Bridgebuilders and Historians Turned Metal Into Myth

A vintage golden genie lamp made of brass placed on a flat surface with a white background, evoking timeless tales. by Boris Hamer via pexels

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Bridgebuilders and Historians Turned Metal Into Myth

Evolutionist storytellers have for centuries reinforced iron as a gauge of progress. They employed technology as “the measure of men” and portrayed iron as the quintessential material of the Industrial Revolution. Their calculation was rooted in the late 18th-century transition in the British economy’s basis from wood and water to iron and coal. Within this ferric landscape, wood was deemed appropriate for less complex, less civilized societies.

The words of historian Carl Condit, whose publications on building technology were widely read, ring through the decades: “Wherever wood was plentiful and industrial techniques less advanced than in Western Europe, timber construction was bound to be the natural choice.” He believed that wood framing belonged to a “vernacular tradition,” that is, unscientific, less advanced. Wood’s mythic nature — unlearned, craft-based, inflammable — helps explain why in the early 21^st century the use of wooden members, such as beams or columns, in high-rise buildings can still evoke surprise.

Our understanding of materials reflects engineering, evolutionary, economic, and nationalist perspectives. It shapes how we see materials and how designers use them. Consider engineer John Roebling, who in 1860 proclaimed, “Iron has emphatically become the material of the age. Upon its proper use, the future comfort and physical advancement of the human race will principally depend. It will yet be the harbinger of peace, as already it has given us the means of locomotion and of intelligent intercourse.”

His rhetorical fervor aligned with the industrial-evolutionist reasoning of his time and is comparable to the language of today’s promoters of digital technologies. Roebling believed that technology provided evidence of a superior civilization and that technological progress would benefit the world; his metal cable manufacturing company was helping make it happen (“intelligent intercourse” probably refers to the far-reaching impact of telegraph wires, which Roebling’s company manufactured).

Roebling, like Abraham Darby, William Fairbairn, and Robert Stephenson, had a financial stake in iron. (This is not to say they were venal; a belief in a future they would profit from was integral to their entrepreneurial mindset.) Roebling’s design for the Niagara railroad suspension bridge — an American symbol whose image traveled around the world — depended on cables, though its deck initially made substantial use of wood and iron. When the bridge opened in 1855, the “American Railroad Journal” proclaimed: “It must place the name of Roebling high among the greatest and best of those who have accomplished most for the advancement of their species.”

This Prussian-born technologist remains an American hero to this day, thanks to his Brooklyn Bridge. But historians who adopt material ideologies and biases from innovator-entrepreneurs such as Roebling and integrate them uncritically into storymaking create puzzling scenarios. They write things like “the iron truss came soon after the iron arch.” This affirmation, which links disparate structures and seems to exclude wood, is a celebration of progress rather than an insight into the history of innovation.

Wood and metal structures each required their own design method. With wood, the connection type determined the size of the entire member; with iron and steel, designers established the size of the members first. As an engineer explained in 1933, “If he designs a steel bridge while standing on his feet, he should stand on his head while designing a timber structure. In other words, the processes are reversed.”

In metal structures, a much smaller material area was required for the connections, which were simpler, could withstand a variety of forces from different directions, and could be designed as an independent feature of the structure; in addition, the shape of the member could be more precisely specified and manufactured. Metal enabled designers to create structures that were physically closer to one-dimensional depictions — that is, closer to the diagrams used in structural analysis. Lumber was superimposed and connected at the overlaps, while metal construction approached a single plane, with connection points where members met, usually at their ends.

Designers had to think about wood and metal in different ways. Essential to successful wood design was knowledge of wood types, shared by manufacturer and builder. Because wood fails with forewarning, builders could learn through observation and repair. (A recent study reports that 19^th-century wooden railway bridges had a safety advantage; they were not known to collapse while trains crossed them.) As railways rejected wooden bridges, the importance of the type of knowledge and experience required to build with wood diminished.

Iron, by contrast, could break with little or no warning; this may be due to the type of metal, how it is used, or the quality of manufacture. Metal members were more of a black box, not knowable in the ways that wood was. Bridge designers and builders trusted the metal maker to produce a material that met a testing standard, which in most cases was independent of the designer. The alienation from firsthand knowledge, along with the foregrounding of analytical tools for designing structures, became fundamental to the mass-construction of bridges. The designer could develop a structural idea in the abstract — and then seek materials that fit the design.

The evolutionist ascent-of-iron narrative lowered the status of the carpenter while elevating that of the engineer, who possessed a different kind of knowledge. No matter the material, however, intuition (that is, tacit knowledge and skill based on experience) remained basic to design. As historian Joachim Radkau explained, craftsmanship and a feeling for materials were still important, before iron and industrialized building and after, but “human skill was pushed to the edge of technologists’ consciousness.”

The professionalization of engineering occurred alongside the development of structural metals. Civil and mechanical engineers became closely identified with new types of structures that employed metal; this enabled them to distinguish themselves from contractors, whose participation in iron construction was also essential. Eminent structural engineer Corydon T. Purdy’s assertion in 1895 that “it is only with the advent of steel that the engineer has become a necessity” transmitted heavy metal reverberations about progress: New materials require new people with new knowledge to replace those who came before.

That year, in the same journal, engineer J. Parker Snow, while describing wooden lattice railway bridges he was maintaining, shared an “impression” that wooden bridges had become “obsolete.” Already 30 years earlier, when an engineer mentioned “the lattice, long since abandoned as a wooden structure,” he seemed to confirm its extinction; yet wooden lattices continued to be built, though in smaller numbers. But metal was the material on which engineers, entrepreneurs, and historians were building professional status, careers, and wealth.

