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Breaking bad: the material smashing machine
Breaking point A gigantic machine in London is the legacy of one dour Victorian’s passion for pushing materials to their limit. Sumit Paul-Choudhury pays it a visit
A Hulton Archive/Getty
“
Oh! Ill-fated bridge of the Silv’ry Tay, I must now conclude my lay By telling the world fearlessly without the least dismay, That your central girders would not have given way, At least many sensible men do say, Had they been supported on each side with buttresses, At least many sensible men confesses, For the stronger we our houses do build, The less chance we have of being killed.
44 | NewScientist | 10 May 2014
BIG bridge for a small city.” So said US president Ulysses S. Grant of the Tay Bridge. A marvel of Victorian engineering, spanning 3.5 kilometres across the river Tay in eastern Scotland, the threadlike crossing linked the factories and jute mills of Dundee and the coal fields of Fife. But its glory was short-lived. On 28 December 1879, a mere 18 months after opening, its central section collapsed in a violent storm, sending a passenger train plunging into the frigid waters below and killing all 75 or so on board. The poem excerpted to the left – The Tay Bridge Disaster by William McGonagall, a man often feted as Britain’s worst poet – captures the controversy that ensued. How robustly had the bridge been built? At the time, there were no national laboratories or standards for materials testing. In fact, there was only one man the authorities could call upon: David Kirkaldy. Born and educated in Dundee, Kirkaldy dabbled in the family linen business before moving to Glasgow to work as a draughtsman and engineer. But it wasn’t his hometown connections the board of investigators valued. It was his passion for meticulous, rigorous testing – and the gigantic machine at his Testing Works at 99 Southwark Street, London. Kirkaldy was a dour, obstinate man who deferred to nobody. His creed, inscribed in ornate stonework above his works’ entrance was “Facts Not Opinions”. His adherence to it meant he fell out not only with those damned by his conclusions, but also with those who disputed his findings. The Engineer, upon his death, described him as “outspoken and fearless as a Viking”. A blunter obituary called him “the best-hated man in England”. His 15-metre, 116-tonne testing machine still exists in its original building just south of London Bridge, now the Kirkaldy Testing Museum. In fact, says Hugh MacGillivray, the
museum’s director, the entire purpose-built premises was originally more like one giant machine, with machinery protruding through three floors. Initially powered by steam, before switching to high-pressure water supplied by the London Hydraulic Power Company, the machine now uses electricity to fulfil its original mission: to bend, stretch, crush, tear and snap enormous bits of stuff. The idea was to test components of a bridge or other megastructure to destruction by applying up to 450 tonnes of pressure or tension and so identify dud batches. Parts of the Eads Bridge across the Mississippi at St Louis endured the machine’s embrace, as did metal intended for London’s Hammersmith Bridge. But it didn’t just mangle metal: it also crushed concrete and bricks, smashed earthenware sewage pipes and snapped anchor chains, ropes and wheels. The Tay Bridge was a delicate assignment. Tests of fragments painstakingly retrieved from the riverbed established that while the bridge’s bracing rods were strong enough, the cast-iron lugs attaching them to the supporting columns were not. They failed at about 20 tonnes of load, rather than the 60 needed to withstand high winds.
