Issue 3

THE PRESIDENT, in calling upon Mr. Andrews, to open the discussion, proposed a cordial vote of thanks to Professor Husband for the immense amount of trouble which he must have taken in preparing his paper.

We would draw the attention of our readers to an alteration which has been made in the "make-up" of the Journal this month; that is the presentation of such items as "Institution Notices" and "Branch Notices" as a separate insertion. This innovation has been made in response to a large number of requests from members. An increasing number of readers are having the twelve issues bound into one volume at the end of each year, and it was felt that the repetition of lists of names and addresses detracted from the value of The Structural Engineer as a scientific journal. Printed, as they will be in future, on coloured paper, and inserted in the middle of the Journal, these pages will be distinguished from those containing matter of more permanent interest, and the difference in colour will also serve to draw attention to the various notices issued by the Council and the Branch Secretaries. Moreover, when the journals are bound at the end of the year, these pages can be detached without mutilating any other part of the Journal.

V.-THREE BRIDGES OF SPECIAL INTEREST. (1) The Lebir Bridge This bridge consists of two 250 ft. spans over permanently running water, and three 100 ft. spans over normally dry ground, 50 ft. above low water level in the river, which has a catchment area of approximately 1,000 square miles, and is the largest of the tributaries entering the main Kelantan River. The construction of the bridge was under the charge of the Section Engineer, Manek Urai, in addition to his many other duties, in the persons successively of Mr. H. S. Haskins, Assoc.M.Inst.C.E., who did the setting-out and began the sinking of all the wells during 1924 (thereafter becoming Acting Divisional Engineer, Kelantan North); the author, who completed the bridge to the original plans and opened it to construction traffic, during 1925; and Mr. Lyndon V. Brady, Jun.I.E.Aust., who was responsible for the work of reconstruction in 1927, after the great flood of which the effects will be described. John Edwin Holmstrom

In my early days I had several years in architecture, so a few thoughts on the differences in materials and construction between those days and the present may be of interest. G McLean Gibson

DELEGATES and visitors to the International Congress at Liege last year will be interested in the following particulars of the reconstruction of two famous bridges over the Meuse.

WHEN I was first asked to read a paper this session, I set about trying to find a subject upon which not much had been published widely; I have finished by choosing the subject which has probably been more fully discussed than any other within the range of structural engineering. Ewart S. Andrews

PROFESSOR HUSBAND, referring to Mr. Godfrey’s paper “Some New Ideas on Dams” (published in the January issue of The Structural Engineer), said that the opening paragraph made it, clear that the title was a little ironical. Mr. Godfrey stated that so far from the ideas in his paper being in any way new they were very old indeed, but he wished to draw very emphatic attention to them. Many of the members were probably aware that. Mr. Godfrey, who was an eminent consulting engineer in Pittsburg, had for the last 20 or 25 years been carrying on a very intensive campaign against what he called the neglect of the question of up-lift or under-pressure beneath gravity dams. He did not think Mr. Godfrey intended to convey the impression that engineers generally had neglected to recognise the existence or possibility of the existence of up-lift because every engineer understood that it might be present in any dam, but, there was no doubt that in the ease of the earlier dams constructed 40 or 50 years ago, this question of up-lift had been neglected in their design. The dams had not been given a sufficiently large profile in order to guard against the effect of up-lift being exerted beneath their bases. Mr. Godfrey went further and stated that practically all the important dam failures for some years back-and there had been a great many, especially abroad, although we had been particularly immune from them in England, and had been very fortunate in that respect, could be traced to the actions of under-pressure or up-lift. Personally, he believed that Mr. Godfrey in making that statement was practically correct,. At any rate, it could safely be said that about 95 per cent. of the failures were probably due to up-lift. Mr. Godfrey’s arguments about these matters had been, in America especially, very much decried, and he had been denied the opportunity until quite recently of expressing his views before a representative professional audience. It was only within the last 18 months or so that Mr.Godfrey had succeeded in obtaining permission to read a paper on this subject before the American Society of Civil Engineers in New York. Before that paper was read, however, Mr. Godfrey’s agitation had resulted in this question receiving very considerable recognition amongst American engineers and in his own paper Professor Husband said he would show that far from being neglected by British engineers this question of up-lift had been taken into very careful consideration by many of them in the design of important dams. There was no question, continued Professor Husband, that today and for several years past, the question of under-pressure was, and had been receiving very careful consideration in the United States. Since 1916 the United States Bureau of Reclamation-which was the body responsible for the design and building of most of the very large dams in recent years, for irrigation purposes-had been making a very careful series of observations on such important dams