The Tacoma Narrows Bridge Collapse and How We Got It Wrong
Wow, what a sprawling article. At first it seems to just focus on how the popular physics class explanation of why the bridge collapsed was wrong...which is mildly interesting but I was hoping from the title that we&#x27;d get an indepth look at the engineering processes behind the bridge -- as I remember hearing far more about the bridge in my engineering classes than in physics. But the OP delivers some about the engineering, though I&#x27;m largely ignorant of the details about the Tacoma Narrows Bridge (based on the film footage, I had assumed it had happened in the 60s, because I didn&#x27;t think color footage would have been easy to take in the early 40s).<p>I liked this detail a third-way through:<p>&gt; <i>To be fair to Moisseiff and his engineers, the phenomenon of aerodynamic instability wasn&#x27;t well understood at the time. But it wasn&#x27;t completely unknown either. The last collapse of a suspension bridge due to its reaction to the wind occurred five decades earlier, when the Niagara-Clifton Bridge fell in 1889. (The heavyset design of the Brooklyn Bridge, which opened five years earlier, in 1883, was meant to withstand the sorts of forces that had affected suspension bridges in previous decades.)</i><p>&gt; <i>Just four months after Galloping Gertie collapsed, a professor of civil engineering at Columbia University, J. K. Finch, summarized suspension bridge failures in an article in Engineering News Record. &quot;These long-forgotten difficulties with early suspension bridges, clearly show that while to modern engineers, the gyrations of the Tacoma bridge constituted something entirely new and strange, they were not new—they had simply been forgotten.&quot;</i><p>The most recent example of a similar failure was 50 years earlier. No doubt the information would propagate to some degree through engineering libraries...but given how much we today forget about engineering failures and case studies (in the software engineering context, some would argue that the memory hole cycle seems to be about 6 months long) despite vastly improved information pipelines, I&#x27;ve always wondered how difficult it was to learn and maintain best practices in the engineering disciplines before the past few decades.