The Frisco Bridge , previously known as the Memphis Bridge , is a cantilevered through truss bridge carrying a rail line across the Mississippi River between West Memphis, Arkansas , and Memphis, Tennessee .
41-633: At the time of the Memphis bridge construction, it was a significant technological challenge and is considered to be chief engineer George S. Morison 's crowning achievement. No other bridges had ever been attempted on the Lower Mississippi River . The bridge is built entirely of open-hearth steel , a newly developed material at the time of construction. The structure features a 790-foot (240 m) main span and two additional 600-foot (180 m) spans. Its 65-foot (20 m) height above
82-493: A separate discipline in physics, formally treated as distinct from mechanics, whether it be classical fields or quantum fields . But in actual practice, subjects belonging to mechanics and fields are closely interwoven. Thus, for instance, forces that act on particles are frequently derived from fields ( electromagnetic or gravitational ), and particles generate fields by acting as sources. In fact, in quantum mechanics, particles themselves are fields, as described theoretically by
123-561: A series of lectures — inspired by reading his Harvard classmate Fiske's book The Discovery of America — on the transformative effects of the new manufacturing power of that era. Though he collected these lectures for publication in 1898, they were not published until 1903, shortly after his death, under the title The New Epoch as Developed by the Manufacture of Power . Morison died in his rooms at 36 West 50th Street in New York , and
164-449: Is being renovated as part of a system-wide BNSF infrastructure improvement program. The west approach to the bridge, which was made of 52 spans totaling 340 feet (100 m) in length, was replaced by a new 27-span bridge. This project was completed in 2017. The bridge was designated as a National Historic Civil Engineering Landmark in 1987. George S. Morison (engineer) George Shattuck Morison (December 19, 1842 – July 1, 1903)
205-556: Is the area of physics concerned with the relationships between force , matter , and motion among physical objects . Forces applied to objects may result in displacements , which are changes of an object's position relative to its environment. Theoretical expositions of this branch of physics has its origins in Ancient Greece , for instance, in the writings of Aristotle and Archimedes (see History of classical mechanics and Timeline of classical mechanics ). During
246-483: Is the extensive use of mathematics in theories, as well as the decisive role played by experiment in generating and testing them. Quantum mechanics is of a bigger scope, as it encompasses classical mechanics as a sub-discipline which applies under certain restricted circumstances. According to the correspondence principle , there is no contradiction or conflict between the two subjects, each simply pertains to specific situations. The correspondence principle states that
287-680: The Civil War , and "invariably referred to Mexico as Pjacko." He "had, like Zeno , a conviction that time was a solid. If he made an appointment to confer with a person at 3:15 P.M., as he always put it, at 15:15 hours, that was when they met. Those who arrived earlier waited; those who came at any time after 15:15 never conferred at all." Morison read the Anabasis in Greek, the Aeneid in Latin, and
328-596: The Kansas City, Fort Scott and Memphis Railway , later acquired by the " Frisco ," began in 1888 and was completed May 12, 1892. In the end the project created a bridge that was the farthest south on the Mississippi River, featured the longest truss span in the United States and cost nearly 3 million dollars. A testament to its design and construction, the bridge is still used by BNSF Railway and
369-419: The early modern period , scientists such as Galileo Galilei , Johannes Kepler , Christiaan Huygens , and Isaac Newton laid the foundation for what is now known as classical mechanics . As a branch of classical physics , mechanics deals with bodies that are either at rest or are moving with velocities significantly less than the speed of light. It can also be defined as the physical science that deals with
410-796: The great cantilever railroad bridge at Memphis, Tennessee , and the Boone, Iowa viaduct . Morison served as president of the American Society of Civil Engineers (1895) as well as a member of the British Institute of Civil Engineers winning that institution's Telford Medal in 1892 for his work on the Memphis bridge. In 1899, he was appointed to the Isthmian Canal Commission and recommended it be built at Panama . Born in New Bedford, Massachusetts , he
