Thomas Paine

In the late-1780s, a few years after he helped fuel the American Revolution with pamphlets such as “Common Sense,” the writer and political philosopher Thomas Paine finally found time to pursue his passion for scientific innovation. He experimented with a smokeless candle, early steam engines and a concentric wheel, and conducted an investigation into the causes of yellow fever. Still, he was most excited by the prospect of building iron bridges. “The European method of bridge architecture, by piers and arches, is not adapted to many of the rivers in America on account of the ice in the winter,” he argued in a 1786 letter to Benjamin Franklin. With this in mind, Paine drew up plans for a single arch iron bridge that employed a lattice support structure modeled after a spider’s web. He patented the design and tirelessly promoted it on both sides of the Atlantic, but proposed bridges over Philadelphia’s Schuylkill River, the Thames in London and the Seine in Paris all failed to materialize. The closest Paine came to getting one built was in 1797, when elements of one of his prototypes were incorporated into a bridge over England’s River Wear.