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NOTES FROM THE FIELD
DEATH OF A LANDMARK
A tornado does what a century of hard use could not
IN OUR WINTER 2003 issue the historian and photographer David Plowden called the Kinzua Viaduct a “truly heroic nineteenth-century railroad bridge.” He went on to say, “It has stood rusting in a remote part of northwestern Pennsylvania ever since the Erie Railroad abandoned it in 1959, but its future is far happier than that of most unused bridges.” So indeed it seemed, for the majestic viaduct, towering 300 feet above Kinzua Creek, formed the centerpiece of a popular park, and the W. M. Brode Company, of Newcomerstown, Ohio, was about to start a $12 million renovation.
Brode’s work crews began in February and made good progress until 3:00 P.M. on July 21, when bad weather forced them to leave for the day. The site manager, Floyd Quillin, and a few others stayed behind to inventory construction materials. “It was raining and blowing very hard as I left the trailer,” says Quillin, “and I heard a series of boom, boom, booms, like thunder. Leaves and branches were starting to fly, so we hurried to our truck, and by the time we reached the park gate, the trees on either side of the road were bending down toward each other.
“We saw the 10-by-16-foot guard shack get picked up, and then we saw the driver’s-side wheels of the guard’s pickup truck lifting off the ground. I backed up to a culvert pipe, hoping we could take cover there, but suddenly it was all over. Someone yelled, ‘I think the bridge came down,’ and it took us a while to climb through the downed trees and wreckage to a point where we could see. It looked all right at first, but when we got closer, we saw that the whole middle was gone. Then I realized the booms I’d heard were the towers hitting the ground one by one.” In the space of about a minute, the centuryold Kinzua Viaduct had been felled by a Force 1 tornado, which knocked down 11 of its 20 supporting columns.
The 121-year history of the ruined structure is a tale of two bridges. In the early 1880s the New York, Lake Erie & Western Railroad wanted to bring Pennsylvania coal to Buffalo and the Great Lakes through the rugged terrain of McKean County. The company’s chief engineer, Octave Chanute (the same Octave Chanute whose glider research would later inspire the Wright brothers), proposed to cross the plunging Kinzua Creek Valley with a half-milelong viaduct. Chanute, Adolphus Bonzano, and Thomas Curds Clarke came up with an efficient and elegant design, a continuous Howe truss made from prefabricated wrought iron.
The Phoenixville Bridge Works assembled the Kinzua Viaduct in an amazing 94 days in 1882. As the highest and longest American bridge of its time, and briefly the world’s highest, the structure became an immediate tourist attraction. By 1900, however, it could no longer withstand the stresses of increased traffic and heavier trains, and the Erie Railroad replaced it with a steel deck-girder span designed by Chanute and Mason R. Strong and laid upon the original foundation piers. Construction began on May 24, 1900, and was finished on September 25.
It remained a working viaduct until 1959, when the Erie Railroad shut down the line. Nick Kovalchick, a scrap and salvage dealer, got the contract to demolish the viaduct, but he could not bring himself to destroy such a beautiful structure, and he persuaded the state to build a park around it. Kinzua Bridge State Park opened in 1970 and became a favorite among local residents and bridge lovers, who could cross the viaduct on foot or in an excursion train until the summer of 2002, when an inspection revealed significant deterioration. Unfortunately the ensuing renovation could not be com-completed in time to save it. As Stephen Brode of the Brode renovation firm says, “The towers we’d completely repaired withstood everything, even the forces of the broken part of the structure pulling against them as the tornado brought them down. They were never designed for that load.”
Jean Cutler, director of Pennsylvania’s State Historic Preservation Office, says the Kinzua Viaduct will not be delisted from the National Register of Historic Places or the National Register of Civil Engineering Landmarks. Instead, its status will be re-evaluated after the state’s Department of Conservation and Natural Resources decides what to do with the structure. According to Terrence Brady, deputy press secretary of the DCNR, three options are under consideration: Leave the collapsed bridge as is, and shore up the parts that are still standing; repair what’s left, and clear away the wreckage; or rebuild the bridge. Among the 2,000 people who visit the site each day, the prevailing sentiment is clear: Rebuild it. Many even ask how they can contribute to the reconstruction fund.