451-482: The theory of impetus , which later developed into the modern theories of inertia , velocity , acceleration and momentum . This work and others was developed in 14th-century England by the Oxford Calculators such as Thomas Bradwardine , who studied and formulated various laws regarding falling bodies. The concept that the main properties of a body are uniformly accelerated motion (as of falling bodies)
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#1732782638476492-509: The wave function . The following are described as forming classical mechanics: The following are categorized as being part of quantum mechanics: Historically, classical mechanics had been around for nearly a quarter millennium before quantum mechanics developed. Classical mechanics originated with Isaac Newton 's laws of motion in Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica , developed over
533-545: The 20th century based in part on earlier 19th-century ideas. The development in the modern continuum mechanics, particularly in the areas of elasticity, plasticity, fluid dynamics, electrodynamics, and thermodynamics of deformable media, started in the second half of the 20th century. The often-used term body needs to stand for a wide assortment of objects, including particles , projectiles , spacecraft , stars , parts of machinery , parts of solids , parts of fluids ( gases and liquids ), etc. Other distinctions between
574-519: The Middle Ages, Aristotle's theories were criticized and modified by a number of figures, beginning with John Philoponus in the 6th century. A central problem was that of projectile motion , which was discussed by Hipparchus and Philoponus. Persian Islamic polymath Ibn Sīnā published his theory of motion in The Book of Healing (1020). He said that an impetus is imparted to a projectile by
615-683: The Missouri River, Ohio River , and the Mississippi River . The 1892, Memphis Bridge is considered to be his crowning achievement, the largest bridge he designed and the first to span the difficult Lower Mississippi River . Morison was a member of several important engineering committees, the most important of which was the Isthmus Canal Commission , where he was instrumental in changing its recommended location from Nicaragua to Panama . In The Path Between
656-556: The New York Bar. In 1867, with only general mathematics training and an aptitude for mechanics , he abandoned the practice of law and pursued a career as a civil engineer . He apprenticed under Octave Chanute , along with Joseph Tomlinson , during the construction of the first bridge to cross the Missouri River , the swing-span Hannibal Bridge . Morison designed many steel truss bridges , including several crossing
697-528: The Seas , author David McCullough notes that in the Panama canal affair, "Morison emerges a bit like the butler at the end of the mystery--as the ever-present, frequently unobtrusive, highly instrumental fixture around whom the entire plot turned." McCullough believed that had Morison lived, Theodore Roosevelt would have asked him to take a major part in the building of the canal. In the 1890s, Morison developed
738-594: The ancient Greeks where mathematics is used more extensively to analyze bodies statically or dynamically , an approach that may have been stimulated by prior work of the Pythagorean Archytas . Examples of this tradition include pseudo- Euclid ( On the Balance ), Archimedes ( On the Equilibrium of Planes , On Floating Bodies ), Hero ( Mechanica ), and Pappus ( Collection , Book VIII). In
779-455: The basis of Newtonian mechanics . There is some dispute over priority of various ideas: Newton's Principia is certainly the seminal work and has been tremendously influential, and many of the mathematics results therein could not have been stated earlier without the development of the calculus. However, many of the ideas, particularly as pertain to inertia and falling bodies, had been developed by prior scholars such as Christiaan Huygens and
820-426: The behavior of systems described by quantum theories reproduces classical physics in the limit of large quantum numbers , i.e. if quantum mechanics is applied to large systems (for e.g. a baseball), the result would almost be the same if classical mechanics had been applied. Quantum mechanics has superseded classical mechanics at the foundation level and is indispensable for the explanation and prediction of processes at
861-458: The dime novels of Archibald Clavering Gunter in English. "He thought that people who were good with animals, particularly horses, were popular with their fellows and loose in their morals. When he himself drove a horse, he brought it to a full stop by saying, 'Whoa, cow.'" One Sunday Morison walked out of church when the minister preached that silver should be coined at a ratio of 16 to 1, telling
