THREE

THE VISTULA BRIDGE AT DIRSCHAU (TCZEW)

National in Form, Transnational in Content

The Grand Master Winrich v. Kniprode, ruling from 1351–82, is at the center of the tableau; he is the hero of the epic portrayal, and his deeds in war and in peace, which he decisively won over Lithuania in 1370, inspired the artist’s appropriate presentation of the Grand Master. . . . In the bas-relief, the warlike household knights of Winrich spread out along the tableau. At the same time, in the foreground, he moves forward, raising his arm graciously over the ruins of destroyed idols, as a promoter of art and science, and as a protector of industry and trade; he observes the latter’s prosperity in the rich scenery in front of him. The first section contains Winrich’s triumph over his most tenacious opponent Kęstutis, Grand Duke of Lithuania, and the spread of Christianity.¹

Description of the Dirschau bridge’s eastern portal in 1857

The bridge . . . over the Vistula at Dirschau . . . constructed for the Royal Eastern Railway of Prussia . . . [was] commenced in the spring of 1850 and completed in the autumn of 1857. The Dirschau bridge, which carried a single railway line with a common roadway on each side, comprises six iron lattice spans, each of a clear width of 386 Prussian or 397 ¼ English feet [appr. 120 meters].

The whole length of the bridge is thus . . . 2.745 ft. 4 in. [appr. 837 meters]. . . . The superstructure of the bridge consists of a lattice sided tube 38 feet 8 inches above the bottom. . . . The lattice tube is in three divisions, each covering two openings. According to the calculations of the Prussian engineers, a given weight of material performs less service than the same weight in the Conway [Conwy] bridge, in the proportion of 10,000 to 13,268.²

Technical description of the Dirschau Bridge in the American Railway Times (1859)

THESE TWO ARTICLES DESCRIBE THE same structure, the railroad bridge at Dirschau (Tczew), approximately 500 kilometers to the northeast of Berlin. With its sheer length of 837 meters, its Gothic Revival yellow brick round towers, and the typical latticework, this structure stands out as an engineering masterpiece even today.³ When it was first inaugurated in 1857, contemporaries admired it as a “triumph of human ingenuity over the forces of nature” since this was Prussia’s first permanent bridge across the mighty Vistula (Weichsel, Wisła) River.⁴ As traveler Louis Passarge pointed out in 1857, hardly any “inhabitant of western Germany just a couple of years earlier had known anything about Dirschau.”⁵ First and foremost, its location on major north–south and east–west routes and an important river crossing made the place distinctive. Here, travelers to “the easternmost province of the Prussian state had to wait for days for a suitable moment to cross the Vistula.”⁶

While Dirschau would gain in national and international importance only with the advent of the Ostbahn in 1857, it still had six hundred years of recorded history. Chartered by Pomeranian Duke Sambor II in 1260, the town would become part of the medieval State of the Teutonic Order. In 1466, Poland-Lithuania took over, and after the state’s first partition in 1772, Prussia annexed the region.

In 1844, planning started on the future railroad bridge. As we have seen, the Prussian military heavily influenced the decision to move the crossing here, far away from a more accessible location in Thorn, 140 kilometers farther south, which strategists considered too close to the border with the Russian Empire. The whole rural area had to be dammed in to facilitate the bridge’s construction, and entrepreneurs set up industrial infrastructure. As a result, brickworks, an iron foundry, and a cement factory started operations. The newly established Royal Machinery Company provided for the bridge’s iron elements.⁷ Within a couple of years, Dirschau was catapulted into the industrial age, and its population almost doubled from 4,158 in 1846 to 7,758 in 1871.⁸

This chapter will look at two seemingly contradictory yet closely intertwined developments of the nineteenth century. The first part analyzes the bridge’s role as a symbol of Prussia’s/Germany’s sense of a national civilizing mission in east central Europe—embodied in the eastern portal’s iconography, as indicated in the first quotation above.⁹ The Gothic Revival towers of both the Dirschau and the nearby Marienburg (Malbork) Bridges support this evidence; they correspond with the architectural style of Marienburg Castle—the very seat of erstwhile grand master of the Teutonic Knights Winrich von Kniprode. The chapter’s second part highlights the transnational aspects of the bridge. The sober technical description of the Dirschau railroad crossing in the second quotation shows a global engineering community collaborating closely in railroad construction. Consequently, the American Railway Times portrayed the bridge in detail and compared it to the Conwy railroad crossing in Wales. The third section will analyze the transnational dialogue aiming at standardizing the world. As we see in the second quotation above, each country had its own ways of measuring, and the lack of standardization sometimes compromised global knowledge exchange. These developments in civil engineering unfolded during an increased economic and technological exchange facilitated by the early railroad networks.

“CIVILIZING THE EAST”: RAILROAD STRUCTURES AS SYMBOLS FOR HEGEMONIC AMBITIONS

As seen in the previous chapters, Prussia regarded infrastructure as an economic and geostrategic tool. In the Ostbahn case, strategists aspired to connect military fortresses and facilitate troops’ transportation. In addition, the railroad gained importance for Prussian and German population policies. The Dirschau Bridge can serve as a magnifying glass to showcase these visions.

