the consulting engineer gets conscripted onto the team, he needs to be an independent watchdog. Sadly, In our world, that rarely pays the bills but it does save lives.
One more problem is endemic and was here as well back in 19th-century Scotland
This problem is endemic, and none of us are immune. We call it ego, we want to do something spectacular and never done before, and often to do it cheaply. There is an old joke in NASA about the crew on Apollo 13 asking each other while waiting to launch, “How’s it feel to go to the moon in a vehicle bought from the lowest bidder”. Yeah, we all know that feeling.
This one shouldn’t have been much of a surprise, things wear out, especially when you decide to raise the load limit. Why nobody reported those gussets is beyond me though. Unless their boss managed to lose that memo, which wouldn’t be the first time.
If you were in the military in drill we (or at least I did) learned the command ‘route march’ What it amounts to is quick march but more like a quick walk in te park, not in step. It seems a funny command, but in fact, it goes all the way back to the Romans. The Romans built great bridges, as evidenced by how many of them still stand, but they had a weakness. When armies marched over them, the rhythmic vibrations of marching troops, would often resonate with the bridge and cause it to fail. And so they instituted route march to minimize the vibrations, And rhythmic vibrations are still the enemy of more or less rigid constructs.
We always learn from mistakes, if we are lucky, the mistakes of others.
But while we all chuckle about these things, we should also remember how much progress we’ve made. Like I’ve said before, when my dad started as a lineman, a hundred years ago half of all linemen would die on the job, when I started in the 70s it was unusual, now it is not even considered a hazardous occupation by the insurance companies. And that’s a debt we owe to those who came before. I still remember sitting in Dad’s office his last night before he retired and asking him what he was most proud of. He took me out in the lobby and pointed to a plaque on the wall. It was from the company;s insurance company, and announced that they had worked one million man hours without a lost time accident. It’s still the only one, I’ve ever seen, although I’m sure there are others.
That’s how our world got built, by hard men who were always looking for a better way, and sometimes finding it. We’d do well to emulate them.