University

Historic Pittsburgh is a digital collection that provides an opportunity to explore and research the history of Pittsburgh and the surrounding Western Pennsylvania area on the Internet. This website enables access to historic material held by the University of Pittsburgh's University Library System, the Library & Archives of the Historical Society of Western Pennsylvania at the Senator John Heinz Pittsburgh Regional History Center, and the Carnegie Museum of Art. The project represents a model of cooperation between libraries and museums in providing online access to their respective materials.

Gentlemen:
It gives me great pleasure to be enabled to report the Niagara Suspension Rail Way Bridge complete in all its parts. The success of this work may now be considered an established fact. The trains of the New York Central, and of the Great Western Rail Road in Canada, have been crossing regularly since the 18th of March, averaging over 30 trips per day.
One single observation of the passage of a train over the Niagara Bridge, will convince the most skeptical, that the practicability of Suspended Railway Bridges, so much doubted heretofore, has been successfully demonstrated.

From southeast to northwest, Cleveland is traversed by the winding Cuyahoga river valley, which, while it provides the railroads with an effective entrance to the city, cuts it into two distinct districts as far as vehicular traffic is concerned. To provide crossings over the river and its wide valley, several bridges have been builds, notably the Detroit-superior Bridge near the lakefront and the central viaduct to the south. After 25 years of study on viaduct to connect Lorain avenue on the west of the river with the district to the east, in The Course of which time the project was once abounded after bonds had actually been voted for construction, the citizens of Cleveland are opening, the first week in the November, a $6500000 viaduct 5,865 ft. long, with its eastern terminus at central avenue. Dr. Watson's interest in the project has been continuos since its inception.

In developing the STRUCTURAL ENGINEERING SLIDE LIBRARY as a comprehensive resource for teaching structural and architectural engineering at college and university level, I felt there was a need to devote a volume to the work of one structural design company. Leonhardt, Andrä and Partners of Stuttgart, Germany, was an ideal choice for this project. One of Europe’s leading structural design companies, its staff has been on the leading edge of many developments in engineering over the past 40 years. Their name has been particularly associated with the development of incrementally launched bridges, cable-stayed bridges, cable-net structures, and prestressed concrete television towers.

WATSON, WILBUR J. (5 Apr. 1871-22 May 1939), a civil engineer, especially eminent in bridge design, was born in BEREA to David R. and Maria (Parker) Watson. Receiving his B.S. from the Case School of Engineering, Watson developed a carefully stated philosophy of the relationship between engineering and aesthetics and used structural and reinforced concrete to produce some of the most beautiful BRIDGES in northern Ohio. He helped set standards for bridge construction across the country. While employed by OSBORN ENGINEERING CO. in Cleveland, Watson was designing bridges as early as 1898. Marrying Harriett Martha Barnes in 1900, Watson founded his own firm, Wilbur J. Watson & Associates, in 1907.

The construction of durable Iron Highway Bridges instead of perishable wooden structures – securing, as it does an ornamental and permanent improvement to the public highways, and avoiding their frequent obstruction for the repair or rebuilding of wooden bridges failing from decay, storm or fire – has become an imperative public want, wherever trial has been made of properly designed and constructed work.

Debate about the descriptor for Victoria's second university was not prolonged and through an enabling Act 1958, Monash University became one of a very few universities in the world named after a military hero. Of German-Jewish immigrant stock Sir John Monash was Australian, indeed Victorian, to the core and is still regarded as Australia's greatest fighting General. He was possessed of such diverse talents that his scholastic failures as a young man serve to remind us that even great men are human and that focus, application and determination are key ingredients for success as much in academia as in other spheres of life.

See "Album of Designs of the Phoenix Bridge Company."

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.

Since the presentation of our last album in 1873, the rapid increase in the variety and amount of out business, in the design and manufacture of bridges and of all kinds of structures of iron and steel, renders it necessary for us to exhibit to the public, and to our friends and customers particularly, the present state of constructive engineering as existing at the works of the Phoenix Bridge Company.