For many contemporaries of the nineteenth century, the bridge was the most splendid European railroad crossing. As early as 1847, during the Prussian United Diet’s fierce debate on the proposed Ostbahn state bond, the Diet’s president called the planned bridge a “national edifice” and stressed its infrastructural importance. He highlighted its role as the first permanent link between the west and east banks of the Vistula, which thus knitted Prussia together.¹⁰ Its sheer dimensions and decorative elements—such as the Gothic Revival round towers and angular portals of the bridgeheads, designed like defensive fortifications—would impress travelers.¹¹

The bridge emerged in an area that Prussia had annexed from Poland-Lithuania just seventy years earlier. In this disputed borderland, the Prussian monarchy wanted to manifest its imperial power and role as a civilizing force in east central Europe. After the Napoleonic Wars, the Gothic Revival style applied in the German states achieved the status of a national style, harking back to the perceived greatness of the medieval Holy Roman Empire and the State of the Teutonic Knights.¹² This reference to medieval times as the imagined starting point of modern nations was no stranger to other European countries; however, it was of particular significance in Prussia’s eastern borderlands.¹³

Medieval Teutonic Knights as Modern Germans

In Prussia, King Frederick William IV ordered the reconstruction of various historical medieval buildings, such as Cologne Cathedral and Stolzenfels Castle, excellent examples of the thriving popularity of romanticism along the Rhine River.¹⁴ The nineteenth-century reconstruction of Marienburg Castle in West Prussia is another example of medieval structures’ popularity. Historically, it was a strong symbol of power since it served as the seat of the Teutonic Order. Initially, the Order of Brothers of the German House of Saint Mary in Jerusalem (the full name of the Teutonic Order) had been an institution taking care of wounded crusaders in the Holy Land. When the crusader states in Palestine and Syria faltered, the order looked for new opportunities in Europe. In 1225, Polish duke Konrad of Mazovia asked the order to support him against the pagan Baltic Prussians. After the rapid buildup of a mighty state north of the Polish lands, the order soon conflicted with Poland to the south and Lithuania to the north. The knights started construction of Marienburg Castle in the thirteenth century, and it suited as the seat of the order in the fourteenth century. The order’s decline began with its defeat by the united armies of Poland-Lithuania in the 1410 Battle of Grunwald. The castle fell into disrepair and suffered partial destruction in the eighteenth century.

The rebuilding of the dilapidated structure began in 1817.¹⁵ West Prussian provincial governor Theodor von Schön was the “guiding spirit” of the reconstruction, which was carried out in a way that “generated a dichotomy between barbarians and the defenders of European civilization.”¹⁶ As a result, this former seat of the Teutonic Order developed into a symbol of German dominance in the region.

The history of the Teutonic Order and its role in central and eastern Europe remains a controversial topic among historians to this day.¹⁷ In this context, Marienburg Castle’s symbolic role in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was grounded in its significance for German and Polish national movements. German nationalists exploited the assumed German national character of the Teutonic Knights to assert territorial claims over the region and stress the cultural mission and the priority of the German nation in Europe’s East. In the nineteenth century, this region was also inhabited by Poles, Lithuanians, and other ethnic groups—who, in the eyes of German and Russian nationalists, had no right to form their nation-states. Regarding Marienburg Castle, this notion of Prussia’s East as a bulwark of Germandom against uncivilized Slavs is best illustrated by German emperor Wilhelm II’s 1902 speech at this very castle.¹⁸

Polish nationalists followed the same lines of thought. With Nobel Prize winner Henryk Sienkiewicz’s 1897 novel, The Teutonic Knights, the anachronistic and divisive view of evil Teutonic Knights as direct precursors of the anti-Polish German state of the late nineteenth century entered the mainstream thinking of Polish society.¹⁹

During the Ostbahn’s construction, the idea of Polish cultural inferiority and poor governance found its way into German intellectual debates through novels like Gustav Freytag’s Credit and Debit of 1855. Being one of the most successful German novels of the nineteenth century, it is a telling example of the growing anti-Polish and antisemitic atmosphere in the German states in the mid-nineteenth century.²⁰ The novel helped to spread the term polnische Wirtschaft (Polish economy/management), depicting the alleged discrepancy between orderly German settlements and Polish chaos and mismanagement. As we have seen, this stereotype was also present in the Prussian parliament’s discussions of the Ostbahn.²¹ Mindsets like this prevail today; however, they are increasingly marginalized.

Iconography: Prussian Civilizers

The iconography of the two bridges at Dirschau and Marienburg fits well into this growing Polish-German antagonism. The Vistula River itself was part of this development: German and Polish nationalists postulated the Vistula’s “Germanness” and respectively its “Polishness” as part of a nineteenth-century narrative that focused on rivers like the Rhine and the Vistula as intrinsically linked to the French, German, and Polish nations. This mythmaking found its expression in poems and literature and contributed to the increasing role of rivers for competing modern nation-states—think of the famous German anti-French poem of 1840 “The Guard on the Rhine” (Wacht am Rhein).²²

While Carl Friedrich Lentze (1801–1883) was responsible for the technical part of the bridge’s construction (see next section), Friedrich August Stüler (1801–1865) oversaw the decorative elements.²³ The latter was a close friend to King Frederick William IV and a follower of architect Karl Friedrich Schinkel. In the position of official royal architect, Stüler played a crucial role in Prussian architecture, constructing the New Museum, the New Synagogue, and other renowned structures in Berlin and elsewhere.

