800,000 lb. Riehle Testing Machine
John Fritz based his design on the shop buildings that he had designed and erected at nearby Bethlehem Iron Company. The University's Board of Trustees would name this building the Fritz Engineering Laboratory. The original building would be designated in 1991 by the American Society of Civil Engineers as a Civil Engineering Landmark. At the time of building Fritz had installed the largest universal test machine of its time, an eight hundred thousand pound Riehle machine. On this test machine, Fritz Lab tested in 1939 for Bethlehem Steel (successor to Bethlehem Iron Co.), the cable anchorages for the first Tacoma-Narrows (the galloping bridge) Bridge. Fritz Lab would test many bridge elements for Bethlehem Steel bridges to name a few: the Walt Whitman Bridge, the George Washington Bridge, the Golden Gate Bridge and the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge.