Collapse of Quebec's World's Greatest Bridge

1916

Quebec, Que., Sept. 11. — The span of the world's greatest bridge collapsed into the St. Lawrence river today with a loss of life variously estimated.

The Company erecting the structure placed the number of deaths at upward of 25, but H. P. Borden, a member of the Quebec bridge commission, expressed the opinion that only three persons were lost. Several hours after the accident happened, at 10.30 o'clock, a special train into Quebec brought 20 men who had been injured.

Nine years ago a similar accident at the same spot took a toll of 70 lives. Today 90 men were carried into the river when the 5,000 ton span, being raised from pontoons in an engineering feat designed to complete the $17,000,000 cantilever suspension for transcontinental railway traffic, plunged a distance of fifteen feet into the water and sank 200 feet below the surface perhaps never to be recovered.

Contradictory stories were told regarding the collapse. The pontoons had been removed and the span was being lifted by massive hydraulic jacks when, according to some of the spectators, the northern end of the span fell with the breaking of girders. Frantic efforts were made to plate a chain rope around the tottering structure, but with reports like shells exploding the remaining supports snapped and the span disappeared with a spectacular splash.

Some of the observers said that the structure buckled at the center as it fell. Groups of men at work slipped off into the water and others were knocked into space by flying debris. Scores of craft containing spectators went to the rescue and their endeavors prevented a larger loss of life.

Toronto, Sept. 11. — The property loss resulting from the Quebec bridge disaster will be about $600,000, it was stated here today by George L. Evans of the Dominion Bridge Company. The accident will delay the completion of the structure for ten months, he said.

—The Fryeburg Post, Fryeburg, Maine, Sept. 12, 1916, p. 6.

Burning Mud

1902

Nowadays everything that will burn is interesting. A fuel works at Stangflorden, in Norway, where peat is made into a useful fuel, should be of especial interest to Massachusetts, which is said to be talking of opening up its extensive peat beds. The factory at Stangflorden is run by electricity generated by water power, and has been in operation since 1898. The chief difficulty in manufacturing fuel from peat is getting rid of the water with which it is always soaked. About eighty-five per cent, by bulk is water, and practically all of this must be removed before a satisfactory fuel is obtained. At Stangflorden the wet peat is brought to the factory in boats, from which it is removed by electric conveyors and submitted to a preliminary rough drying and pressing. The briquettes thus formed are placed in chambers, through which warm, dry air is driven, and are finally placed in electrically heated retorts, where the drying is completed.

The peat yields, besides these briquettes, tar, charcoal, creosote, sulphate of ammonia and other by products. The electric power is obtained from five eighty-kilowatt dynamos. The plant is capable of turning out 1000 centners (a centner is about 110 pounds) of air-dried peat a day. The fuel is said to burn well, yields little soot and ash and is really salable in Bergen and other towns.

The Old Suez Canal

1907

Few people are aware that there had been a canal across the isthmus of Suez before De Lesseps ever conceived the idea of his monumental enterprise.

A canal across the isthmus was actually constructed 600 years before the Christian era and served as a waterway for small vessels until about 1,000 years ago, when it was allowed to fall into disuse. Napoleon revived the idea and instructed one of the great engineers of his day to investigate the matter, but though a favorable report was presented to him, in which M. Lepere recommended the restoration of the canal, the work itself was never touched.

When M. de Lesseps undertook the task of cutting the canal he thought at first to follow the idea of Napoleon and restore the ancient waterway, but this plan was abandoned and the present plan determined upon.

Powerful Aero Engines

1917

In testing an airplane engine of 200 horse power a Detroit company mounted it upon a heavy motor truck, and the aerial propeller sent the track flying along a boulevard at the rate of more than 40 miles an hour. This was a speed that the truck could not begin to develop under its own motive power, and the method furnished a better practical test of the 12-cylinder airplane engine than was possible in the testing laboratory or in any stationary trial on blocks.

As an additional test the rear wheels of the two-ton truck were locked, so that they could not revolve, and in this condition it was driven across a ball park by the airplane engine and propeller through heavy drifts of snow and over ice. The motor weighs 800 pounds and develops power sufficient to drive a 12-passenger airplane at 40 miles an hour. — Popular Mechanics Magazine.


Won His Lost Watch

An extraordinary watch story is told by a Welsh campaigner home on leave from African battlefields. When he was in German West Africa he lost a wristlet watch. It was not very valuable, so he did not worry a lot about it. But many months later, when on active service in German East Africa, he took a share in a raffle for a watch. He won, and to his amazement found that the prize was his own watch.

Moving A House By Water

1896

A remarkable feat of engineering has just been successfully accomplished by a Pacific coast firm. An attorney named Ernest Sevier is the owner of a two-story house at Arcata, twelve miles from Eureka. Owing to a decline in the value of property at Arcata Sevier determined to have the house moved to Eureka, where he intended having it set up on some land that he owned.

A firm of contractors undertook to remove the house intact and set it up, uninjured, for the sum of $1,200. In case it was unfit for occupancy upon its arrival they were to receive the dwelling as their compensation.

