Tom Paine’s Bridge

“T HESE ARE THE TIMES THAT TRY MEN’S SOULS . …” S O WROTE T HOMAS P AINE IN T HE C RISIS IN D ECEMBER 1776 . His words stirred the Continental Army to victory at Trenton and have been passed down to generation after generation of schoolchildren. But being the American Revolution’s greatest propagandist was only one of Tom Paine’s many careers. At various times he was also a stay maker, a tax collector, a sailor, an editor, and, after the Revolution, a bridge builder —a pursuit in which he was just as much a revolutionary as he was in politics, though to less immediate effect.

In the eighteenth century, stone and timber were the traditional materials of bridge construction. Each was imperfect. Stone was good in compression but poor in tension, meaning that while it could support a heavy weight, it was of little use where resistance to stretching was needed. Wood, by contrast, was good in both tension and compression but was difficult to join together securely; it was also less durable than stone and subject to fire.

Because of these deficiencies, it was virtually impossible to build a stone or wood arch of long span. In Europe, when a long bridge was needed, engineers would build it as a series of shorter arches. But multiple spans of stone arches and piers would not work on America’s deep, fast-flowing rivers, which often jammed with relentless ice flows that exerted enormous pressure during the spring. By rising above a river instead of sitting within it, a single-span arch bridge could avoid the ice peril.

Creating such a bridge would require a new material and thus a new set of design principles. Paine was the first person in the New World to recognize iron’s potential to fill this need. Acting on his convictions, he came up with the earliest American design for a metal bridge: a castiron arch made up of thin longitudinal ribs running parallel to and above each other along the length of the span. In pursuit of his goal he became the first person anywhere to receive a patent for an iron bridge.

Paine occupies an ambiguous place in engineering history. For all its innovations, his bridge never crossed any river; no one knows exactly what it looked like; and it wasn’t even a very good design, which is not surprising since he had no technical training and little practical experience with mechanics. America’s first iron bridge would not be built until half a century later, and then on an entirely different design. Still, by providing a glimpse of what could be, Paine showed the way to a technology that would make possible the nation’s great westward expansion during the nineteenth century.

Paine’s beginnings gave no hint of the supreme polemicist and farsighted bridge builder that he would one day become. In 1750, at the age of 13, he left school to work in his father’s shop in Thetford, England, making whalebone stays for women’s corsets. For the next 24 years of his life, until he emigrated to America, he was a failure at just about everything he tried. In 1757 he spent seven months at sea, serving on a privateer that preyed on French vessels. In 1761 he joined the customs service, and the following year he was promoted to a post as an exciseman in Lincolnshire. The job required him to ride a circuit collecting taxes for the government that would one day banish him for sedition. In 1765 he was fired for falsifying his records. Two and a half years and a variety of jobs later, he was rehired by the customs service, only to be fired again in April 1774 after leading his fellow excisemen in a campaign for higher wages. He married twice. The first marriage lasted less than a year before his wife died in 1760 while delivering a stillborn infant. The second resulted in a separation in 1774 after three years, though the couple was never formally divorced (which would have required an act of Parliament).

After losing his second wife and his second post as an exciseman, Paine moved to London in June 1774. As he had done in his earlier stay in London during the salary controversy, he took advantage of the city’s cosmopolitan culture, attending lectures on astronomy and other scientific matters sponsored by the Royal Academy. At one of those earlier meetings he had met Benjamin Franklin, who, besides being the agent to Parliament for the colonies of Massachusetts, New Jersey, and Georgia, was also a scientist and political thinker. Having come from a humble background himself, Franklin took to the rough-hewn but clever and inquisitive Paine. It was a contact that Paine would treasure for the rest of his life.

Paine was of medium build with broad shoulders, standing 5 feet 10 inches. He had a large nose, but his most distinguishing feature was his intense, penetrating blue eyes. Later in life an acquaintance described him as “coarse and uncouth in manner, loathsome in appearance, and a disgusting egotist.” He also drank heavily. Yet for those who could overlook his personal habits and gratuitous displays of knowledge, he could be a warm friend and a stimulating companion.

The outcome of his friendship with Franklin was his decision to emigrate to America. Franklin prepared letters of introduction to his son William (the royal governor of New Jersey) and his son-in-law Richard Bâche (a Philadelphia merchant). The letters suggested that Paine could be a schoolteacher, clerk, or surveyor.

