Isambard Kingdom Brunel, seated, and at his side, in hand, his top hat, looking forever over the crowd of people in the London Paddington Station he designed. A famous nineteenth century British engineer whose life-size bronze statue by John Doubleday greeted us at our first stop on a three-week trip through the UK in 2019 exploring historic bridges and canals. Not a day passed during our trip that we did not come in physical contact with a cast iron, wrought iron, or historic steel structure, many of them riveted, most of them continuing to perform as designed.

One memorable Brunel bridge we visited early in our trip was the Clifton Suspension Bridge located in Bristol. We scheduled a tour of the bridge with Laura Hilton, an industrial archaeologist who serves as Visitor Services Manager for the Clifton Suspension Bridge Trust. It was a memorable experience, especially touring the huge, vaulted stone abutments constructed to support the bridge tower on the Leigh Woods side of the river. It was assumed that this abutment was solid stone until the discovery, in 2002 during a renovation project, of twelve vaulted chambers, a discovery made one hundred and forty years after the bridge opened.

Laura Hilton, along with Andrew Martin for the Clifton Suspension Bridge Trust, will present the history of the Clifton bridge's construction and the engineers involved. Of special interest to Martin are the Victorian engineering connections, the working relations between engineers and notable figures of the 1900s that show the origins of materials and the sharing of ideas during the Industrial Revolution. If you would like to attend the Clifton Suspension Bridge WebEx presentation, please email me at meslerv@gmail.com

Today the Boyer rivet hammer is finding a new life in the hands of craftsmen and women in the preservation community. Once shelved to collect dust and rust, these historic tools are being oiled, machined, and made ready to do the work they were built for: to drive rivets. During the Q&A after David Simmons' presentation, there was a lively discussion regarding the holder-on, an essential tool in the rivet process. Pneumatic and Hand Crafted Holder-On  In the photos below, an industrial pneumatic holder-on, rebuilt by Michigan Pneumatic Tool, is used during a rivet demonstration for students at Lansing Community College.

Climbing down from his seat, the teamster unfastens the harnesses from his horses to let them graze before going back to pick up another load of wrought iron bridge parts from the local train depot. A gin-pole is positioned over the wagon, and local craftsmen with heavy hemp rope straps begin to unload the bridge members. An aroma of oily hemp permeates the air and blends with the smells of the trees and river. The rope tightens in the double sheave wooden block, and the wrought iron bridge members are lifted from the wagon. That is how I imagine the scene. As I worked on the restoration of the Bauer Road Bridge, I visualized how the bridge parts would have been transported to the site and how the bridge would have been erected over the river, not by the industrial machinery that I've worked with but with the labor-intensive methods that would have been familiar to my ancestors.

Erected over the Looking Glass River in the 1880s, the Bauer Road Bridge served the local Michigan farm community for years until it was determined unfit for late twentieth century vehicle traffic. Mounds of dirt were piled at each end to prevent any further use of the bridge. Its identification plaque was removed by a local resident to put in their recreation room, and the bridge sat nameless for years. There are no ornamental iron details that decorate its main members, but within the plain simple lines, as with all historic metal truss bridges, lies a graceful efficiency designed to carry rural traffic. Within its eye bars, rivets, chord pins, and wrought iron is the unwritten record of a craftsman. These members were all saved in the Bauer Road Bridge restoration, in contrast to many historic bridge projects where original bridge members are replaced with "new steel," destroying the original and its irreplaceable manufacturing and craftsman record. Restored and erected in 2005, the Bauer Road Bridge now spans the Dickinson creek in Michigan's Calhoun County Historic Bridge Park.