There Ain’t ‘Alf Some Clever Bastards – Part Ninety Six
Thomas Paine (1737 – 1809)
From the age of around ten, until I went to university, I lived in the beautiful rural county of Shropshire. One of its principal claims to fame is that it is home to the world’s first major bridge to be constructed entirely of cast iron, spanning the Severn Gorge at Coalbrookdale.
Abraham Darby’s iconic design was a testament to the burgeoning age of industrialisation and word of the bridge, opened in 1779, spread around the world. Its fame gave its rather prosaic name to the small town that grew up around it, Ironbridge.
Revolutionary as the material used to build the bridge was, Darby’s iron construction was traditional in design, consisting of five ribs, forming a semicircle, a technique dating back to at least the Roman times. The drawback with a semicircle was that the width dictated the height of the bridge, fine for a steep gorge like the one at Coalbrookdale but creating an irritating hump on wider spans.
The Romans, ingenious to the last, solved this problem by using a sequence of small arches. But this approach caused other problems, not least that there was more work required to secure the footings which, in turn, could alter the flow of the river, as the nineteen arches on London Bridge had done to the Thames.
Now that there was a revolutionary new material with which to construct a bridge, wouldn’t it be great if the design was freed from the restrictions imposed by the traditional semicircle methodology?
This is where Thomas Paine sought to make his mark.
One of America’s founding fathers, Thomas is best known these days as the author of The Rights of Man, published in 1791 and a forthright defence of the French Revolution against the attacks of British politicians such as Edward Burke. But he had other strings to his bow, not least being an ardent pontist, fascinated by the mix of architectural splendour and sheer practicality that makes up a bridge.
Aren’t we all?
Intrigued by iron bridges, Paine sought to raise enough money to build a bridge that would span the river Harlem in New York in 1785 and another to cross the Seine in Paris in 1786. His lack of experience in bridge building counted against him, as did his revolutionary design for the span.
Thwarted by practicalities, he turned his attention to perfecting his design.
Claiming to draw his inspiration from a spider’s web, Paine sought to liberate bridge design from the restrictions imposed by a semicircle. He concentrated his attention on what geometricians call the “chord of a circle”, which, simply put, is a straight line between two points on a circle. Using a chord meant that the height of the arch could be adjusted to the demands of the topology of the area to be spanned.
Goodbye, hump-backed bridges.
Convinced that he had cracked the problem, Paine applied for a patent on his idea, the application being granted on August 26, 1788 (patent No. 1667), specifically for a bridge, using his design, to span the river Don in Sheffield.
Despite having the patent to hand, the project was still born.
Desperate to raise some public interest in his design, Paine turned his attention to creating a 110 foot-long iron bridge, effectively a bridge to nowhere, on the bowling green of a public house, the London Stingo, in Lisson Green, on the edge of London’s Paddington.
Quite what the bowling fraternity thought of his erection is unrecorded.
Paine had interested Thomas Jefferson in the project. The Sage of Monticello was enthusiastic, convinced that Paine would build an arch of up to five hundred feet and that any bridge so constructed would soon cover its building costs in toll fees generated.
Work was started in May 1790 and completed in the September, eliciting a congratulatory note from Jefferson, “I congratulate you sincerely on the success of your bridge. I was sure of it before from theory: yet one likes to be assured from practice also.”
But fine words butter no parsnips.
No money was forthcoming to enable Paine to build a bridge to his new design across a river and, by October 1791, the structure was rusting. Disheartened, Paine suffered the ignominy of seeing his bridge dismantled and packed off to Yorkshire, some of the iron then being used to build a bridge spanning the River Wear in Sunderland in 1796, at 240 feet then the longest iron bridge in the world.
At least, the bowlers of the London Stingo got their green back.
By then, Paine had weightier matters on his mind. The Pitt administration, fearing a revolution at home, started to crackdown on agitators and dangerous sorts. With a warrant out for his arrest, Paine skipped across the Channel to France in September 1792.
It is a pity that there was no bridge to facilitate his escape.
If you enjoyed this, check out Fifty Clever Bastards by Martin Fone