The idea that materials provide an evolutionary track for designers to follow, rather than commodities to be manipulated, is rooted in the belief that each material has a form through which it can best be expressed. This notion endures in the oft-quoted bromide attributed to the architect Louis Sullivan, “Form follows function,” which aligns with his convictions about nature and evolution. As if function dictated a unique form, or each form had only one function! Sullivan’s business partner, engineer Dankmar Adler, more astutely deciphered design: “Form follows historical precedent.” Or, as an engineer in 1844 remarked regarding the succession of bridge types, “There is a fashion which rages for a certain time.”

This is evident in the number of cable-stayed bridges built in recent years. While evolution clarifies the process of change in an animal species, biology cannot account for the myriad decisions that drive the design of individual objects or the development of innovation over time. There is always a menu of possibilities to choose from.

But evolutionism can circumscribe that choice. Anthropological experts traced cultural evolution through the West with the advent of iron as climax. In the late 19^th century, John Wesley Powell, a founder of the field of anthropology, explained, “The age of savagery is the age of stone; the age of barbarism the age of clay; the age of civilization the age of iron.” Ethnologist Otis T. Mason confirmed that “the civilized man passes his whole life in the midst of wheels and cranks and engines of iron.”

Metal embodied a majestic symbolic potency: Its mythical strength and permanence provided proof of the durability and civilizational direction of nation and imperial empire. So cultural narrators ignored the role of wood at a pivotal inventive moment — the reinvention of building — and likely remained ignorant of the moment because of wood’s centrality. Lumber and enslaved people were considered primitive or pre-industrial, on the other side of the divide, even if they played a giant role in the making of industrial capitalism and management. Like the racial classifications often employed to define society, “iron bridge” and “wooden bridge” in historical accounts often are factitious labels that reveal evolutionary caste. They refer to imaginary homogeneous types rather than actual mixed heritage and composition.

The evolutionist-progressive narrative also functions as a political power tool. Entrepreneurs and engineers used it to rationalize intentions and minimize mistakes. It enabled industrialists John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie to justify aggressive corporate tactics and the mistreatment of individuals; Carnegie claimed that inequality and concentration of wealth were “essential to the future progress of the race.” Evolutionism supported the view that efforts to make society equitable were unnecessary and perhaps unnatural. In China, evolutionism would replace traditional values and serve as a tool for massive change.

Just as biologists have applied evolution to all scales of life, from genes to species change over thousands of years, historian-evolutionists have turned their attention to all scales of invention and industry, ranging from “arrow into rocket” fantasias to seemingly small alterations. In defense against a lawsuit accusing them of theft, a group of dismayed engineers asked: “How can you patent something that is in the natural evolution of technology?” Indeed, if designers are evolution’s agents, they would not be responsible for illicit appropriation.

By the beginning of the 20^th century, corporations in the United States were less likely to publicly espouse survival of the fittest. The idea went underground and fertilized the evolutionist-progress narrative of technology that nurtures today’s neoliberal thought. In the 21st century, evolutionist narratives can deflect attention from the inequity behind, for example, digital devices — gleaming avatars of progress made of metals whose manufacture and disposal depend on environmental harm and brutal working and living conditions in places Western consumers never see. This is the dark side of the evolution-of-materials tale. While evolutionism’s inextricable ties to the openly nationalist and racist currents of the 19th and 20th centuries are well known, less discussed are its support for contemporary corporate “innovation” and its impacts. The question is: Who is technological evolution and progress for?

“Arguably, no folk theory of human nature has done more harm — or is more mistaken — than the ‘survival of the fittest,’” asserts anthropologist Brian Hare and science writer Vanessa Woods. The catchphrase justified and perhaps inspired a couple of centuries of human and environmental destruction. It’s so deeply ingrained that it’s hard to extract from our understandings of history and society.

Struggle represents only one way of viewing the world, however. For humans and animals, cooperation may be the strongest outcome of evolution. The ever-changing relationships of interdependent individuals create stories, materials, and communities. Were 19th-century bridges known as “American” like processed American cheese, whose development runs through England and Switzerland? Were they like Gruyère, officially made only in Switzerland and France, though the United States, which imports more cheese by that name from the Netherlands and Germany, claims the name is “generic”? Were so-called American bridges like French dressing, whose origins do not lie in France and whose contents the US government controlled for 72 years, until 2022, 24 years after the Association for Dressings & Sauces asked that it cease doing so? Or did they have something in common with chocolate? Eighty percent of cocoa beans come from West Africa, although only 1 percent of chocolate is made there.

Exploring how social and political flows define and redefine manufacturing, innovation, and consumption can lead us to shift our understandings of national, local, and global. Today, Kinshasha and Paris have the same number of Francophones; 60 percent of French speakers live in Africa, where they are remaking the language.

Biologist and computer scientist David Krakauer wrote, “Genes, minds and societies are all involved in various forms of construction. A better understanding of life requires that we abandon the view that organisms are account books recording in their behaviour past ages of the Earth and see them rather as builders engaged actively in the planet’s construction.”

Instead of regarding technologists as enactors of biological tropes and national destinies, we might view them as creators working in a multiplicity of places through networks that range across construction sites, businesses, factories, universities, and nations, while building a diversity of futures.

Gregory Dreicer is a historian, curator, and experience designer whose transdisciplinary explorations and public engagement offerings include “Between Fences,” “Me, Myself and Infrastructure,” and “Unbelievable.” He has worked with the Museum of Vancouver, the Chicago Architecture Foundation, and the Museum of the City of New York. He is the author of “American Bridge,” from which this article is adapted.

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