For 2,000 years the most durable spanning structures have been built of masonry, and the surviving bridges of the Roman Empire have challenged master masons, architects and engineers to emulate and surpass them. Down the centuries, bridge-builders have been commissioned by monarchs, bishops, councils of state, cities, private individuals and, more recently, waterway and railway companies. The studies collected in this volume focus chiefly on the bridges, viaducts and aqueducts themselves and the actions of the designers and builders, but also encompass the political, economic and social contexts and outcomes of their creation. Famous bridges in Britain, Italy, France, Iran and the USA are all featured. Narratives of conception, design and construction predominate, but there are also papers on construction techniques, on the analysis of documentary sources, and on the continuing search by modern engineers for satisfactory scientific description of the strength and stability of arch bridges.
Biography
Ted Ruddock
'The aim of Ashgate's twelve volume series is to bring together collections of important papers on particular topics from scholarly journals, conference proceedings and other hard-to-access sources. This is a wholly laudable objective. Some of the papers in the volume under review [The Civil Engineering of Canals and Railways before 1850] cannot be found even in abundantly-resourced academic libraries. The series opens up, directly or indirectly, debates over the nature of historical evidence which arise from the profoundly different approaches to the past of historians of technology, whose works are principally represented in these volumes, industrial archaeologists and social and economic historians.' Industrial Archaeology Review, Vol. XXI, No. 1
