An Elementary and Practical Treatise on Bridge Building: An enlarged and improved edition of the author's original work
(An Elementary and Practical Treatise on Bridge Building -...)
An Elementary and Practical Treatise on Bridge Building - An enlarged and improved edition of the author's original work is an unchanged, high-quality reprint of the original edition of 1873. Hansebooks is editor of the literature on different topic areas such as research and science, travel and expeditions, cooking and nutrition, medicine, and other genres. As a publisher we focus on the preservation of historical literature. Many works of historical writers and scientists are available today as antiques only. Hansebooks newly publishes these books and contributes to the preservation of literature which has become rare and historical knowledge for the future.
Squire Whipple was an American civil engineer, author, and inventor.
Background
Squire Whipple was the son of James and Electa (Johnson) Whipple. His father, a farmer and later the owner of a small cotton mill at Hardwick, Massachussets, where Squire was born, removed with his family to Otsego County, N. Y. , in 1817.
Education
The boy assisted in farming operations, attended the academy at Fairfield, Herkimer County, taught school for a time, and in 1829 entered the senior class at Union College, Schenectady, where he received the degree of A. B. in 1830. He probably owed his interest in engineering to the construction of the Erie Canal in the region near his home during his boyhood, although he was too young to be a member of the group of engineers who were trained in that great school, and his reputation was achieved not in canal construction but in bridge building.
Career
After graduating from college he was engaged in a minor capacity in surveys for the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad and for the Erie Canal. In 1836-37 he was resident engineer of a division of the New York & Erie Railroad; and he was subsequently employed on other surveys for projected railways and canals. In the intervals between his engineering appointments he made surveying instruments, including transits and theodolites, and worked on various inventions. His first original device of note was completed in 1840 - a lock for weighing canal boats. On April 24, 1841, he received his first bridge patent, for a truss of arched upper chord built of cast and wrought iron. Some five years later he devised a truss of trapezoidal form which was frequently used in bridges built during the succeeding generation. This design places him with Ithiel Town, Stephen H. Long, William Howe, and Thomas W. Pratt among the American pioneers in the development of the pure truss bridge. In 1852-53, on the line of the Rensselaer & Saratoga Railroad near West Troy, N. Y. , Whipple employed his truss in the first iron railroad bridge of considerable span. This structure contained elements which became typical of American truss - bridge design - the inclined end post and the pin-connection. Whipple described the bridge in detail in a letter published in Engineering News, April 7, 1883. In 1872 he built a drawbridge, with a lift span, over the Erie Canal at Utica, and subsequently designed several other short lift spans. Some account of his work, by himself, was published in the Railroad Gazette, April 19, 1889. Whipple's chief contribution to bridge engineering, however, was his publication, in 1847, of A Work on Bridge Building, the first notable attempt to reduce the problem to a scientific basis. Previously engineers had built bridges so as to look strong enough to experienced eyes; modern methods of computing stresses and designing the parts of such structures to meet them were unknown; Whipple's book was the first extensive and thorough treatment of the subject. Later, in 1869, he issued a continuation of this treatise, making the woodcuts himself and printing the issue on a hand press in his home. Still later, in 1872, it was published by David Van Nostrand, under the title, An Elementary and Practical Treatise on Bridge Building; a fourth edition came out in 1883. Whipple died in his home in Albany.