What Things are and what things Aren’t Department, #3: Things that Aren’t 'Bridges" or “Floating Land”.

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 772  Blog Bookstore

My friend Jeff Donlan sent me a link to a site in which librarians-on-coffee-breaks were busily renaming classic book titles as they might be re-titled today. For example, we have:

Old: Richard III ; New: R3: Judgment Day

Old: Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus; New: Frankenstein: Wrath of the Supercorpse

Old: Das Kapital; New: Labor Value: How Today's Companies Get the Most out of Their Workforce.

 

You get the picture. And so it was with this in mind that I came across this unusual woodcut in the delightful publication called The Mirrour of Literature, Amusement and Instruction, published in London on 25 January, 1840.  There are all manner of fringe-interesting and ephemeral materials here—necessarily unexpected, as in this short article about “The Steam Floating Bridge” (of Torpoint, Cornwall to Devonport, Devonshire crossing the Hamoaze).

At first glance this looked like a remarkable modernized way of reformulating the word and concept for “boat” or “ferry”. (What audacity!—though perhaps it was someone trying to evade patent protection by calling a boat “a bridge”, leading an entirely new wave of renamed inventions into a shadow industrial revolution…)  But luck on this was only half-full—on closer inspection (and of course before actually reading the article, set aside like so many instructional manuals) you can see the “bridge” part of the steam-driven barge:  two chains leading from the land, then under water, then up again on the bow/stern of the business end of the barge, then down again, and then on to the other shore.  This all does sound quite like an old common ferry to me, but if the good Cornish people felt it to be a bridge, then a bridge it is.

Loosely connected to this floating “bridge” is the so-called floating “land” used by associates of the mystical Noah to help in the last-moment construction of the great ark.  The activity on board is a little confusing to me, as is the room-enough-for-three bit of floating “land”, which I would hazard to call a “raft”. 

 I should point out that the guy with the hammer-like tool is working on the roof and not the head of the person in the flattened foreground, though this would make for a better story, taking a step towards an ancient Murder on the Orient Express.  

I wonder also about the guy collecting water with the jar, as it seems that if he waited for just a little bit longer the water would be coming to him. (This image is a 19th-century republication of the scene from the 1493 Nuremberg Chronicle.)

**A longer and fuller description of the “bridge” is found in the Saturday Magazine for 1842, here. 

Comments

[Ray Girvan]

"This all does sound quite like an old common ferry to me, but if the good Cornish people felt it to be a bridge, then a bridge it is."

I guess it's slightly more snappy than "roll-on roll-off captive pontoon ferry"... I'm uncertain if I remember the one across Portsmouth Harbour http://www.history.inportsmouth.co.uk/events/floating-bridge.htm as I was only three when it was discontinued. But I do remember as a child that the ramp with the grooves for the chains was there for some years.

That "Mirror of literature, amusement, and instruction" account is also online, by the way: http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=mSQ4AAAAYAAJ&pg=PA57

[John Ptak]

How interesting that you have such a memory of Portsmouth Harbor, certain or not--its a good one. And thanks for the two links--I didn't know that The Mirrour was online.

[Ray Girvan]

The memory looks moderately accurate; this photo from 1960 - http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/c/ce/Gosport_1960s.jpg - when the new ferry was already in service (from the pier, right, off the radially arranged gardens) shows the floating bridge beached nearby. Parts of the harbourside, well into the 1960s, were positively Dickensian.