Kirkaldy’s office in the corner of the ground floor is largely as it would have been, complete with a battered armchair and the fire-proof safe he used to store his records. The walls are decorated by a stern portrait and an exquisite diagram of a ship in his own hand. The office is, MacGillivray points out, an unnecessary step up from the main floor. “The boss had to be a bit higher than everyone else.” Seeing the machine in action is more like watching a geological process than a crash test, but no less dramatic for that. Presented
“The entire purpose-built premises was really one giant testing machine”
Dave Stock above: Kirkaldy Testing Museum
Damned by the inquiry’s report, the reputation of the bridge’s engineer, Thomas Bouch, was ruined. Following Kirkaldy’s death in 1897, two more generations continued the family tradition of breaking stuff in Southwark Street. His grandson, also called David, tested the cables used to hold up the Skylon monument at the 1951 Festival of Britain, and wreckage from a crashed de Havilland Comet, the world’s first passenger jet, retrieved from the sea off the Italian island of Elba in 1954. The machine was finally mothballed in 1974,
when improvements in quality control had made it possible to test small samples of material, while non-destructive techniques such as X-ray and neutron scattering allowed far finer-grained material analysis. Today, the machine stands amid antique tools, faded signs and a motley array of devices for testing everything from wire strength to the durability of parachute webbing. Upstairs once contained a Museum of Fractures, an exhaustive collection of broken pieces of metal; sadly for posterity, they were blown to bits by a bomb during the second world war. Among the materials tested to destruction by David Kirkaldy’s machines were (above, right to left) ships’ anchor chains, steam locomotive wheels and some bits of London’s Hammersmith Bridge
with a slab of steel as thick as your arm, it pulls or pushes inch by inch until the sample finally gives way, sometimes in explosive fashion. It may not do so for much longer. The museum’s future is in jeopardy: it faces a steep hike in its rent and may have to close if it fails to attract more visitors and supporters. That would be a terrible loss, says MacGillivray. There is no other machine like it in the world that has survived more or less unaltered. Kirkaldy’s brute-force approach might seem crude today, and his meticulous records of his experiments perfect bedtime reading for insomniacs, but his work established the importance of objectivity in materials testing. “Before him, all you could do was ask who made it, and if you trusted them,” says Mark Miodownik, director of the Institute of Making at University College London. “The fact that you can safely go over a bridge or up in an aeroplane is down to Kirkaldy.” In life, Kirkaldy helped hold engineers to account, including those responsible for the Tay Bridge disaster. But his lasting legacy was an enduring shift in attitudes, captured by a rather better respected poet, Rudyard Kipling, whose 1935 Hymn of Breaking Strain begins: The careful text-books measure (Let all who build beware!) The load, the shock, the pressure Material can bear. So, when the buckled girder Lets down the grinding span, The blame of loss, or murder Is laid upon the man. Not on the Stuff – the Man! n Sumit Paul-Choudhury is New Scientist ’s editor. To see the machine in action, and to suggest something for it to break, visit bit.ly/NScrush 10 May 2014 | NewScientist | 45
A Hulton Archive/Getty
“
Oh! Ill-fated bridge of the Silv’ry Tay, I must now conclude my lay By telling the world fearlessly without the least dismay, That your central girders would not have given way, At least many sensible men do say, Had they been supported on each side with buttresses, At least many sensible men confesses, For the stronger we our houses do build, The less chance we have of being killed.
44 | NewScientist | 10 May 2014
BIG bridge for a small city.” So said US president Ulysses S. Grant of the Tay Bridge. A marvel of Victorian engineering, spanning 3.5 kilometres across the river Tay in eastern Scotland, the threadlike crossing linked the factories and jute mills of Dundee and the coal fields of Fife. But its glory was short-lived. On 28 December 1879, a mere 18 months after opening, its central section collapsed in a violent storm, sending a passenger train plunging into the frigid waters below and killing all 75 or so on board. The poem excerpted to the left – The Tay Bridge Disaster by William McGonagall, a man often feted as Britain’s worst poet – captures the controversy that ensued. How robustly had the bridge been built? At the time, there were no national laboratories or standards for materials testing. In fact, there was only one man the authorities could call upon: David Kirkaldy. Born and educated in Dundee, Kirkaldy dabbled in the family linen business before moving to Glasgow to work as a draughtsman and engineer. But it wasn’t his hometown connections the board of investigators valued. It was his passion for meticulous, rigorous testing – and the gigantic machine at his Testing Works at 99 Southwark Street, London. Kirkaldy was a dour, obstinate man who deferred to nobody. His creed, inscribed in ornate stonework above his works’ entrance was “Facts Not Opinions”. His adherence to it meant he fell out not only with those damned by his conclusions, but also with those who disputed his findings. The Engineer, upon his death, described him as “outspoken and fearless as a Viking”. A blunter obituary called him “the best-hated man in England”. His 15-metre, 116-tonne testing machine still exists in its original building just south of London Bridge, now the Kirkaldy Testing Museum. In fact, says Hugh MacGillivray, the
museum’s director, the entire purpose-built premises was originally more like one giant machine, with machinery protruding through three floors. Initially powered by steam, before switching to high-pressure water supplied by the London Hydraulic Power Company, the machine now uses electricity to fulfil its original mission: to bend, stretch, crush, tear and snap enormous bits of stuff. The idea was to test components of a bridge or other megastructure to destruction by applying up to 450 tonnes of pressure or tension and so identify dud batches. Parts of the Eads Bridge across the Mississippi at St Louis endured the machine’s embrace, as did metal intended for London’s Hammersmith Bridge. But it didn’t just mangle metal: it also crushed concrete and bricks, smashed earthenware sewage pipes and snapped anchor chains, ropes and wheels. The Tay Bridge was a delicate assignment. Tests of fragments painstakingly retrieved from the riverbed established that while the bridge’s bracing rods were strong enough, the cast-iron lugs attaching them to the supporting columns were not. They failed at about 20 tonnes of load, rather than the 60 needed to withstand high winds.