As far as the bridge’s design is concerned, it is evident that the nearby quasi-national monument Marienburg Castle served as its model. The aftermath of the German Reich’s founding in 1871 saw the emergence of thousands of Gothic Revival government buildings, post offices, and churches. However, in the 1840s–1860s, new buildings in the Gothic style were not very common. As Judith Breuer has pointed out, significant exceptions were new structures erected next to historical, Gothic-style buildings with a German national claim. The most prominent cases of nationalist pairing were the Dirschau and Marienburg Bridges and station buildings close to the medieval castle and the Cologne railroad bridge next to this western German city’s cathedral.²⁴ The Gothic Revival station building in Dirschau fits into a European architectural trend featuring “a strongly marked nationalism as the assertive spirits of rival nations jostled with each other and advanced their claims for continental dominance.”²⁵

However, the railroad structures did not allude only to medieval architecture. Equally important was the imagery of decorative elements, an ahistorical presentation of German national history, allegedly dating back to the medieval Teutonic Order. This nationalist imagery is especially evident in the case of the Dirschau Bridge’s eastern portal, presented in the quotation at the chapter’s outset. Further emphasizing the German cultural mission in the European east, it depicted the subjugation and conversion of the Lithuanians by Grand Master Winrich von Kniprode in 1370. Distinguished Berlin sculptor Hermann Schievelbein accomplished the relief. The inscription read: “In remembrance of the flourishing days of the Order of the Teutonic Knights in Prussia under the Master Winrich von Kniprode.” In addition, on the western portal of Marienburg Bridge, near the castle, rested a statue of Grand Master Hermann von Salza, founder of the State of the Teutonic Order, whom in 1225 Polish duke Konrad of Mazovia had invited to fight the pagan Prussians. The eastern portal displayed a statue of Duke Albrecht of Brandenburg-Ansbach, who in 1525 transformed the State of the Teutonic Order into the secular Duchy of Prussia, the nucleus of modern Prussia.²⁶

Figure 3.1. The eastern portal of the Dirschau Bridge depicts the Teutonic Order’s subjugation of the Lithuanian ruler. Illustrirte Zeitung Leipzig, 748 (October 31, 1857): 292. Courtesy of Austrian National Library, ANNO.

In the 1860s, the thirty-minute train ride between Dirschau and Marienburg was an example of the “panoramization of the world,” as Wolfgang Schivelbusch has put it.²⁷ Here, travelers experienced an encounter with idealized medieval German history; the Vistula and Nogat crossings and the station building at Dirschau were modeled on the Marienburg Castle, alluding to an imagined medieval German national history.²⁸ As such, this iconography is not openly anti-Polish. However, given that this was a time of growing German-Polish antagonisms and Germanizing policies in West Prussia, it mirrors the feeling of ethnic exclusiveness that gained momentum with the German national movement.

Further evidence for increasingly German-nationalist thinking and its manifestation in infrastructure is the 1873 railroad bridge at Thorn, near the border with the Russian Empire. Although railroad planners in the 1840s, for military reasons, had been reluctant to build the first Vistula bridge at this location, the growing economic needs ultimately outweighed geostrategic considerations. However, the planners still left a German-nationalist mark on the landscape—a counterpoint to the Russian visions implemented in nearby Aleksandrów at the same time (see chap. 2). The Thorn railroad bridge’s iconography was openly German nationalistic. It featured statues of the Teutonic Order’s grand master Hermann von Salza and King Frederick the Great. While Germans referred to Frederick as an enlightened monarch who expanded Prussia’s territory by adding Silesia and the western provinces of Poland, the Polish national movement perceived him as the evil monarch of a partitioning power.²⁹ Moreover, additional reliefs on the bridgeheads depicted the Old Prussians’ defeat in the thirteenth century and the Prussian troops’ annexation of Thorn in 1793.³⁰

This iconography reflects the German Reich’s anti-Polish policies, which chapter 2 touched on. Since the town was a strategic fortress close to the border, many Germans imagined Thorn as a national “stronghold directed against the Tsarist Empire and . . . against the Poles within the state.”³¹ The railroad bridge as an entry point into the city underscored this relevance.

THE DIRSCHAU BRIDGE AND THE GLOBAL SCIENTIFIC COMMUNITY

Given the railroad structures’ romanticizing, German-nationalist iconography, one might be surprised that the Dirschau Bridge is also a prime example of a global scientific community carved out of stone and iron. Contemporary travel writer Louis Passarge was fully aware of the international significance of the bridge when he noted that “we reference Dirschau when we debate the Göltzschthal bridge, the Semmering railroad, the Conwy and the Menai Strait crossings. . . . Contemplating the enormous buildings and scaffoldings for the first time . . . even the well-educated reacts with irrationality and astonishment. . . . [For the] inhabitants of the Vistula valley, though . . . being experts on the stream’s nature and convinced of the impossibility of its bridging, . . . a mere astonishment may have preceded admiration and understanding of the genius of this creation.”³² The railroad structures mentioned in the first two lines were built between 1849 and 1854 and are in Saxony, Austria, and Wales (latter two). They were considered masterpieces of their time. The 1850 Britannia Bridge across the Menai Strait gained special recognition, and its design profoundly influenced the Dirschau Bridge. Thus, the latter symbolized technological progress and economic change in a region far away from the industrial heartland.

