Cable-stayed Bridge - History of Making

History of Making

Cable-stayed bridges can be dated back to 1595, where designs were found in a book by the Venetian inventor Fausto Veranzio, called Machinae Novae. Many early suspension bridges were cable-stayed construction, including the 1817 footbridge Dryburgh Bridge, James Dredge's patented Victoria Bridge, Bath (1836), and the later Albert Bridge (1872) and Brooklyn Bridge (1883). Their designers found that the combination of technologies created a stiffer bridge, and John A. Roebling took particular advantage of this to limit deformations due to railway loads in the Niagara Falls Suspension Bridge.

The earliest known surviving example of a true cable-stayed bridge in the United States is E.E. Runyon's largely intact steel or iron bridge with wooden stringers and decking in Bluff Dale, Texas (1890), or his weeks-earlier but ruined Barton Creek Bridge between Huckabay, Texas and Gordon, Texas (1889 or 1890). In the twentieth century, early examples of cable-stayed bridges included A. Gisclard's unusual Cassagnes bridge (1899), in which the horizontal part of the cable forces is balanced by a separate horizontal tie cable, preventing significant compression in the deck, and G. Leinekugel le Coq's bridge at Lézardrieux in Brittany (1924). Eduardo Torroja designed a cable-stayed aqueduct at Tempul in 1926. Albert Caquot's 1952 concrete-decked cable-stayed bridge over the Donzère-Mondragon canal at Pierrelatte is one of the first of the modern type, but had little influence on later development. The steel-decked Strömsund Bridge designed by Franz Dischinger (1955) is therefore more often cited as the first modern cable-stayed bridge.

Other key pioneers included Fabrizio de Miranda, Riccardo Morandi and Fritz Leonhardt. Early bridges from this period used very few stay cables, as in the Theodor Heuss Bridge (1958). However, this involves substantial erection costs, and more modern structures tend to use many more cables to ensure greater economy.