Flat-pack empire

Stephen Tuffnell

The journey from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania to Atabara, Sudan, is more than 6,000 miles as the crow flies. That’s a long way for 622 tons of steel to travel, but the Atbara River Bridge made the journey nevertheless.

In early February 1899, the component parts of the bridge rolled from the mills of Philadelphia’s Pencoyd Iron Works and began their journey to the middle of the Nubian Desert. After crossing the Atlantic and arriving in Alexandria, this great kit of parts, which included seven steel trusses, chords, pier caps, rivets, and an electrically-powered travelling crane, was loaded onto 67 railway cars and transported to Cairo, where the cars were moved to barges and sailed down the Nile to Wady Halfa. Here, the bridge was loaded onto the Sudan Military Railway and taken to the construction site. Once at the bridge site, the travelling team of American engineers constructed its seven spans onshore before swinging them out onto concrete piers sunk into the riverbed.

The American engineers didn’t work alone. The erection crew managed a mixed labor force of around 200 Egyptian and Sudanese convicts paroled for the work under the supervision of 120 soldiers. These were divided into gangs of six men who ‘worked at the muzzle of the soldiers [sic] rifle,’ with each worker driving 100 rivets per day on the 1000-foot-long structure. They toiled in harrowing conditions: the Nubian Desert is one of the hottest and driest climates on the planet, with temperatures reaching as high as 48˚c in the shade, so that work had to be paused between 11am and 3pm. Costing a mere £6,500 and taking just six weeks to build, the simple cantilever bridge was a crucial part of the Sudan Military Railroad, enabling the supply and organization of British and Egyptian troops who then advanced against the Mahdist State near Khartoum, 177 miles to the southwest, as they consolidated Britain’s North African empire.

Photograph of “Portal View of the Completed Bridge, The Atbara River Bridge,” Scientific American, Vol. lxxxvi, No. 11 (March 15, 1902): 184.

Bridges are among the largest, most impressive feats of steel. Emblematic of the conquest of time and space by steam-powered modernity, they are usually thought of as immovable objects. But in the late nineteenth century, American railway bridges were surprisingly well-travelled. The portfolio of the Phoenix Bridge Company, by the 1890s the leading bridge fabricator in North America, included prefabricated exports to Guatemala, Nicaragua, Peru, Costa Rica, Cuba, Brazil, Mexico, Canada, Russia, China, and Japan. Pencoyd erected “knock-down” kits in Japan, Taiwan, Mexico, the Netherlands, Uganda, and Australia. The Pennsylvania Bridge Company spanned the vertiginous Goteik Gorge in Burma.

How was all of this possible? Two important factors were involved. The first was a technological innovation, structural steel, which transformed bridge- and skyscraper-building. Pencoyd pioneered the rolling of standardized shapes from open-hearth furnaces in the United States. Open-hearth steel had the advantage of being stronger than wrought iron and less brittle than steel made by the Bessemer process. The introduction of this new structural steel was so rapid and so sweeping that it prompted Andrew Carnegie to declare, ‘Farewell, then, Age of Iron; all hail King Steel.’ By 1900, Pencoyd operated 10 open-hearth furnaces, each of around 30 tons capacity. Pencoyd turned out 5,000-15,000 net tons of steel shapes per month, so the 620-ton Atbara kit was about four days’ work. In addition to beams and girders, Pencoyd also produced the pins, nuts, and rivets needed to assemble its standardized bridge templates. The firm effectively provided flat-pack bridges for global consumers.

Panorama of Pencoyd Iron Works (Pencoyd, Pa.), 1900, 1986268_1_0570. American Iron and Steel Institute, Public Relations Department. American Iron and Steel Institute photographs and audio-visual materials (Accession 1986.268), Audiovisual Collections and Digital Initiatives Department, Hagley Museum and Library, Wilmington, de.

The second factor was nothing less than a reinvention of corporate capitalism. In 1899, in the midst of the spree of trust creation known as the “great merger movement” in the United States, J.P. Morgan amalgamated Pencoyd into the American Bridge Company. The resulting industry-wide holding company, composed of 28 of the largest steel fabricators in the United States, collectively accounted for ninety percent of domestic American bridge construction. The new firm promoted economies of speed - rolling steel shapes through continuous casting - which reduced costs and enabled the new industrial giant to break into foreign markets. In the United States the manufacture of bridges had been reduced to ‘a science so exact’ that export prices were not significantly higher than domestic construction costs.

These trends underlay the erection of a pervasive empire of U.S. steel, of engineering across borders, one that moved along the capillaries of imperial movement and continually extended its reach into new colonial spaces. Industrialized steel enabled the conquest of nature’s gradients and valleys and girded the vertical expansion of cities – all while offering savings in weight, greater resilience, and better resistance to corrosion.

Bridges bear the burden of other mobilities, but they are not necessarily static things. Prefabrication granted a portable architecture to a restless world. For it is infrastructure that makes empires.

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Stephen Tuffnell is Associate Professor of Modern US History at the University of Oxford. His work examines the histories of U.S. migration, the transimperial production of global modernity, and the global histories of commodities including gold, steel, and ice. He is the author of Made in Britain: Nation and Emigration in Nineteenth-Century America (Oakland, 2020) and co-editor of A Global History of Gold Rushes (2018). His work has also appeared in the Journal of Global History, Diplomatic History, and a number of other edited collections.