Railroad construction was closely linked to the development of new professions. The profession that would have the most significant impact on the rural and urban landscapes was civil engineering. Civil engineers constructed numerous bridges and diked the rivers, thus leaving their mark on the topography. Renowned Prussian architects such as Eduard Knoblauch and Friedrich August Stüler imposed on the Ostbahn their vision of progressive architecture, which in the 1850s ranged from Italian country-style station buildings (Kreuz [Krzyż], Bromberg, Elbing, Schneidemühl [Piła], Nakel [Nakło], Schönlanke [Trzcianka], and Filehne [Wieleń]) to Gothic Revival bridges and station buildings (Dirschau and Marienburg).³³ The multiple stations on the line created challenges for urban planning and served as new centers for emerging towns and developing villages. As we have already seen in the case of Berlin, railroad stations, representing a new building type, served as “starting points of social (trans)formation processes” such as transportation, population growth, architecture, industry, and trade development.³⁴

Local Challenges Resolved Globally

On the Vistula River, civil engineers of the 1840s and 1850s had the task of spanning a river that was extremely wide, wild, unregulated, and likely to compromise any crossing with its flooding and heavy ice drift. Also, just twenty kilometers south of Dirschau, the stream splits into two delta branches—the Vistula proper and the Nogat. As a result, engineers erected two bridges: one at Dirschau and one on the Nogat at Marienburg, some twenty kilometers to the southeast. Embedded in transnational networks, Prussian and Swiss engineers tackled these challenges.

Railroad networks accelerated the cross-border transmission of knowledge and the international dissemination of new technologies. European engineers frequently traveled abroad; sometimes, these trips were even institutionalized. This was the case at Berlin Vocational School, the institution railroad entrepreneur August Borsig attended. Its head, Christian Wilhelm Beuth, sent numerous students abroad—mainly to Great Britain, France, and Belgium—to study technical novelties.³⁵

The influence of railroads in this exchange was twofold. First, as a new and quick means of transportation, it facilitated the dissemination of scientific books, journals, and thus new ideas. Professionals traveled more often than before and studied scientific advancements abroad. Wolfram Kaiser and Johan Schot call this development the “Origins of Technocratic Internationalism,” and Arnold Pacey aptly speaks of “technological dialogue.³⁶ Second, as a newly implemented technology, the railroad itself demanded a myriad of skills and involved many branches of industry. Relevant knowledge and machinery spread from Great Britain (and increasingly from the US) to continental Europe and beyond. Prussia participated in these globalizing developments. At first, it imported knowledge and machinery from Great Britain, where George Stephenson and others had developed the steam locomotive.

In the next step, entrepreneurs such as August Borsig in Berlin built up Prussia’s robust railroad industry, serving domestic needs and exporting its manufactured items. One of the importing countries was the Russian Empire, which in the first decades after 1850 was heavily dependent on the import of locomotives, rail, machinery, and even coal to meet the demands of railroad expansion.³⁷ In the Russian case, French civil engineers played a unique role. Within the French-led Great Russian Railroad Company (Grande société des chemins de fer russes), they were responsible for the vital link between St. Petersburg and Warsaw and its branch line to the East Prussian border at Verzhbolovo (Virbalis). The whole structure of the crucial Niemen Bridge at Kaunas was planned and manufactured in France. Subsequently, steamships transported the bridge’s iron parts to Tilsit (Sovetsk) in East Prussia and then up the Niemen River to the construction site at Kaunas.³⁸ Already in those days, engineers from different countries unconsciously projected a borderless Europe, thus laying “the foundation for the formal process of European integration.”³⁹

Carl Lentze: A Networking European

One of the Prussian civil engineers representing the emerging international scientific community was Carl (or Karl) Lentze.⁴⁰ He was born in Soest in the Prussian province of Westphalia in the western part of the monarchy. In 1823, he graduated from the renowned Berlin Bauakademie and worked as a field surveyor in the Prussian administration.⁴¹ Subsequently, he passed the examination to become a government-approved master builder, which enabled him to pursue a career in the Prussian administration. In the 1830s, he worked as inspector for river works in Münster and Düsseldorf in Westphalia. In 1844, he oversaw the first plans concerning the regulation of the Vistula River. One year later, he signed up for the Royal Commission for the Construction of the Vistula and Nogat Bridges on the Ostbahn.⁴²

It is not known if Lentze traveled extensively before the mid-1840s. However, he had indisputably joined the global scientific community at this time. Working on the Vistula Bridge project, in the winter of 1844–1845, he made an extensive study trip to France, Great Britain, and Ireland to gather data for the construction. Study trips like this one were a global phenomenon and part of what Ben Marsden and Crosbie Smith have called “technological tourism.”⁴³ In the 1840s, there was no example of a railroad bridge of this size in the world. To this end, Lentze analyzed road bridges such as the Menai and Conwy Bridges in Wales (1819 and 1826). However, railroad engineers faced the much heavier loads and vibrations borne by railroad bridges in comparison with road bridges.⁴⁴

Several smaller structures set up in Great Britain at this time proved to have a significant influence on the ultimate design of the Ostbahn bridge. In his report on the tour, Lentze described cast-iron, wrought-iron, and wooden bridges, weighing the advantages and disadvantages of dozens of newly erected structures, both railroad and road crossings.⁴⁵ He contacted the responsible civil engineers, made drawings, took notes on every detail of the designs, and checked on atmospheric influences and the impact of heavy loads and troops. He noted even small cracks in bridge piers and rust on different construction parts and reported countermeasures to protect the metal elements.

