Toothpick Bridges essays

Toothpick Bridges essays Building a toothpick bridge is much more complicated than many people realize. In order to build a successful bridge, one must research bridges in order to find which bridge is the best in a particular situation. There are several types of bridges and all of them have different places in which they will be used. Some bridges are used to span across a small freeway, others are used to span across a deep gorge, and other bridges are used to cover over a huge water way. A person must design the perfect bridge in order to hold the desired weight for the bridge. Even the top skilled architects make mistakes while designing a bridge. Although bridges often go ignored, their purpose is essential to modern America. In the 1850s, covered wagons heading west had to move across streams or rivers. Without the right bridges in place, the pioneers would sometimes travel many miles out of the way to find a safe place to cross a river. Other times they waited for days or weeks for flooded rivers to go down until it was safe to cross. Crossing rivers was a dangerous part of early travel. Narrow wheels sank into the muddy river bottoms and unpredictable currents took peoples lives and property. Consider how long it would take to cross a river today if bridges were not included in the roads. Consider how the movement of people, goods, and services would be affected without highway systems, which include bridges. The entire American economy as we know it would be hurt greatly. There are six basic modern bridge forms: the beam, the truss, the arch, the cantilever, the cable-stay, and the suspension. A beam bridge is made of long timber, metal, or concrete beams anchored at each end. If the beams are arranged in triangles, so that each shares only a portion of the weight on any part of the structure, the result is a truss bridge. An arch bridge has a curved shape causing the vertical force of the weight it carries to produce a horizontal...