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#1732782638476902-456: The distinction between quantum and classical mechanics, Albert Einstein 's general and special theories of relativity have expanded the scope of Newton and Galileo 's formulation of mechanics. The differences between relativistic and Newtonian mechanics become significant and even dominant as the velocity of a body approaches the speed of light . For instance, in Newtonian mechanics ,
943-558: The ideas of other great thinkers of his time and began to calculate motion in terms of distance travelled from some starting position and the time that it took. He showed that the speed of falling objects increases steadily during the time of their fall. This acceleration is the same for heavy objects as for light ones, provided air friction (air resistance) is discounted. The English mathematician and physicist Isaac Newton improved this analysis by defining force and mass and relating these to acceleration. For objects traveling at speeds close to
984-447: The less-known medieval predecessors. Precise credit is at times difficult or contentious because scientific language and standards of proof changed, so whether medieval statements are equivalent to modern statements or sufficient proof, or instead similar to modern statements and hypotheses is often debatable. Two main modern developments in mechanics are general relativity of Einstein , and quantum mechanics , both developed in
1025-451: The mayl is spent. He also claimed that a projectile in a vacuum would not stop unless it is acted upon, consistent with Newton's first law of motion. On the question of a body subject to a constant (uniform) force, the 12th-century Jewish-Arab scholar Hibat Allah Abu'l-Barakat al-Baghdaadi (born Nathanel, Iraqi, of Baghdad) stated that constant force imparts constant acceleration. According to Shlomo Pines , al-Baghdaadi's theory of motion
1066-698: The minister that "he should never try to deal with a subject he obviously didn't understand." Of his neighbor, composer Edward MacDowell , Morison said, he was "a man with whom I had absolutely nothing in common." Between 1893 and 1897, Morison, a bachelor, built a house of about 57 rooms so, he said, that he would "have a place to eat Thanksgiving dinner and to watch the sun set over Mount Monadnock ." A fellow engineer, one Fullerton L. Waldo, wrote that he hated eating lunch with Morison, "but I'd trust his judgment sooner than that of any other engineer I know." Mechanics Mechanics (from Ancient Greek μηχανική ( mēkhanikḗ ) 'of machines ')
1107-468: The molecular, atomic, and sub-atomic level. However, for macroscopic processes classical mechanics is able to solve problems which are unmanageably difficult (mainly due to computational limits) in quantum mechanics and hence remains useful and well used. Modern descriptions of such behavior begin with a careful definition of such quantities as displacement (distance moved), time, velocity, acceleration, mass, and force. Until about 400 years ago, however, motion
1148-408: The motion of a spacecraft, regarding its orbit and attitude ( rotation ), is described by the relativistic theory of classical mechanics, while the analogous movements of an atomic nucleus are described by quantum mechanics. The following are the three main designations consisting of various subjects that are studied in mechanics. Note that there is also the " theory of fields " which constitutes
1189-423: The motion of and forces on bodies not in the quantum realm. The ancient Greek philosophers were among the first to propose that abstract principles govern nature. The main theory of mechanics in antiquity was Aristotelian mechanics , though an alternative theory is exposed in the pseudo-Aristotelian Mechanical Problems , often attributed to one of his successors. There is another tradition that goes back to
1230-552: The north side of the Harahan Bridge is now designated as Big River Crossing , having been refitted to carry pedestrian and bicycle traffic across the Mississippi River in 2016.) While the Frisco Bridge has not featured cantilevered roadways, pedestrians, buggies, and some automobiles used its main deck before the Harahan Bridge opened (the bridge was closed to such traffic while a train was crossing). Construction for
