NOTHING IS WRITTEN - EDITOR’S DESK Rick Rader, MD, FAAIDD, FAADM - Editor in Chief
THE CASE OF
t n , a the Bridge, h p e l E e th and the
Determined Parent
I
was duped. Growing up, thanks to my vast comic book collection, I believed that Superman was the Man of Steel. It was not until I took a college economics course that I learned that Andrew Carnegie was actually the Real Man of Steel. The mid-1800s saw incredible innovations across America. We saw the development and distribution of railroads, cameras, telephones, electric lights, and oil supplies. Not to be overshadowed by those behemoths of ingenuity, we also saw the invention of Levi Strauss and his “blue jeans.” The major mode of transporting goods was with steamboats. When rail cargo was offloaded, it was put on steamboats, ferried across the wide and swift Mississippi River and then reloaded onto other trains. The major obstacle was the Mississippi River and constructing a bridge across it was thought to be “unbuildable.” Up until this time, “iron” was the material that built America. Iron machines were in6 | HELEN • helenjournal.org
vented to do the work on farms, in factories, and buildings. At the onset of the Civil War, Carnegie, an immigrant from Scotland, owned the Keystone Bridge Company. It was about this time that a civilization-changing discovery was made. When you took a mixture of iron and carbon metals from the earth, heated them at very high temperatures, you wound up with steel, a material that was stronger than iron. Jo Carol Hebert, writing in Smarty Pants Magazine for Kids (that’s really the name!) brings the story forward: “In 1867, Carnegie sets out to do the impossible. Build a road-railway bridge across the wide waterway to the Mississippi River to St. Louis. It was the longest bridge ever and the first time to use steel on a large scale. The bridge would not only span the river, it would link the East of America to the Western Frontier.” So, this was a big deal. From the very beginning, it was a project with a vast array of problems, frustrations and financial setbacks; but
