Comments by "Paul Frederick" (@1pcfred) on "Ashtabula Bridge Accident" video.

You cannot look at this event through the lens of today. These people did not have the knowledge or even the materials to do any better. They were blazing the trail. In the process plenty got burned too. This accident happened two decades before the ASTM was even founded. It was hardly the only of its kind either. For a period train bridge collapses was a relatively common thing. That caused change itself.
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@tjmul3381 I imagine because my views are different than theirs are. It was all part of fortifying the 2020 election. Dissenting opinions needed to be suppressed. So they shadow banned people like me. I hope they're happy with what they got. I am not one to forgive and forget, that's for sure.
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It wasn't just greed and arrogance. It was largely ignorance. They simply didn't know. They were constructing some of the first metal bridges mankind had ever built. So there was a learning curve involved. Better materials were not available either. It wasn't like you could go to a steel mill and get ASTM rated beams. That didn't happen until 1898. It was founded because things like this bridge collapse were commonplace.
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@timthehippy9478 no money from the infrastructure bill is going to go into actual infrastructure. Not unless politicians embroider the word infrastructure onto their pockets.
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@Spittin_Chiglets I've studied the advent of tech a bit and it is an interesting subject. One that doesn't make entire sense to me either. One thing it hasn't been is a linear progression. More of an exponential curve. the 1870s was midway up the steep part of the curve too. By the turn of the 20th century they'd thought they'd invented everything at that point. That was a widely held belief. Today that notion is pretty funny. But I can kind of see why they thought that. Their world was a lot more visceral than ours is now. Progress was easier to see. Taller buildings and bigger bridges. Someone once said we can't have world's fairs today because you could hold one on a dollar bill. And that just doesn't have the same impact as the old worlds fairs did.
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@tjmul3381 when you pull crap like that you're not going to explain yourself. They don't need to explain themselves. I know why they did it. They're scumbags.
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@sthenzel the bridge did stand for a number of years before it collapsed. It didn't fall down the first train that went over it. So it did in fact work. I'm sure that fateful night they fully expected it to work then too.
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You'll have to go now and look for relics. They couldn't have picked everything up. It was a real mess! I'd try in the summer when the water is low.
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@blogengeezer4507 I have seen things now I never thought I would. But if there's a reason to live that's it. To see things. Because you never know.
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You have to learn sometime. The Bessemer process was developed in 1856 But there was a lot of resistance when it came to adopting the new material. The only other way to make steel was done by a technique called puddling. Where you couldn't make more than 50 pounds at a time. So you certainly weren't using steel for structural members. Wrought and cast iron was virtually all that was available. There's always a lag between invention and widespread use. Although accidents like this one spurred acceptance.
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@sthenzel the only way they could have known was if they'd had a crystal ball. This was the second metal truss bridge ever built. And it was by far the most ambitious one. It was quite literally a bridge too long. To their credit it did work fine for a number of years before it did collapse. We know through the process of learning and experience. We know today because of what they did then. We learned from their mistakes. They still had to make those mistakes in the first place though.
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I have to agree with the fire chief. It was hopeless. Sometimes you just have to cut your losses. Even drunk he had a good head on his shoulders.
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It remains impossible to hold people with money accountable today too. It's one of the primary incentives to become wealthy.
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Scientific metallurgy is a shockingly new innovation. The train disasters started it and it wasn't really to the state it is in today until the Space Age. Then a metal failure was national shame on the international stage. So the stakes were never higher. Before the late 1800s metallurgy was akin to alchemy though. Metallurgy really wasn't a thing.
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You could patent a truss today if you can invent one that is substantially different than existing designs. The way the patent office is if you just show up and are prepared to pay they'll let you have a patent on anything. A company was granted a patent on cordless power tools with lithium ion batteries. They had nothing to do with the invention of the batteries or the tools. Just use the batteries with the tools. The patent office was OK. They'd probably let you patent pouring cream in coffee.
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In the late 1800s train disasters were a very common occurrence. So common that the government did step in and regulate the industry. The ASTM was founded in 1898 to stem the tide too.
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At the time there were no experts when it came to metal bridge construction. They had no idea what they were doing. Which is why it didn't work. The next generation made an effort to figure more things out though. Even they we'd classify as fairly incompetent today.
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@tjmul3381 and here we are on a site that has censored me discussing it. Interesting. Yeah corporations are still screwing us over.
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It should be a smashing success. Who doesn't like a good train wreck?
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@sthenzel a few sporadic citations here and there does not suggest a widespread compendium of information. You have the internet, they didn't.
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@sthenzel they say that familiarity breeds contempt.
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@sthenzel yeah well they could have been wrong. For a number of years they were too. No one likes to hear I told you so!
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There was a period where train disasters were a regular occurance. To the point where the industry became regulated. This accident is right in that era too.
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@flagmichael in the 1870s you had a choice. You could either die on the trail or die on the rails. At least on the train you'd be comfortable up to the moment of your demise.
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@sirridesalot6652 did you expect the bridge would rise when the supports were removed? In the course of my life I have on occasion had to temporarily support some structures whilst building them. They invariably settle some once the supports are removed. That's normal!
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@sirridesalot6652 every bridge is doomed to fail. Anybody can be a Monday morning quarterback. We know now the bridge collapsed. But at the time it seemed fine.
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@sirridesalot6652 there's always one naysayer. If we all listened to that guy we'd never do anything.
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@sirridesalot6652 still can't go with that opinion.
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Years ago we had the most heavily monitored bridge in the country by me. There were scour holes by the pilings 200 feet deep. She was in pretty bad shape. I was never too keen going across her either. Then replacing it they screwed it up somehow and that was a big scandal. But they finally did get it right.
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Yes you did. Trains were the planes of their day. Even worse really. It was like the wild west all over with trains.
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In 1875 there were no competent engineers for metal construction. The whole concept of metal construction was still fairly new. The very first metal bridge ever constructed was erected 94 years earlier. No one even tried to codify the engineering until two decades after the disaster took place. That's when they began. So this bridge was built in a time when they simply didn't know what they were doing.
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@richardross7219 the ASTM wasn't even founded for 2 decades after that tragedy occurred. So it is accurate to state that design and analysis techniques weren't established. No one had even thought of them yet. Or if they had that's as far as it went. They certainly hadn't done anything yet. Events like this tragedy did spur folks into action eventually though. It was just a crazy time. Heck steel had just been produced for the first time on an industrial scale 20 years prior to that bridge being built. And people still weren't too keen on it. That's how abysmally ignorant they really were. In the construction business we have a saying, If you don't cheat then you don't eat.
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@richardross7219 let's consider the timeline. In 1856 Bessemer patented his steel making process. In 1875 The Carnegie Steel Company was founded. So there's no way they could have even purchased structural steel when the bridge was constructed in 1865. It simply was not available in the continental US. There's always an appreciable gap between invention and adoption. And they were square in that gap.
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I've worked with ironworkers and I've never seen one half sober. On one job they wanted to do drug testing. The ironworkers were having none of that! So then the customer was like OK forget about drug testing. They still have pride in their work though. They will get it done and done right.
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@wtmayhew yeah I've seen a few other comments that people have been searching the site. They say they've found some things. It is more picked over than I realized.
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Pfft. Guy was dead right.
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@mr.bianchirider8126 but some stupid with a flare gun burned the place to the ground.
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