Lentze was particularly impressed by innovative suspension bridges, such as the Royal Canal Bridge on the Dublin–Drogheda Railroad in Ireland.⁴⁶ This bridge was a wrought-iron lattice construction and relatively light. Civil engineers from all over Europe visited the construction site frequently, questioning the project’s durability. Lentze’s calculations proved the bridge’s stability and attested that additional tension rods and counterweights on both ends of the bridge were unnecessary.⁴⁷ The technical description of the Royal Canal Bridge reveals that it had a significant influence on Lentze’s decision on how to span the Vistula. Technological similarities notwithstanding, the Tudor style of the future bridge’s gates bears a certain resemblance to the 1826 Conwy suspension bridge in Wales.⁴⁸

However, the Royal Canal Bridge was not a genuine British-Irish invention. Numerous and typically relatively small wooden lattice bridges existed in the United States before, as attested to by an 1820 patent by Ithiel Towne that subsequently influenced bridge-building developments in the US and Europe.⁴⁹ Later, American engineers developed this system further (1840 patent by William Howe), and by the 1840s, it had made its way into railroad construction in the United States and Great Britain.⁵⁰ In 1841, Amasa Stone and William Howe collaborated with railroad engineer George Whistler to build the latticework Connecticut River Bridge in Springfield, Massachusetts, as part of the Western Railroad. This design would later be called “Howe truss” or “American lattice.”

European civil engineers closely followed the developments in North America; know-how regularly traversed the Atlantic, and both Europeans and Americans studied bridge designs on the other continent.⁵¹ Not surprisingly, when the Russian Empire planned the first large-scale railroad project, connecting St. Petersburg to Moscow (the Nicholas Railroad), two Russian engineers went to the United States to study railroad and bridge design. Pavel Melnikov and Nicholas Kraft arrived in June 1839 and spent one year in North America. They made the acquaintance of George Whistler, who, in 1842, traveled to the Russian Empire to advise on the railroad.⁵² As a result, the empire introduced the five-foot railroad gauge Whistler recommended; Melnikov’s and Kraft’s study of American lattice-truss bridges was also applied to the Nikolaev Railroad’s nine multispan bridges.⁵³

Yet another European traveling to the US was Habsburg engineer Carl Ghega. In 1842, he studied wooden bridges in various parts of the country. Since North American crossings were different from their European counterparts—spanning broader streams and applying wooden construction materials—Ghega was convinced that studying them could influence European bridgebuilding in significant ways. He described the famous “Latticework wood bridges” by Ithiel Town in great detail.⁵⁴ A German engineer examining the construction of American wooden lattice bridges was Karl Culmann, who in 1851 published his research in a report containing detailed graphs and calculations.⁵⁵

While Lentze did not explicitly mention American bridges in his 1844 report, given the extensive publications on the topic, he must have been aware of the importance of this design for American and Russian civil engineering.⁵⁶ During Lentze’s trip, other observations may also have influenced his planning. For example, he described the Garonne River regulations in France, showing similarities to his later work on the Vistula. At Dirschau, since 1844, thousands of workers carried out civil works to make the future crossing less prone to flooding and ice drift. In his report, Lentze described new techniques to produce a more durable concrete, used at the docks in Liverpool and implemented later in Dirschau.⁵⁷

In November 1846, Lentze submitted his construction plans for the bridge. Swiss engineer Rudolph Eduard Schinz was responsible for the static calculations. After heavy ice drift in the previous winter, which in the future might have compromised a too-narrow bridge design, Lentze decided to increase the width between the bridge piers to 145 meters to allow for the ice’s flow to the sea. The only bridge type thus far that had proved capable of securely spanning a similar width was the suspension bridge. Consequently, Lentze planned on a similar design at Dirschau.⁵⁸

Political Upheaval Influences the Bridge Design

In 1847, while Lentze awaited the king’s final approval of his plans, about 7,700 workers were employed mainly in river works, in housing construction, in brickworks, and at the iron foundry.⁵⁹ As we have seen, for political reasons, at this point, the Prussian king ordered an almost complete building freeze. He required the Prussian United Diet’s approval of government bonds needed to build the Ostbahn. However, the reform-minded protoparliament tried to link its endorsement to far-reaching political reforms angrily rejected by the king.

Figure 3.2. Old Dirschau railroad bridge over the Vistula. Lithography by W. Loeillot, Berlin, Zeitschrift für Bauwesen 5, no. 9/10 (1855): Blatt 49. Courtesy of Berlin University of the Arts, University Library, Sign. 2 B 172–5.1855.