On November 30, 1774, Paine arrived in Philadelphia, the biggest and most important city in the American colonies. He had barely survived a virulent shipboard typhus epidemic, and after being taken from the ship on a stretcher, he spent six weeks recuperating before he was well enough to call on Bache. Paine found work as a tutor and began contributing letters and essays to various publications. The city’s residents quickly learned to appreciate Paine’s flair for writing, and the printer Robert Aitken hired him to edit the Pennsylvania Magazine shortly after its establishment in January 1775. The magazine prospered until events caused its discontinuation after the July 1776 issue.

Paine had done much to set those events in motion by publishing, in January 1776, his classic Common Sense , which called for America to discard the yoke of British colonialism. The pamphlet became an instant bestseller. As the Revolution progressed, Paine remained close to the center of the struggle, writing more stirring tracts, filling a variety of government posts, and even serving briefly in the Continental Army. In early 1781 he accompanied Col. John Laurens on a journey to France to seek money for the Continental cause. This trip may have given him his first exposure to the idea of iron bridges, which were the subject of heated debate in Parisian engineering circles.

By 1783, when the American Revolution came to an end, Paine had gone from poverty-stricken failure to folk hero in less than 10 years. Although an unwillingness to tame his confrontational style had made him some political enemies, a grateful nation rewarded him with grants of money and land, including a confiscated Tory farm in New Rochelle, New York. With wealth and leisure seemingly assured, he addressed himself to repairing the ravages of war and building the new nation.

Bridges were one of America’s most conspicuous needs, and he began his efforts with a proposal for a 300-foot wooden arch across the Harlem River. The bridge would connect the estate occupied by his friend Gen. Lewis Morris—a signer of the Declaration of Independence and the halfbrother of the patriot and statesman Gouverneur Morris—with the island of Manhattan. The estate, called Morrisania, was located in the Bronx, not far from New Rochelle.

Paine took his first step beyond the drawing board in 1785, when he hired a 39-year-old mechanic named John Hall to help him build a model. Hall had previously been a foreman at Boulton & Watt, which pioneered the steam engine in England. Before emigrating to America, he had installed a steam engine near Coalbrookdale around the time when the world’s first iron bridge was being built there. He had put in another one at the pioneering Walker brothers’ ironworks in Rotherham. Through these assignments he had become familiar with some of the latest developments in ironmaking and bridge building, technologies in which Britain led the world.

Hall arrived in America on August 5, 1785. Steered by mutual friends, he got in touch with Paine at his home in Bordentown, New Jersey, about 20 miles up the Delaware River from Philadelphia. The two men immediately struck up a friendship. In November they began work on a wooden model of Paine’s nine-rib bridge to cross the Harlem River, followed by another model in cast iron.

In June 1786 Paine put both models of his Harlem River bridge, which were scaled at 1 to 24, on display in Benjamin Franklin’s courtyard in Philadelphia. By this point, however, ownership of Morrisania had passed to Gouverneur Morris, who had no interest in linking his rural estate with the city of New York. So Paine reworked his design into something much grander, an iron behemoth to span the 400-foot-wide Schuylkill River in Philadelphia. No bridge had yet been built there, but plans were afoot to erect a multispan covered wooden structure. Under pressure from this alternative proposal, Paine came up with a design that would use 520 tons of iron and contain 13 ribs, one for each state in the new Union. He spent most of his time in Philadelphia during the summer of 1786 lobbying the Pennsylvania assembly—many of whose members were his political allies—to adopt his plan for the Schuylkill crossing.

As Paine tried to drum up support for the project, Hall began work on a model of the proposed Schuylkill bridge, to be made of wrought iron and wood. He and Paine finished it in mid-December and sent it to Franklin. On December 26 David Rittenhouse, a distinguished scientist and the treasurer of the state of Pennsylvania, came to Franklin’s courtyard and reviewed the model. He decided that Paine’s design was workable but balked at the estimated cost, a whopping $33,000, and questioned whether America’s iron industry could produce enough material for such a big structure. The next day the model was moved to the Pennsylvania statehouse, today known as Independence Hall, where it remained on view until March.

By then the excitement over Paine’s bridge had waned. The assembly delayed its decision because of Pennsylvania’s shaky finances, and backing promised by private patrons grew dubious. Then Paine, an only child, decided to go to England and visit his parents, whom he had not seen in 13 years. Combining filial duty with bridge business, he took his latest model with him across the Atlantic, hoping to come back with favorable reviews from prominent European engineers. Armed with letters of introduction from Franklin, he set sail in April 1787, intending to return to America in a few months. He ended up spending the next 15 years in Europe.

