London Bridge is Falling Down

Of course, you remember the childhood song, “London Bridge is falling down, my fair lady.” As the story goes, the bridge construction took place in the early 19^th century. Being meant to handle 19^th century foot traffic, horses, wagons, and the like, the overpass became obsolete.

As modern traffic took its toll on the viaduct, the need for a transition became obvious. Entrepreneurs purchased, dismantled, and shipped the London Bridge to America to become a new thoroughfare across the Colorado River, in Lake Havasu, Arizona.

According to history.com, to ensure the bridge could handle modern traffic, construction crews built a hollow core of steel-reinforced concrete, which was then covered with 10,000 tons of the original 19th century granite.

Workers began by labeling each of its granite bricks with markers that indicated their arch span, row number and position. The bridge was then disassembled, packed away in crates and shipped to Long Beach, California, via the Panama Canal. From there, a small army of trucks carried it across the desert to its new home at Lake Havasu.

All told, the shipping, assembly and dredging took over three years and cost Robert McCulloch and C.V. Wood some $7 million.

Ya know, the last time I asked someone if they wanted to buy a bridge, things didn’t go so well.

Have a great week and may God bless!

My Kingdom for an Asprin

Bismarck, Dakota Territory (9/3/1883) (Photo credit: Thiophene_Guy)

Have you ever heard someone say, “I wish I had been born back in the Old West!”? Let’s examine some of the pros and cons of this statement.

Let’s go back 150 years. For my part, this notion could begin and end with two words: Air conditioning. But we will delve deeper.

We’ll start with something as simple as a scratch. Today, this could be cured with an antiseptic ointment and a band-aid. In 1862 however, this could potentially become a life-threatening ailment. This simple scratch could become infected and lead to death. Of course, there was always the option of amputation. But thanks to unsanitary surgical equipment, additional suffering was a nice little side-dish on your heaping plate of death.

Skipping to the world of dentistry, a simple tooth extraction in today’s world would require no more that a needle full of a local anesthetic. The tooth would be painlessly removed and the patient would be ushered out of the office, no more the worse off.

The same procedure 150 years earlier would require one bottle of “anesthesia” (re: liquor), “restraints” (re: four large men), and a dirty pair of pliers wielded by the same man that would cut your hair.

A headache. What to do, what to do? I’ll let you figure that one out.

Today, a trip to the grocery store supplies the household with a week’s worth of groceries. Back then, a trip into the woods may or may not yield food for that evening’s dinner.

Here is another no-brainer. The average lifespan in the 1860s was 45 years.

I’ll have to give you one thing: Riding around on a horse wearing cool clothes and holstered six-shooters would certainly have been cool. But that’s about as far as I can take it.

To finish this post, imagine having to write using an 1860s typewriter, as opposed to the computers we are blessed with today.

‘Nuff said.