Lentze took advantage of the building freeze and went on a second study trip to Great Britain. Accompanied by Prussian building director (Generalbaudirektor) Friedrich Mellin and the head of the Dirschau Royal Machinery Company, H. W. Krüger, he visited the construction sites of two innovative railroad bridges on the Chester and Holyhead Railway in Wales, crossing the Conwy River and the Menai Straits.⁶⁰ In charge of the plans was Robert Stephenson, son of railroad pioneer George Stephenson. The most sophisticated structure on the line was the Britannia Bridge, spanning the Menai Strait. The bridge was a meeting point for many famous engineers who debated its novel design, such as British engineer and industrial infrastructure pioneer Isambard Kingdom Brunel.⁶¹ The bridge consisted of two 140-meter rectangular wrought-iron tubes and two additional tubes of 70 meters each. In late 1846, the railroad company opened the Conwy Bridge to rail traffic, followed by the inauguration of the Britannia Bridge in early 1850.⁶²

As a result of his visit to Great Britain, Lentze abandoned the idea of constructing a suspension bridge to span the Vistula. He combined features of the Britannia and the Royal Canal Bridges. Instead of the heavy and more expensive tube, he adopted a wrought-iron lattice, which had never been used for a bridge of this length before. While the design did not convince Stephenson, history proved Lentze right.⁶³ While tubular railroad bridges soon became outdated, the lighter and less expensive wrought-iron truss bridges pioneered by Lentze and others prevailed for another decade.

In 1850, the Prussian government promoted Lentze to senior government building officer to elevate his position and salary. Seven years later, he completed the bridges at Dirschau and nearby Marienburg. At 785.28 meters, the bridge at Dirschau was near twice the length of Britannia Bridge.⁶⁴ Prussian engineers and statesmen contemporarily qualified it as a significant feat of engineering and sometimes even referred to it as a “national edifice” or the “new wonder of the world.”⁶⁵ Remarkably, while professional journals from the German lands revealed the influence of American and western European construction on Lentze’s work, accounts in popular periodicals rarely did.⁶⁶ If at all, the authors mentioned the Britannia Bridge solely. German contemporaries judged the latter’s construction as ingenious, but not without praising the Dirschau Bridge as superior. In 1857, German traveler Louis Passarge compared the Britannia Bridge to a hollowed-out tree trunk of Indigenous Americans (Indianer). “Compared to this, the Dirschau Bridge is an elegant gondola. . . . The lattice bridge is the more ingenious child of the ingenious Britannia tubular Bridge.”⁶⁷ However, as we have seen, American wooden precursors and the Irish Royal Canal Bridge strongly influenced its construction details as well.⁶⁸

The Prussian government was conscious of the bridge’s role in its prestige. While they commissioned a German national iconography on the eastern portal of the bridge, they also self-confidently approved an iconography of the western portal that underpinned modern Prussia’s reputation in science and technology. The portal depicted King Frederick William IV with four princes and representatives of his subjects. On the right were members of the building commission with Lentze and Minister of Finance August von der Heydt. On the left, ordinary subjects, among them a child, looked up to the monarch, hailing him and presenting local produce such as sheaves and flowers. While the eastern portal of the bridge, with its depiction of medieval history, was an ahistorical window into a nationalized German past, the western portal was a window into Prussia’s glorious present and future, where economy, sciences, and technology flourished.⁶⁹

Like Carl Lentze, Friedrich August Stüler, the creator of both portals, embodied the technological progress represented by the bridge’s structure. Being one of the founding fathers of the Berlin Union of Architects (Architekten-Verein zu Berlin), he had made extensive study trips before the Prussian king appointed him a royal architect. His expertise stemmed from his time as a student at the Berlin Building Academy, the Academy of Arts, the Berlin University, and from his extensive tours of European countries such as Italy, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Hungary, Sweden, and Russia.⁷⁰ Like other architects, he did not limit his professional activities to his home country. He also submitted original designs in international competitions, such as the St. Petersburg Winter Palace reconstruction.⁷¹

Figure 3.3. The western portal of the Dirschau Bridge depicts the Prussian king, his grateful subjects, and the bridge’s engineers. Illustrirte Zeitung Leipzig, 874 (March 31, 1860): 241. Courtesy of Austrian National Library, ANNO.

International Recognition

While the influence of numerous European and American designs on the Dirschau Bridge’s construction is evident, it is equally informative to compare Prussia’s praise of the Vistula Bridge to the response from the global scientific community. The bridge was worth mentioning in the Journal of the Franklin Institute of April 1860. The journal listed “the immense bridge carrying the Royal Prussian Eastern Railway over the Vistula” among other wide-span railway bridges, like the Niagara Falls Suspension Bridge.⁷² As leading British and American professional journals of the 1840s, 1850s, and 1860s reveal, civil engineers in the northern hemisphere closely followed the bridge’s construction. At the 1862 London International Exhibition, the Prussian minister of commerce and the “Royal Engineer Works at Dirschau” were awarded medals for outstanding civil-engineering achievements.⁷³ However, foreign civil engineers perceived the Prussian successes from a broader perspective, revealing connections to similar developments elsewhere. In this context, being aware not of Prussian geography but of the importance of the mere structure, British civil engineer William Humber defined Lentze’s bridge “over the Dershaw [sic], near Berlin” as “a work surpassing even the Britannia Bridge in magnitude.”⁷⁴ In his address at the annual meeting of the Institution of Civil Engineers of Ireland in 1866, President Robert Mallet underpinned the global importance of “the railway lattice bridge of Dirschau, on the Vistula . . . in six spans, each of which is but thirty feet [9.1 meters] short of those of the Britannia bridge, and in the construction of which the great economy residing in the lattice, as contrasted with the tubular or box girder system, has been strikingly shown.”⁷⁵ A contemporary French travel guide thus praised the bridge as “one of the most beautiful works of art created in Europe.”⁷⁶