Word of Paine’s contribution to the American Revolution had preceded him to France, where he was received as a hero. On July 21 he showed his model to the French Academy of Sciences, which received him with great admiration and appointed a committee of three eminent scientists to review the structure and aesthetics of his bridge. The committee’s assessment, presented in late August, noted other plans for all-iron bridges that had been brought before it and mentioned the Coalbrookdale bridge in England, a pioneering 100-foot span that had opened in 1779. The report ended with: “We conclude … that Mr. Paine’s plan of an iron bridge is ingeniously conceived; that its construction is simple, solid, and fit to provide the strength necessary to withstand effects arising from loading; and that it is worthy of a trial.”

The endorsement gave Paine false hopes like those he had experienced in Philadelphia. He sent a preview of the report to Franklin, hoping that the Pennsylvania assembly would now see the virtue of his design, and on August 30, with an official copy in hand, he went to England. There he learned that his father had recently died, but except for that sad news, he and his bridge had arrived at a propitious time: The Blackfriars Bridge over the Thames had just given way, and another stone bridge, built by the renowned British engineer John Smeaton over the Tyne at Hexham, had collapsed in a 1782 flood because of quicksand under its piers.

Late in 1787, while still in England, Paine heard that a French entrepreneur had applied for permission to build a wooden bridge on cast-iron piers over the Seine. The entrepreneur was another multitalented individual, Pierre Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais, best remembered today as the playwright who gave the world The Barber of Seville and The Marriage of Figaro . He had started out as a clockmaker, however, and had more than a dilettante’s interest in mechanical matters. He had crossed Paine’s path a decade before, when he headed a shadowy French company that secretly funneled aid and supplies to the American rebels. He and his American contacts were charged with embezzlement, an episode that inspired one of Paine’s most vituperative rhetorical outbursts and nearly led to a diplomatic rupture with France. Now the same Beaumarchais threatened to steal Paine’s thunder and imperil his prospects of finding backing for his Schuylkill bridge. So Paine crossed the Channel once again.

On his first trip to Paris, he had sought nothing more than the endorsement of France’s engineering experts. This time he proposed actually to build a bridge. The Schuylkill remained his ultimate goal, but he hoped to gain experience in France and use his Seine project to attract financing in America. “If I can succeed only in one contract in Europe,” he wrote, “… I shall be able to build the Schuylkill bridge myself.” But the plan he presented in Paris was incomplete in many areas, including the important matter of how much it would cost, and all hope of obtaining a government grant soon dissolved in the chaos of the approaching French Revolution. Finally, in June 1788, Paine gave up on the Seine scheme and returned to London to continue seeking patrons for his American bridge.

On his arrival he found guarded enthusiasm for building a bridge in London instead. One particularly promising backer was Peter Whiteside, an English-born businessman who had made a fortune in Philadelphia during the Revolution supplying the Continental Army. He guided Paine through the patenting process, witnessed his patent application, and probably offered to underwrite a full-size trial bridge. Under the auspices of “His most Excellent Majesty King George the Third,” Paine received English patent no. 1667 on August 26, 1788, for “a method of constructing of arches, vaulted roofs, and cielings [ sic ], either in iron or wood, on principles new and different to anything hitherto practiced.” The very idea of seeking a patent was also unprecedented; until then none had been granted for iron bridges even though the concept had been around since the mid-eighteenth century.

No drawing accompanied the patent, but in his specification Paine explained that he had taken the idea for his bridge from a spider’s web and “the quills of birds, bones of animals, reeds, canes,” and other things in nature. He planned to protect the iron ribs from rust by varnishing them with “a coat of melted glass.” He hoped to have his bridge built by the great English ironmaster John Wilkinson, who had helped construct the Coalbrookdale bridge, but Wilkinson left on a business trip to Sweden before Paine could speak to him. His next choice was the Walker brothers of Rotherham, whose ironworks, among the foremost in England, had cast thousands of tons of the British cannon that were fired against Continental troops in the recent war. In late October Paine proposed their constructing an experimental arch of 250 feet, but the shop wasn’t big enough to hold something that size, and the approach of winter made work outdoors impractical.

Then Paine learned that a former member of Parliament, Francis Ferrand Foljambe, who lived three miles from the ironworks, needed a 90-foot bridge to replace an existing wooden span that provided access to his estate. Paine and William Yates, the Walkers’ foundry foreman, scaled down their plan accordingly. The construction of an experimental model, Paine’s fourth, proceeded through the winter and early spring, overseen mostly by Yates while Paine was in London on political business. Although the deal with Foljambe never went through, interest grew in exhibiting a fullsize bridge in London.

