The Pat Tillman Memorial Bridge

Last month my wife and I took the kids on a crazy road trip adventure to retrace the history of water conservation in the Great American Southwest. The trip was inspired by our reading Colossus, which retells the story of taming the Colorado River and building the Hoover Dam.

First stop was the Salton Sea which is only 100 years old and was created by accident when an irrigation canal went awry in 1906. I traced down the exact spot where the accident happened which was right outside of Yuma, Arizona. There wasn't much to see. We drove on a levee alongside the old Colorado River bed, following an old 1906 map and Google Earth. Two Border Patrol agents' trucks were parked nose-to-nose on the levee as we peered into Mexico. We drove the Chevy to the levee but the levee was bone dry. The Border Patrol guys gave us such mean looks that I was afraid to even take a photo.

We stayed overnight in Yuma which is a very old and dusty town bisected by what's left of the Colorado River. I took some high-res ("artsy") photos of an old hotel there which I'll post separately. Heading further upriver, we reached the Hoover Dam:

Hoover Dam taken from Tillman Bridge

The last time I was at Hoover Dam was pre-9/11. In the old days, the main route between Phoenix and Vegas still passed over the dam. We did that journey then with one kid and one in the oven while driving our glorious 1963 Thunderbird (that car deserves more that passing mention so I won't mention it further). There was something new this time that wasn't there in 1999--the new Pat Tillman Memorial Bridge:*

Tillman Bridge taken from Hoover Dam

The bridge is stunningly gorgeous and just opened a year or so ago. It's part of the main road now between Vegas and Phoenix, but you can park and walk it too for no charge. I felt a little acrophobic as I took that photo of the dam from the bridge.

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*I dedicate this blog post to Corporal Patrick Daniel "Pat" Tillman (November 6, 1976 – April 22, 2004).

Added:  A 1930's artist captured the same view of Hoover Dam from an imaginary bridge:

Men of Iron and Steel

The Iron Bridge at Ironbridge, Shropshire, England (Original)

A Briton named Abraham Darby ignited the industrial revolution around 1710 when he substituted coke (from coal) in his recipe for ironmaking. Traditionally, iron ore had been smelted using charcoal derived from trees (charcoal is "cleaner" carbon). Learning to smelt iron with coke in blast furnaces ultimately freed the iron industry from the natural limits of forests, much like the invention of the automobile would later free arable land from the yoke of producing fodder for horses. Three generations of Darbys stoked the wrought iron age.

Perhaps the most iconic monuments wrought from iron are Gustave Eiffel's eponymous tower in Paris (1889) and the first Ferris Wheel erected in Chicago in 1893 by George Ferris, Jr.  Eiffel also designed and produced the wrought iron framework beneath the copper sheathing of our Statue of Liberty. But even these structures were out of date when they were completed.

By the mid-1800's the demand for wrought iron was so great that inventor Henry Bessemer developed and patented the first modern process for making steel (steel is essentially purified pig iron alloyed with other metals). Vastly superior to wrought iron, Bessemer's steel revolution was so successful that it returned wrought iron making to a cottage industry. European steel maker Alfred Krupp adopted the process, and built his company on cannons and railroad wheels. Andrew Carnegie brought the same process to America but also began buying ore-rich land in Minnesota, developing a vertically integrated business model. By the time Carnegie sold his immense fortune to J.P. Morgan in 1901, the price of steel rails had fallen from $160 per ton to $17 per ton. Carnegie devoted the rest of his life to philanthropy, perhaps returning to the promise of an earlier self.*

Subsequent, more efficient processes eventually supplanted the Bessemer process, including the Open Hearth Process, the Basic Oxygen Process and the Electric Arc Process, first patented by Carl Wilhelm Siemens in 1878.

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*In December 1868, Carnegie wrote in a "memo to self:" 

Man must have an idol and the amassing of wealth is one of the worst species of idolatry! No idol is more debasing than the worship of money! Whatever I engage in I must push inordinately; therefore should I be careful to choose that life which will be the most elevating in its character. To continue much longer overwhelmed by business cares and with most of my thoughts wholly upon the way to make more money in the shortest time, must degrade me beyond hope of permanent recovery. I will resign business at thirty-five, but during these ensuing two years I wish to spend the afternoons in receiving instruction and in reading systematically!  Link

Cold Iron is master of them all! 

Il Ponte Rotto (Cleveland)

A photo I took of a broken bridge across (or near) the Cuyahoga river in 1984:

A photo of the original Ponte Rotto in Rome along with its history can be found here.

Update:  I found some recent photographs of the Jefferson Avenue Bridge here and here

And: This is my favorite photo of the Ponte Rotto:

Notice how close the modern trastevere travesity comes to the old Ponte Rotto.

Last Letters From Stalingrad: #38

...I wanted to write you a long letter, but my thoughts constantly disintegrate like houses which collapse under shellfire.  I shall have ten hours, then this letter has to be turned in.  Ten hours is a long time for people who are waiting, but short for those in love.  I am not nervous at all.  Actually, it is here in the East that I have for the first time become really healthy; I don't have colds and sniffles any more; that is the only good the war has done me.  It gave me something else, the realization that I love you.  It is strange that people value things only when they are about to lose them.  The vast distance is spanned by the bridge from heart to heart. By that bridge I wrote about our daily round and the world in which we live here.  I meant to tell you the truth when I returned, and then we would never have talked about the war again. Now you will learn the truth beforehand, the last truth.  Now I can write no more.

As long as there are shores, there will always be bridges.  We should have the courage to walk on them.  One bridge leads to you, the other to eternity; at the very end they are the same for me.

Tomorrow I shall set foot on the last bridge.  That is the literary way of saying 'death,' but as you know, I always liked to express things figuratively, because I took pleasure in words and sounds. Give me your hand, so that crossing it won't be so hard.