As Gregory Dreicer pointed out, the competition between the tubular and the lattice bridge designs turned into an international competition of sorts. In Great Britain, Stephenson had tremendous prestige even after the lattice design proved superior. For some time, he successfully defended his design against the “American lattice,” adapted by engineers in Prussia and other countries. As Mallet’s statement above suggests, debates might also have “pit[ted] Irishmen against Englishmen.”⁷⁷

Not only his study trips but also his cross-references to journals from abroad made Lentze part of an international scientific community.⁷⁸ At a time of improving railroad connections, numerous civil engineers traveled internationally. They returned with new ideas, observations, drawings, and the latest scientific journals and books. As the example of the Dirschau Bridge shows, leading European and American journals reprinted scientific articles, study trip reports, and news from other parts of the world.⁷⁹ One of the critical institutions of this exchange was the Washington-based Smithsonian Institution. Founded in 1846, it initiated an international exchange service of printed materials and specimens. The Smithsonian did not charge for this service, and the transatlantic shipping companies and the members of the German Customs Union gradually exempted the shipments from charges.⁸⁰ Andreas Daum argues that this service “established the most comprehensive and reliable information network in science,” with national offices and agents who ordered and transmitted books, journals, and specimens to and from the United States.⁸¹

In 1857, Die Natur editor Karl Müller claimed that natural science would “make the world a ‘common, spiritually free homeplace’ for everyone,” creating a spirit of cosmopolitanism.⁸² As we have seen, professionals not only read about achievements made abroad but also more often got into direct interaction with one another. This development would soon gain an even broader dimension. The mid-nineteenth century saw the emergence of congresses as “true factories of international knowledge.”⁸³ World exhibitions, the first of which was held in London in 1851, provided another competitive forum for international knowledge exchange. As we saw in chapter 1, the exhibition’s Crystal Palace galvanized visitors and influenced the design of other large industrial structures, such as the Ostbahn’s railroad stations. Martin Kohlrausch and Helmuth Trischler hold that at “the Crystal Palace, professionals from every conceivable technical field could study state-of-the-art machinery—and take their discoveries back home to fertilize their nations’ efforts at industrialization.”⁸⁴ Railroad and transoceanic steamship networks enabled the emergence of this world of science that was no longer confined to national or geographic borders. As Gangolf Hübinger has pointed out, the emerging international culture of experts was a dynamic system whose protagonists “produced, organized, stored, selected or canonized” knowledge.⁸⁵

This universal spread of expertise did not necessarily abolish mental borders between states and the emerging modern nations. It often led to fierce rivalries about which country was at the forefront of scientific supremacy.⁸⁶ The Dirschau Bridge is an excellent example of competition between different “nationalized” designs, where engineers created “national building mythologies” on the engineering level.⁸⁷ Similarly, for the British, the Britannia Bridge and its tubular design constituted “a symbol of national pride” and “political power.”⁸⁸ In this context, it is not surprising that, in 1856, Karl Müller made a case for distinct nations and distinct national sciences.⁸⁹ The German praise for the Dirschau Bridge and its comparison to the allegedly less advanced Britannia Bridge is one example of this dichotomy between knowledge internationalization and nationalization. This dichotomy would become even more apparent in the years preceding World War I.

Lentze’s Dirschau Bridge served as a model for numerous bridges built during this time in Germany and other parts of Europe and North America. To give just one example, in 1855, the Prussian government transferred Dirschau construction supervisor Hermann Lohse to Cologne, where he oversaw the city’s first railroad bridge, accomplished in 1859. Although the bridge was much smaller, its construction resembled that of the Dirschau Bridge, especially regarding the structure and national imagery.⁹⁰ The Rhine River bridges at Kehl (1858–1861) and Waldshut (1858–1859) in western Germany are other prominent examples.⁹¹ After 1870, the era of tubular lattice bridges ended with the development of new civil-engineering technologies. Over time, because of increased rail traffic, the single-track Dirschau and Marienburg Bridges proved to be insufficient. Hence, in 1890–1891, the railroad company erected new bridges next to the original ones—consisting of novel lens-shaped girders designed by Johann Wilhelm Schwedler and Georg Christoph Mehrtens.⁹²

CREATING A STANDARDIZED RAILROAD WORLD

International cooperation and competition in science and the emergence of a worldwide interconnected transportation network revealed yet another challenge of transnational exchange: the lack of standardization in time and measurements. This was true at both the national and the international levels.