On July 13, 1789, Paine wrote Thomas Jefferson, the American minister to France, in Paris, telling him he planned to erect a 100-foot demonstration bridge on dry land. Paine hoped eventually to sell the bridge to finance an even larger one that would cross the Thames. While the components were being fabricated in Rotherham, he spent five months in Paris observing the progress of the French Revolution. He returned to England in March 1790 and hired Abel Buell—a prominent Connecticut typefounder, engraver, and businessman who was visiting England to learn cotton manufacture—to help him put up the bridge on a London field known as Lisson Green. The bridge parts arrived at the site on May 31, and construction began on the wooden abutments. The ironwork started in August.

Problems quickly cropped up. First Whiteside suffered a business reverse and was thrown into debtors’ prison. His creditors came after Paine for £620 Whiteside had lent him. After a brief stay in prison, Paine found other investors to bail him out. Then he had to assume direction of the work himself when Buell was injured on the first day of iron erection (he returned after a month or so). Paine persevered, and on September 28 his bridge opened to the public.

The arch had a catenary shape and weighed 36½ tons, of which 23 tons was wrought iron and the remainder cast. It had a span of 110 feet and a rise of 5 feet. It remained on display for a year, attracting some fee-paying visitors but no offers to finance a Thames crossing. Eventually the abutments gave way—always a danger with a shallow arch—whereupon the bridge was dismantled and sent back to Rotherham. By then Paine had once again flung himself into revolutionary activities, this time in France, and his career as a bridge designer and promoter began a decade-long hiatus.

Despite its failure as a business proposition, the Lisson Green model had an important effect on the next major iron bridge to be built, a bridge over the River Wear in County Durham that carried the Newcastle road across the entrance to Sunderland Harbor. That bridge was developed by Rowland Burdon, a local businessman and member of Parliament, along with Thomas Wilson, a schoolmaster turned mechanic. Burdon had planned to erect a masonry arch of 200 feet until the Walker brothers drew his attention to Paine’s bridge. Realizing that masonry was impractical and would cost too much, he commissioned an iron-arch structure that would be the world’s largest single-span bridge on its completion in 1796.

The famous Sunderland Bridge, whose construction was supervised by Paine’s foreman from the Rotherham model, William Yates, had six ribs, each made up of 105 castiron blocks. The blocks were held together by wrought-iron ties, and the ribs were spaced laterally by tubes. When joined together, the blocks in each rib worked in the same way as the individual stones of an arch. The bridge cleared the river with an unprecedented span of 236 feet, more than twice that of the Coalbrookdale bridge.

It is probable that some of the straps from Paine’s Lisson Green bridge were reworked for the Sunderland span. Other than that, however, there is no similarity between Burdon and Wilson’s system and that of Paine. Some writers have attributed the design of the Sunderland Bridge to Paine, but in fact Paine did not hear about it until after it was built. Still, it is indisputable that Paine’s demonstration inspired Burdon to switch from stone to iron.

The Sunderland Bridge was brilliantly promoted by Burdon, who, like the backers of the Coalbrookdale span, commissioned a series of prints illustrating how the bridge was made, including dramatic views showing it in its setting. Both sets of prints remain classics of engineering art. No drawings exist of any of Paine’s designs other than a curious vernacular pen-and-ink sketch that is now at the Science Museum in London. The sketch shows a threespan bridge that may have been Paine’s plan for the Harlem River site, or perhaps for some other location.

None of the models that Paine built during his life are known to survive either. Another drawing, dated November 1791 and attributed to the English architect Sir John Soane, is puzzlingly titled “A slight Sketch of Thos. Paine’s patent cast Iron Bridge proposed to be erected over the River Wear near Sunderland.” This may be the source of the mistaken attribution of the Sunderland Bridge to Paine. And in 1988 the eminent British iron-bridge historian J. G. James published a conjectural drawing based on a French description from 1787.

Even as the Lisson Green model was being exhibited, developments in France were drawing Paine back into the literary arena. Edmund Burke had published his classic of conservative thought, Reflections on the Revolution in France , in November of 1790. Paine’s reply was published in March 1791 as The Rights of Man . In his customary vigorous style he defended the French people’s right to revolt and called on the British to follow France’s example and overthrow their king. The essay made him a figure of great controversy. When part two of The Rights of Man (“my political Bridge,” as Paine called it in a letter to John Hall) was published a year later, things got so hot for Paine that he was eventually forced to flee the country. In September 1792 he left Britain for France, never to return. He was convicted of treason in absentia.

Once again, Paine was received in France as a hero, but he soon got caught in the revolution’s shifting currents. In December 1793 he was thrown in jail for opposing the hard-liners’ enthusiastic use of the guillotine and specifically the execution of Louis XVI, who had been a staunch ally of America during its revolution. After almost a year, Paine was released in November 1794 at the behest of the new American minister to France, James Monroe.

