Since antiquity, wood has had certain wooden bridges are comparatively cheaper, and if a flood If a flood swept it away, a new bridge could quickly be built. a new bridge could be quickly erected.
The knowledge gained in the construction of stone bridges was also used in the construction of wooden bridges. for the construction of wooden bridges as well. After all, the construction of a stone bridge is made of wood. The Romans had already mastered the art of making wooden beams out of arched and braced wooden beams, which were extremely stable.
Despite the danger of fire, about 200 large wooden bridges still exist today in Central Europe. Most of them are covered with a tile roof to protect the roadway from the weather.
Particularly impressive is the 200-meter-long bridge over the Rhine in Sekkingen,
The bridge that connects Germany and Switzerland is a particularly impressive one. Wooden bridges played an important role in the development of railroads in North and South America. Because of abundance of rivers and canyons that crisscrossed vast territories, many bridges had to be built; building stone bridges would have been enormously expensive, and wood was available and cheap building material. This is how gigantic wooden girder structures, such as the bridge over the Portage River south of Lake Erie in Ohio.
In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries there was a need for even larger
bridges that could carry large ships. In the eighteenth century, the height
of bridges reached the height of more than 100 m. The unrealized project of a wooden one-arch bridge over the Neva River was 298 m long, designed by Ivan Petrovich Kulibin.
Classicism was popular in the XVIII century. Bridges built in this style, distinguished by clear symmetry, careful attention to proportions of the construction, the spans of large size.
Classicism was widespread in France (Pont de la Concorde in
Paris). Since the late 18th century metal was used for construction. In Colbrookdale, in 1779 appeared the world’s first bridge made of metal, built by blast furnace operator Abraham Derby and engineer Joseph Wilkinson. The bridge connected the banks of the River Severn; as a historical monument, it is now under state protection. Cast iron is a fragile material; like natural stone, it can only withstand the forces of compression. Therefore, the designers of the bridge used a proven arched structure. The details of the arches with a span of 21 m were cast at the Derby factory. The only thing to do on the building site was to assemble them.
The first attempt to build a cast iron bridge on the English model in
The first attempt to construct a cast iron bridge based on the English model was made 15 years later by a Count at his estate in Lower Silesia. Two years later the casting of parts was completed, but it was not possible to assemble them.
The Earl finally invited an English technician and he built a small bridge with a span of 11 metres. Some of the many small cast iron bridges, modeled after the Colbrookdale one, eventually collapsed because the arches failed. The era of large bridges came only after iron and steel were learned to be made from blast furnace iron. Steel and wrought iron are much more ductile than cast iron and also withstand tensile stresses. So, bridges of all shapes and types – suspension bridges on chains and steel cables, arched bridges of riveted steel profiles and framework structures familiar from the times of wooden bridges – began to be built from a new material: iron.
In the XIX century, the appearance of railroads required the construction of bridges able to withstand considerable loads, which stimulated the development of bridge building. Gradually steel and iron became the main materials in bridge building. Gustave Eiffel in 1877 built a cast iron arch bridge over the Douro River in Portugal. The height of the span of that bridge was 160 m.