Lucy's Bones, Sacred Stones, & Einstein's Brain by Harvey Rachlin

Author:Harvey Rachlin
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9781939430915
Publisher: Garrett County Press
Published: 2013-09-06T06:30:02.406208+00:00

When the fourth London Bridge opened on August 1, 1831, the king of England led a cavalcade of celebrants across the bridge as boats filled the Thames River below. Here, in a later photo, strollers and people in horse-drawn carriages cross the bridge.

As London’s growth continued to explode into the twentieth century, the new bridge also proved insufficient. In the late 1960s, city planners realized a new one had to be built. Not only was the structure sorely inadequate for the vastly increased amount of traffic, but the bridge was gradually sinking into the Thames at a rate of about an inch every seven years.

By a quirk of fate, the needs of two different parties came into play: one needing to get rid of the old to make way for the new, and the other to make way for the new by way of the old. To help finance the costs of building the new bridge without raising taxes, the city of London decided to sell the old bridge. For an American real estate developer who wanted to build a new town on a tract of land in the western United States, this was pure serendipity.

The entrepreneur was Robert P. McCulloch, Sr., an oil magnate who in 1963 had successfully bid on the largest parcel of federal property ever sold to a private individual. For seventy-five dollars an acre, he purchased 16,630 acres of barren Arizona desert. Then he heard that the London Bridge was for sale, and he had a brainstorm: What better way to attract people to a desert town and develop a thriving tourist industry than by importing none other than the celebrated London Bridge?

McCulloch’s engineer, C. V. Woods, thought McCulloch had rocks in his head. He couldn’t be serious about bringing the London Bridge to the American West! But McCulloch was in dead earnest, tendering an offer to the city of London of $2.46 million. McCulloch wasn’t the highest bidder, but the city fathers, perhaps in a fit of sentimentality or preservationist fervor, awarded the bridge to him. Whereas the other bidders simply wanted to dismantle the bridge for its granite, McCulloch wanted to reconstruct the bridge as it originally was, over water.

John Rennie’s London Bridge was carefully dismantled, the stones numbered to enable the bridge to be precisely reconstructed. The pieces were shipped by way of the Panama Canal to Long Beach, California. Trucks brought the stones to McCulloch’s tract of desert in Arizona, and in September 1968, after all five arches had arrived, reconstruction began. It was like building the world’s largest jigsaw puzzle. Bulldozers piled sand from the surrounding desert under the arches to support them while the concrete was drying. Under the bridge a channel was dredged, into which water was diverted from a nearby lake.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.