30 March: Bridges

On this date in 1909, the first double-deck bridge, The Queensboro Bridge in New York, opened to traffic, linking Manhattan and Queens. 10 things you might not know about bridges:

1. The earliest type of bridge was probably stepping stones. Neolithic people used to build walkways across marshes. An example is the Sweet Track in Somerset which is approximately 6000 years old. It's so called because it was discovered by an archaeologist named Sweet. The oldest bridge in continuous use, according to the Guinness Book of Records, is the Caravan Bridge, a stone arch span over the Meles River in Izmir, Turkey, which is 3,000 years old.
2. The world's highest bridge is the Beipanjiang Bridge, in south west China. It rises 1,854 feet above a river. The longest is the Lake Pontchartrain Causeway in Louisiana, which is 24 miles long. For 8 of those miles, you can't even see the land at either end.
3. The longest combined road and railway bridge in Europe is situated at the border between Sweden and Denmark. It has the additional feature of turning into a tunnel for part of the crossing. This was so it wouldn't inconvenience air traffic coming and going from nearby Copenhagen airport.
4. There is a word for the fear of crossing bridges: gephyrophobia. It seems there are a lot of people in Michigan, USA, who suffer from that. The Mackinac Bridge there is five miles long and over 200 feet high. The bridge has a Drivers Assistance Program in which people who are too scared to drive over themselves can be driven over by a member of staff. About 1,200 to 1,400 use this service.
5. Then again, they might be more justified than you'd think, since the 607,380 bridges in the USA are on average over 40 years old and 11% of them are considered structurally deficient.
6. While we think of bridges as man made objects, Nature is more than capable of building bridges, too. The largest natural bridge in the world is in China and is called the Fairy Bridge. Until 2010 it was virtually unknown outside China. The Natural Arch and Bridge Society only learned of it when one of their members found it on Google Earth in 2009. They sent a party to measure it in 2010 and they found it was the largest natural bridge in the world by a wide margin. It's also possible to make bridges from living tree roots, which automatically strengthen over time, although it does take about 15 years to build such a bridge.
7. In 480 BC, King Xerxes I of Persia built bridges to invade Greece. However, all the bridges he built got destroyed by storms. Eventually, in a true Basil Fawlty moment, he whipped the sea, threw chains at it, burned the water with red hot irons and got his men to yell at the water. The next bridge he built remained standing.
8. The Euro currency was designed to feature fictitious bridges, meant to represent architectural styles across Europe while not favouring any one country. Which worked fine until the Netherlands decided to build them for real.
9. Brooklyn Bridge in New York has Wine cellars underneath it. They were a money-making scheme to help pay for the bridge as they charged wine merchants for storage of their wine as the vaults were always cool. The cellars are still there but no longer in use.
10. Bridges are often where people go when they want to commit suicide, so some of the highest bridges have prevention measures such as plaques with helpline numbers or even people who try to talk would be suicides out of it. The most bizarre suicide bridge, however, is the Overtoun Bridge in Dumbarton, Scotland, where over the past fifty years, about one dog a year has suddenly, without warning and for no apparent reason, thrown itself off the bridge to its death, 50 feet below. The doggy suicides always take place in the same section of the bridge and all of them have been breeds with long noses. It has led people to wonder if the bridge is haunted. Overtoun is Celtic for "the thin place," an area where this world and the next are said to be close; so who knows? Its curse once extended to the human race when in 1994, a man threw his baby son off the bridge because he thought the baby was the Anti-Christ.

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