The trip was made principally by water. To remove the house to the edge of the bay was the first difficulty to be overcome, as it necessitated taking the building over a large dyke and a marsh. This was accomplished satisfactorily and the house was transferred to two railroad lighters that had been lashed together in readiness for the trip.

The journey by water was completed with the aid of a tug without accident, and an immense crowd assembled at Eureka to welcome the strange craft.

Amid the cheers of the spectators and the tooting of steam whistles the lighters were made fast and the house transferred to land once more. It was a comparatively easy matter to convey it to its new site and the strange engineering feat was accomplished without any more damage being done to the house than a slight cracking of the plaster.

A Minute Survey Made

1904

A high official of the War Department tells of an amusing report once made by General McKibben, of the Engineer Corps, who had been sent west to examine the course and condition of a certain road. The general's instructions especially directed him to report whence and whither the road led.

Most carefully did the officer follow orders; and when the final report was rendered it was seen that the road about which the War Department hungered for information eventually made its way up a certain hill, and climbed a tree at the top.

"Don't you think we had better omit that part?" inquired the commanding officer, when the report was laid before him. "You see, this report is to go through the regular military channel, and will be filed. Really, you know, a road wouldn't go up a tree!"

"That's where this road went," insisted General McKibben. "It got fainter and fainter; then up that hill it wound and climbed into the tree, just as I have shown in the report. There was, sir, not the least evidence of a trail beyond the tree, but it was blazed far up toward the top, and that was the end of the trail. I think the report should stand as it is, sir; I am prepared to substantiate every word of it!"

The report is so recorded in the archives of the War Office.

Train Ferries in Europe

1894

From the Engineering Mechanic

English engineers, finding it necessary to adopt our system of train ferries, and not wishing to give us credit of inaugurating that system, have managed to discover a Sir John somebody who worked the whole thing up fifteen years ago.

A New York paper says: "There seems to be nothing in the way of running unbroken trains between London and Paris, except the necessary capital and the employment of sufficient technical skill. If the London, Chatham, and Dover would combine with the Northern, of France, and employ an experienced American engineer to plan and construct the docks and appliances for embarking and landing the trains, and at the same time send to any of the shipbuilding establishments on our great lakes for a man to construct the ferry boats, the arrangement could be perfected in a year and a half or two years, when freight and passengers could be transported from any part of Great Britain to the Continent, and eventually to all of Asia and Africa, without change of cars or break of bulk."

The system of train ferries will no doubt be established throughout Europe in a few years, and will do much to expedite and cheapen transit.

The Water Supply of Rome

1874

In the course of a lecture on Roman antiquities, delivered at the Royal Institution, London, Mr. J. H. Parker said: The celebrated Aqua Marcia has recently been again brought into Rome, and is rapidly coming into use, being considered the finest drinking water in the world, always cool even in the hottest weather. On the river Anio itself, where a fine cascade falls over the rock, there is a deep rocky gorge; and here great engineering works were made in the time of Claudius and Nero.

A great wall, 12 feet thick, built of large blocks of stone, was erected across the river at the lower part of the gorge, forming a dam of 100 feet high and 12 feet thick, to enclose a portion, perhaps 100 yards long, between the dam and the natural cascade; the water was made to fall over the dam, which thus became the cascade; but at one end of it a specus was made below the level of the surface of the water, so that the water must always flow through that specus, and consequently through Rome, before any of it could fall over the cascade.

This magnificent and most useful piece of engineering continued in use for centuries. It was destroyed in the fourteenth century by an ignorant monk, who was annoyed by a temporary flood in the upper country, which overflowed the meadows near his monastery, and, to relieve that, he made a hole at the bottom of the great dam. The force of the water soon carried all before it, and caused a great flood over all the lower country, even to the Tiber, and did immense mischief — even the walls of Rome were injured.

Mr. Parker said that he had not time to describe the thermae, or great public baths, to supply which most of the aqueducts were made, but he could not conclude without mentioning that the opinion, commonly entertained, that the ancient Romans were ignorant of the fact that water will rise to its level, is entirely a popular delusion. At every half mile of the aqueducts, on their course from the foot of the hills to Rome, each aqueduct forms an angle, to break the force of the water, and at that angle a great reservoir is made, with a piscina or filtering place at one end. Each piscina consists of four vaulted chambers, two above and two below. The water enters into the top of the first upper chamber; it then falls through a hole in the vault into the first lower chamber, then passes through small holes in the intermediate wall into the second lower chamber, then rises again through a hole in the vault into the second upper chamber, and then follows its course at the same level as it originally entered, depositing its mud in the lower chamber as it passed. Each piscina is therefore made upon the principle of water finding its level.

They used the large stone specus, or aqueducts, instead of ordinary pipes, because they could not depend either upon their leaden pipes or their terra cotta pipes to resist the force of such a stream of water. Nothing but the concrete stone was strong enough. At the present time, the cast iron pipes of the new company are bursting every day in the streets of Rome to such an extent that the managers of the company fear that the expense will be ruinous to them. This seems to show that the old Romans were better engineers than we are.