To Lisa Gensheimer, who had just spent nine months developing a film about the Kinzua Viaduct with her husband for public television, “When a magnificent structure like this falls down, it drives home the importance of documentation.” She continues on a hopeful note: “Though this is certainly not the ending we had anticipated, we are going to follow this story wherever it leads us. This tornado is just one more event in the life of the bridge.”
—Katie Jaeger
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FRAUDULENT FRANKLIN?
A pair of innovative approaches to Benjamin Franklin and the early days of electrical science
POLITICAL WRITERS OF A CERTAIN stripe like to assert that the institution of marriage creates many benefits for society. That’s true, and one of the most important of them has nothing to do with morals, economics, or stable family relationships. Instead it lies in marriage’s main byproduct—waiting time—and its beneficial effect on creativity.
Consider the experience of Donald Bitzer, who, as described elsewhere in this issue, invented the plasma display screen for use in the PLATO educational computing system. In 1964 he and a colleague were waiting for their wives to pick them up at the end of the day. “Both wives were late in arriving,” Bitzer recalls, “so we began a discussion focused on reducing the early work [on the display] to as simple a configuration as possible, utilizing the natural capacitance characteristics of a glass panel.” This proved to be the key breakthrough. “Our wives still think that they and their tardy arrival deserve part of the credit for the invention,” Bitzer says.
In similar fashion, the garagerock anthem “Pushin’ Too Hard” was composed in 1966 by Sky Saxon, lead singer for the Seeds, while waiting for his wife (well, his girlfriend) to finish shopping. Most recently, Michael Brian Schiffer, an anthropologist at the University of Arizona, was wrestling with a half-written book on electricity that “lacked a coherent framework.” He couldn’t figure out how to tie it all together, he writes, until “one day, while waiting for my wife, Annette, in a shopping mall in Flagstaff, Arizona, it finally came to me. I would recount the early history of electrical technology and then trace the changes it underwent as people adapted it to the performance requirements of different activities in various science and nonscience communities.”
The result of Schiffer’s mall-rat epiphany is Draw the Lightning Down: Benjamin Franklin and Electrical Technology in the Age of Enlightenment (University of California Press, 383 pages, $34.95). As promised, the book devotes a chapter to each of the transatlantic intellectual communities that developed around the mysterious new phenomenon, including lecturers/ showmen, physicians, lightning-rod inventors, atmospheric scientists, and electrochemists. Since the author is also an archeologist, he takes an artifact-based approach, examining the instruments and apparatus used by each community to see what they tell us about the spread of electrical knowledge and how it was seen by practitioners and outsiders.
Ubiquitous throughout Schiffer’s book, of course, is the figure of Franklin, whose pre-eminence in the early days of electrical research remains unchallengeable. Is it conceivable, however, that the wily Franklin used his talents and reputation to give himself more credit as a discoverer than he deserved? That possibility is examined in Bolt of Fate: Benjamin Franklin and His Electric Kite Hoax, by Tom Tucker (Public Affairs Books, 297 pages, $25.00).
As the title says, Tucker believes that Franklin, an inveterate perpetrator of hoaxes and practical jokes throughout his life, never made the famous kite-flying experiment in 1752 that proved the equivalence of lightning and electricity. The author is not calling Franklin a complete fraud: There is no question that he had previously suggested a similar demonstration in a published paper and that a pair of French scientists performed the kite experiment that same year. But a few months after the Frenchmen reported their results, Franklin wrote that he, too, had recently flown a kite in a thunderstorm and used it to collect the “electric fire.” Suspiciously, there were no witnesses, and Franklin didn’t even give the day when it happened. Tucker thinks he never flew the kite and merely said he had in order to dispute the French claim of priority.
Delving deep into historical sources, Tucker examines the shaky chronology of the episode, as well as the apparatus Franklin supposedly used. His conclusion: The experiment could not have worked. The string would have burned up, the key would have been too heavy, and Franklin’s description of the kite does not make sense in terms of the materials available at the time.
Tucker is not the first to make such a claim. As he acknowledges, similar suggestions have been around for almost a century, though Franklin scholars have usually dismissed them. Whether his evidence is strong enough to establish Franklin as a hoaxer is up to each reader to decide, for while the depth of his research is impressive, none of his points is dispositive in itself. Yet even if Tucker is correct, it does little to harm FrankHn’s position as a pioneer of modern science. Rather, it just makes him look more human and less like the allegorical figure to be found in countless paintings and statues.
—Frederic D. Schwarz
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