Brooklyn Bridge
The Brooklyn Bridge Connection
Lehigh has a long tradition with the Brooklyn Bridge from as early as the building of the tower foundations circa 1877 (see 1882 undergraduate thesis on display), the bridge's centennial in 1986 (the connecting pin) to a dynamic response study in 2002 by an ATLSS research team.
Model Book by Gretchen Bank.
Bridges: Build Your Own Models of the World's Most Famous Structures. Thunder Bay Press, San Diego: 2008.
Contains model illustration and paper engineering samples of Brooklyn Bridge, Tower Bridge, Sydney Harbour Bridge, Golden Gate Bridge. These two images that are used in the chapter of the Brooklyn Bridge history supplied from an 1873 book in Lehigh University Special Collections.
Brooklyn Bridge Paper Model
The paper model of Brooklyn Bridge is built for this exhibition by Eleanor Nothelfer.
Bridge Connecting Pin
The Brooklyn Bridge, ca. 1883.
This connecting pin comes from a stiffening truss of the Brooklyn Bridge. The stiffening trusses were connected where structural members crossed by pins and not rivets. This was standard American practice at the time. It was removed during the restoration for the bridge's Centennial in 1983. At that time a forensic engineer needed to determine whether parts of the bridge had deteriorated or not. The engineer removed individual wires from the cables and parts of other load bearing members that were later replaced by modern steel. These parts were tested to determine their residual strength and could no longer be put back into the bridge. One of Professor Tom Peters's graduate students at the time worked for the engineer and was given one of the pins, which he then gave to Professor Peters in 1985.
Thesis by Eugene Ricksecker
Brooklyn Anchorage of the East River Bridge. Undergraduate Thesis. Dept. of Civil Engineering, Lehigh University. 1882.