Tacoma Narrows: Are there more than just engineering lessons to be learnt?

Tacoma Narrows popped into my head this week. Before you ask whether this is the engineer's equivalent of the Roman Empire meme, I'll start by saying it's not something I've given much thought to since my university days.

For the uninitiated, Tacoma Narrows in the US state of Washington was the site of a 1940 bridge collapse. Nicknamed 'Galloping Gertie' by construction workers, the bridge was beset by excessive movement issues well prior to its collapse on November 7, only four months after opening.

The collapse caused quite the stir, being at the time the third longest suspension bridge in the world. The dramatic nature of the collapse and the low number of casualties (the single fatality was a cocker spaniel named Tubby) meant the collapse even made it to the big screen in a 1940 documentary directed by Barney Elliot.

The collapse and the lessons learned have become a case study in engineering textbooks the world over, and it would crop up regularly throughout my own undergraduate years at the University of Bath. The part I found most interesting wasn't the technical cause of failure, it was the engineering community's response to the collapse.

In the United States the dominant narrative advocated for a reversion to type, designing stiffer and heavier suspension bridges as favoured in the late 19th century by engineers like Leon Moisseiff (or closer to home the Forth Bridge in Scotland). The collapse was characterised as symptomatic of the wider failures of an entire generation of engineers who had forgotten the lessons learned by their forebears.

In the UK, another school of thought was emerging that placed much greater emphasis on the science of aerodynamics - the most famous example being the original Severn Bridge that opened to the public in 1966. The streamlined box section design for the bridge deck, proposed by engineer Sir Gilbert Roberts and subject to extensive laboratory testing, delivered a reduction in steel of over 20% vs the original design. The bridge is still in use today, albeit at lower traffic levels since the opening of the Second Severn Crossing.

So why am I telling you all this? Well it struck me that the stiffness vs aerodynamics debate that gripped those-in-the-know in the 1940s can teach us a lot today. The lesson that my engineering lecturers were presumably trying to illustrate went something along the lines of the 'with great power comes great responsibility' line attributed to Uncle Ben in the Marvel Spiderman comics. Engineers had the knowledge to prevent the collapse, but they also had the power to decide how to respond, and they did so in ways that didn't always conform to a single world-view.

I still consider myself a civil engineer in many regards, albeit in an indirect sense. I still solve problems in the built environment, only now I work with data nuts and bolts and I'm more concerned with logistics than structural integrity. The lesson I'm left with today after my Tacoma Narrows-induced trip down memory lane is that there's never one way to solve a problem and that diversity in thought (and approach) can always be a good thing.

I'm writing this article 7 days after DeepSeek R1 exploded across our newsfeeds, 13 days after Donald Trump's presidential inauguration and 4 days after Rachel Reeves' speech on kickstarting the UK economy via Heathrow Expansion and establishing a Silicon Valley in the UK (whatever that means). It's not my goal to try and draw a neat line between these three historic events and a bridge collapse from nearly 85 years ago, but I will close with one more thing.

At a time when technology is developing so fast it's practically impossible to keep up, and when there are a lot of strongly held predictions for the future or opinions about the right way to do things, I'm left feeling inspired by the American and British engineers who formed their own convictions based on the evidence in front of them and the socio-economic contexts in which they were working. The UK construction technology landscape in which I'm building a business will never be Silicon Valley - and that's okay, because we have our own unique skills and advantages. We need to celebrate our differences, and above all we need to have the conviction to give it a go - even if others won't always agree.

But that's enough for today. Any more engineering-related Googling and I'll never escape from the algorithm serving me repeat runs of National Geographic Megastructures... I hope you took something away from my Sunday musings, and if you feel inclined to share then drop me a comment.