Before and during his stay in prison, Paine had written his last great work, The Age of Reason . The first part was published in February 1794; part two followed in October 1795. Many readers saw these writings as anti-Christian, and they cost him much of his support, especially in America. Another publication, his 1796 Letter to George Washington , further damaged his reputation at home with its harsh criticism of the revered general and President.

Paine had planned to return to America in 1797 along with Monroe (with whom he had lodged for a year and a half while he recovered from a serious illness contracted during his imprisonment), but unfortunately Britain was at war with Napoleonic France. The Royal Navy was monitoring all French ports, and Paine feared being captured and returned to Britain to serve his sentence for treason. He remained in France for another five years, living with Nicolas de Bonneville, his publisher, until a brief cessation in hostilities allowed him to sail back to America.

Toward the end of his stay in France, inspired by the success of the Sunderland span, he resumed his bridge experiments, building two new models. On October 1, 1800, he described them in a letter to Jefferson. One was in pasteboard and the other in cast iron; both had a five-foot span and a rise of five inches. Two years later a visitor to Paine reported: “The ironwork, the chains, and every other article belonging to it were forged and manufactured by himself. It is intended as the model of a bridge which is to be constructed across the Delaware, extending 480 feet with only one arch.” Later he duplicated the model in lead.

The reference to chains suggests a tied arch, in which the ends of the arch are joined by a chain to keep them from spreading apart. The principle is identical to that found in an archer’s bow, where the ends are held together with a string. For that reason, a structure of this type is often called a bowstring arch. The tied arch would become one of the most popular forms for iron bridges in the nineteenth century.

Paine finally returned to America on October 30, 1802, landing in Baltimore with his bridge models in tow. He proceeded to the new city of Washington, where the federal government had moved during his absence. The old patriot hoped to make a presentation to Congress and to win the support of Jefferson, who was now President, for this latest version of his iron bridge. But his religious views and other personal eccentricities rendered him unwelcome in many quarters, and a decade and a half of absence had made him an outsider in a greatly changed nation.

He did his best to make the rounds of influential men, but he encountered little more than politeness from his friends and open hostility from his enemies. Moreover, the Jeffersonian ethic of a small, limited central government opposed any nonessential federal projects (though Jefferson did not shun his old acquaintance, allowing Paine to lodge with him during his stay). After a few months’ futile efforts, Paine realized that he had no chance of winning a federal contract. He fled the bleak, muddy capital in January 1803 and gave his models to Charles Willson Peak’s famous museum in Philadelphia.

Though best known as a portrait painter, Peale, a friend of Paine from Revolutionary days, was also a bridge aficionado. He had secured the first American bridge patent, for a wooden design, in 1797. Paine’s models were popular with the museum’s visitors, but there is no record of what became of them when the museum moved to Baltimore. On this inconclusive note Paine’s involvement with bridge design came to an end.

The last six years of Paine’s life were marked by poverty, declining health, and social ostracism. He worked on inventing a variety of mechanical contrivances but did not get very far with any of them. Mme. Marguerite de Bonneville, the wife of his French publisher, joined him in America with her three sons and lodged with him in Bordentown and later New York City. She was present when Paine died on June 8, 1809, was an executor of his will, and inherited his models and manuscripts. Tragically, the manuscripts and perhaps some of the models were later lost in a fire in St. Louis.

In the decades that followed the construction of the Coalbrookdale span, iron bridges became common in Britain. France experienced a similar though somewhat slower proliferation after its first iron bridge, the Pont des Arts, opened in Paris in 1803. But America, despite its rapid expansion, did not see its first one until 1838, when an ironarch bridge opened to carry the Cumberland Road over Dunlap Creek in Brownsville, Pennsylvania. (See “First and Still There,” by Frances C. Robb, Invention & Technology , Fall 1994.) The delay can be accounted for by differing conditions in the two continents.

In the first half of the nineteenth century, American engineers and builders had to address the needs of a sparsely populated country with a rugged and undeveloped interior. Their designs for most things, especially bridges, reflected a pragmatic do-it-yourself attitude: They were simple structures that could easily be built by any carpenter, millwright, or mechanic. Paine’s idea was introduced at a time when even the emerging vitality of the United States could not support a bridge as sophisticated and expensive as his. Instead the vast stands of virgin timber available for the taking, combined with the simplicity of truss construction, made wood the preferred material.

What, then, is the historical importance of Paine’s work? In the case of the Lisson Green bridge, J. G. James sums up well by saying that its “main value was its practical demonstration of faults to be avoided.” Nevertheless, Paine’s bridge spread the word about an engineering revolution to come—just as his writings did about a political one.