Kirkaldy’s office in the corner of the ground floor is largely as it would have been, complete with a battered armchair and the fire-proof safe he used to store his records. The walls are decorated by a stern portrait and an exquisite diagram of a ship in his own hand. The office is, MacGillivray points out, an unnecessary step up from the main floor. “The boss had to be a bit higher than everyone else.” Seeing the machine in action is more like watching a geological process than a crash test, but no less dramatic for that. Presented
“The entire purpose-built premises was really one giant testing machine”
Dave Stock above: Kirkaldy Testing Museum
Damned by the inquiry’s report, the reputation of the bridge’s engineer, Thomas Bouch, was ruined. Following Kirkaldy’s death in 1897, two more generations continued the family tradition of breaking stuff in Southwark Street. His grandson, also called David, tested the cables used to hold up the Skylon monument at the 1951 Festival of Britain, and wreckage from a crashed de Havilland Comet, the world’s first passenger jet, retrieved from the sea off the Italian island of Elba in 1954. The machine was finally mothballed in 1974,
when improvements in quality control had made it possible to test small samples of material, while non-destructive techniques such as X-ray and neutron scattering allowed far finer-grained material analysis. Today, the machine stands amid antique tools, faded signs and a motley array of devices for testing everything from wire strength to the durability of parachute webbing. Upstairs once contained a Museum of Fractures, an exhaustive collection of broken pieces of metal; sadly for posterity, they were blown to bits by a bomb during the second world war. Among the materials tested to destruction by David Kirkaldy’s machines were (above, right to left) ships’ anchor chains, steam locomotive wheels and some bits of London’s Hammersmith Bridge
with a slab of steel as thick as your arm, it pulls or pushes inch by inch until the sample finally gives way, sometimes in explosive fashion. It may not do so for much longer. The museum’s future is in jeopardy: it faces a steep hike in its rent and may have to close if it fails to attract more visitors and supporters. That would be a terrible loss, says MacGillivray. There is no other machine like it in the world that has survived more or less unaltered. Kirkaldy’s brute-force approach might seem crude today, and his meticulous records of his experiments perfect bedtime reading for insomniacs, but his work established the importance of objectivity in materials testing. “Before him, all you could do was ask who made it, and if you trusted them,” says Mark Miodownik, director of the Institute of Making at University College London. “The fact that you can safely go over a bridge or up in an aeroplane is down to Kirkaldy.” In life, Kirkaldy helped hold engineers to account, including those responsible for the Tay Bridge disaster. But his lasting legacy was an enduring shift in attitudes, captured by a rather better respected poet, Rudyard Kipling, whose 1935 Hymn of Breaking Strain begins: The careful text-books measure (Let all who build beware!) The load, the shock, the pressure Material can bear. So, when the buckled girder Lets down the grinding span, The blame of loss, or murder Is laid upon the man. Not on the Stuff – the Man! n Sumit Paul-Choudhury is New Scientist ’s editor. To see the machine in action, and to suggest something for it to break, visit bit.ly/NScrush 10 May 2014 | NewScientist | 45