1271-426: The seventeenth century. Quantum mechanics developed later, over the nineteenth century, precipitated by Planck's postulate and Albert Einstein's explanation of the photoelectric effect . Both fields are commonly held to constitute the most certain knowledge that exists about physical nature. Classical mechanics has especially often been viewed as a model for other so-called exact sciences . Essential in this respect
Frisco Bridge - Misplaced Pages Continue
1312-427: The speed of light, Newton's laws were superseded by Albert Einstein 's theory of relativity . [A sentence illustrating the computational complication of Einstein's theory of relativity.] For atomic and subatomic particles, Newton's laws were superseded by quantum theory . For everyday phenomena, however, Newton's three laws of motion remain the cornerstone of dynamics, which is the study of what causes motion. Akin to
1353-435: The thrower, and viewed it as persistent, requiring external forces such as air resistance to dissipate it. Ibn Sina made distinction between 'force' and 'inclination' (called "mayl"), and argued that an object gained mayl when the object is in opposition to its natural motion. So he concluded that continuation of motion is attributed to the inclination that is transferred to the object, and that object will be in motion until
1394-541: The various sub-disciplines of mechanics concern the nature of the bodies being described. Particles are bodies with little (known) internal structure, treated as mathematical points in classical mechanics. Rigid bodies have size and shape, but retain a simplicity close to that of the particle, adding just a few so-called degrees of freedom , such as orientation in space. Otherwise, bodies may be semi-rigid, i.e. elastic , or non-rigid, i.e. fluid . These subjects have both classical and quantum divisions of study. For instance,
1435-522: The water was the highest clearance of any U.S. bridge of that era. The construction of the piers went nearly 100 feet (30 m) below the water's surface. Though some sources claim two cantilevered roadways were added to the bridge in the 1930s, one on each side, they probably confuse this bridge with the neighboring Harahan Bridge , which had two cantilevered roadways from 1917 until the Memphis & Arkansas Bridge opened in 1949. (The former roadway on
1476-415: Was "the oldest negation of Aristotle 's fundamental dynamic law [namely, that a constant force produces a uniform motion], [and is thus an] anticipation in a vague fashion of the fundamental law of classical mechanics [namely, that a force applied continuously produces acceleration]." Influenced by earlier writers such as Ibn Sina and al-Baghdaadi, the 14th-century French priest Jean Buridan developed
1517-480: Was an American engineer. A classics major at Harvard who trained to be a lawyer, he instead instead became a civil engineer and leading bridge designer in North America during the late 19th century. During his lifetime, bridge design evolved from using 'empirical “rules of thumb” to the use of mathematical analysis techniques'. Some of Morison's projects included several large Missouri River bridges as well as
1558-478: Was buried in Peterborough , New Hampshire , where he had a summer home (and designed the town library). He was the great-uncle of historian of technology Elting E. Morison (1909–1995). According to David McCullough, Morison was "arrogant, inflexible, most unpopular, a man who was easy to admire from a distance." According to Elting Morison, his great uncle was rude to waiters, hired a substitute during
1599-589: Was explained from a very different point of view. For example, following the ideas of Greek philosopher and scientist Aristotle, scientists reasoned that a cannonball falls down because its natural position is in the Earth; the Sun, the Moon, and the stars travel in circles around the Earth because it is the nature of heavenly objects to travel in perfect circles. Often cited as father to modern science, Galileo brought together
1640-411: Was the son of John Hopkins Morison, a Unitarian minister. At age 14, he entered Phillips Exeter Academy and graduated by age 16. He went on to Harvard College where he was a classmate of philosopher John Fiske . Morison received a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1863 when he was just 20. After a brief break he attended Harvard Law School where he earned a Bachelor of Laws degree and was admitted to
1681-439: Was worked out by the 14th-century Oxford Calculators . Two central figures in the early modern age are Galileo Galilei and Isaac Newton . Galileo's final statement of his mechanics, particularly of falling bodies, is his Two New Sciences (1638). Newton's 1687 Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica provided a detailed mathematical account of mechanics, using the newly developed mathematics of calculus and providing