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Comment by gumby | Hacker News Reader

I enjoyed the rant nature of the essay but your comment hits the spot.

We admire the Victorian era bridge still in use but forget all the bridges that long ago collapsed, and ignore the overconstruction required of the survivors because mechanical theory was still developing at the time.

Also we used to have more single-application devices; while a juicer is often still a single-application device today, at the other extreme our phone has absorbed a deskfull of other single-application devices (and more). Usually with some improved reliability, some less, and also some loss of affordance.

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>We admire the Victorian era bridge still in use but forget all the bridges that long ago collapsed,

Engineers tend to put care into building bridges that don't collapse, and have been doing so for millenia so collapses can happen, but are rare. "All the bridges that long ago collapsed" is in my opinion not all that many bridges, really [1], and lots of people remember the Tacoma Narrows Bridge collapse. I still remember the bridge collapse from the Northridge quake too.

Bridges are a special case of civic architecture where long durability and long reliability are taken into account that are kind of a special class, so they're probably not a great thing to generalize from.

[1] You can judge for yourself from here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_bridge_failures

Well I was talking about the Victorian era (emergence of iron bridge building) and indeed quite a few make that list. "Engineering" in the sense it has today didn't exist back then. Brunel was truly revolutionary in this regard, though even how he thought of it would be far from what we today call engineering.

We see this in the evolution of many technologies, from boiler explosions (especially in trains) that are pretty much unknown today to jet air travel (likewise at a rather extraordinary state of safety) and many others besides (consider the implementation and impact of vaccination).

The bridges we still have are maintained. Bridges fail all the time, but we only repair the ones we want to keep. Your link to wikipedia as proof that bridges do not fail is a case of the observer fallacy. The wikipedia article tells us of some bridges that failed, not all bridges that failed.

Gumby's point that the Victorian era bridges we still have were over-engineered is I think a good point. However we might like to say that they were well-engineered, but I bet that even they have been in a state of on-and-off if not constant repair.

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