Excerpt:
The theory of the equilibrium of arches, until of late years, commanded but little attention from practical men, partly owing to the fact that, since it was derived from observations of their own failures and successes, it came rather too late to be of much service to them, but chiefly owing to the form in which it was presented by mathematicians, who, by giving a fictitious importance to insignificant matters, effectually obscured the broad truth, that the whole question was essentially a comparatively simple problem of weight and leverage.
Annotation:
This archived Digital Bridges document reviews some engineering techniques on the forefront of bridge-building technology in the late 19th century. Like many similar period documents, the bulk of the work is textual and the sentences too convoluted for casual reading; the document was likely intended for readers already educated in the subject. However, there are also some useful lithographs in the book, and the entire document shows the direction in which engineers believed bridge-building would be headed in the coming years.