As we have seen in the case of central Europe, Prussian railroad lines collaborated with adjacent companies to create a unified technological space. The transnational Union of German Railroad Administrations (1847) embodied this space.⁹³ While this was a crucial step to coordinate operations across different lines, some of them cross-border, it did not resolve the question of diverging times and schedules. There was no general standard time in the countries where railroads were under construction in the mid-nineteenth century. In the predominantly agricultural societies, the sun decided when people worked and when they rested. If exact time was needed, people focused on local or solar time, usually indicated by clocks and bells on spires, leading to a “bewildering variety of local times that varied from city to city.”⁹⁴ For example, between Berlin and Königsberg, the solar times were twenty-eight minutes apart.⁹⁵ In 1825, Prussia introduced a mandatory “Berlin standard time” on its postal system to ensure punctual stagecoach travel.⁹⁶ However, this was limited to the small group of the traveling public and those working for the postal service. The Great Western Railway in Great Britain was the first company to introduce a railroad standard time, and other European railroad lines followed.

Figure 3.4. Dirschau railroad station and Vistula bridges, ca. 1900. Postcard, author’s collection.

Still, in the early days of the railroad, standard time was only observed by a (growing) mobile minority that needed reliable schedules to be at the station on time and reach connecting trains along the route.⁹⁷ Increasingly, the centralized station time resonated with the growing number of those who worked for the railroad companies. Coachmen had to be punctual for train arrivals and departures, and so did all those who catered to the needs of smooth railroad operations, from railroad employees to food suppliers on the platforms and at the buffets. Even before the Ostbahn reached Dirschau, we can imagine the challenge of coordinating 7,700 workers at the construction site and in the workshops. Workers usually dwelled in the vicinity, while the supervisors hailed from Berlin. Like those coordinating the growing industrial workforce in Berlin’s factories, entrepreneurs had to decide on the start and end times of the daily work schedule to ensure an appropriate workflow. Work schedules usually followed solar time, announced from Dirschau’s spires. Once the railroad arrived, the “authority of the station clock” ultimately defined the flows and imposed its time regime.⁹⁸ Dirschau was in sync with an increasingly interconnected world, defining local routines by railroad time.

Given the growing significance of punctuality, it is surprising that it still took several decades to implement an overall standard time. In 1872, Berlin time was implemented in northern Germany, and in 1883, the North American railroads ensured the same for their jurisdiction. Slowly, not only railroad administrations but also lawmakers and bureaucrats “understood uniform time to be a technocratic device in the service of national interests and national administrative rationality.”⁹⁹ This rationality soon crossed national borders, and in 1884, an international conference in Washington, DC, divided the world into standard time zones based on Greenwich (solar) time. After a fierce debate among the military, state agencies, and engineers, politically unified Germany finally switched to central European time in 1893; France introduced western European time in 1911, and the Russian Empire imposed its own St. Petersburg time, sixty-one minutes ahead of central European time, in 1874.¹⁰⁰

International agreements on timekeeping were not the only challenge in an increasingly connected world. For example, railroad, telegraphy, and postal systems required international agreements to facilitate cross-border connections between state-owned and private companies. As a result, in Paris in 1865, the International Telegraph Union, later renamed International Telecommunication Union, was founded.¹⁰¹ The Universal Postal Union followed in 1874. Also, railroad companies from different European countries gathered once a year at International Railroad Congresses to adjust their timetables and regulate cross-border connections. In 1882, they signed the Convention on Technical Unity of Railroads (Convention relative à l’unité technique dans le domaine des chemins de fer) to technically standardize the different systems of tracks and wagons and their operation.

As far as a unified system of weights and measures is concerned, the situation was even more complicated. In the 1860s, politicians, scientists, and journalists from France, the United States, and the German lands advocated for the global introduction of the metric system. They regarded it as crucial for the international advancement of technology. However, its implementation has been complicated and remains far from being universal today. While many states formerly occupied by Napoleon kept the French metric system even after 1815, there existed a myriad of different standards in other parts of the European continent, even within a single country. The International Statistical Congresses established in 1853 demanded in vain the worldwide introduction of the metric system—a task that politicians and economists are still dealing with today.¹⁰² As we have seen in the second quotation at the beginning of this chapter, in the mid-nineteenth century, disseminating scientific knowledge required linguistic translation and the conversion of units—with possible errors made along the way.

It is essential to study Carl Lentze’s career within the framework of the international developments of the mid-nineteenth century, such as the creation of an increasingly interconnected, standardized world. During the construction of the Vistula Bridge, Lentze was already a civil engineer with an international reputation. In October 1855 and June 1865, an International Commission for the Piercing of the Isthmus of Suez convened in Paris to prepare for the construction of the Suez Canal. Lentze was the Prussian representative, introduced as “Counselor of the Vistula works” (travaux hydrauliques) and “Counselor of the Ministry of Commerce and Public Works and Chief Engineer of River Works in Prussia.”¹⁰³ The commission consisted of four members from France, four from Great Britain, and one each from the Netherlands, Spain, Austria-Hungary, Sardinia, and Prussia. Shortly before his passing, Lentze oversaw the preparations for the Kiel Canal (Nord-Ostsee-Kanal), which would enable much quicker and safer navigation between the North Sea and the Baltic Sea.

CONCLUSION

The Dirschau Bridge and other railroad structures in the region are excellent examples of the dichotomy between the German-nationalist notion of fulfilling a “civilizing mission” in east central Europe, on the one hand, and the transnational flows of knowledge, on the other. These two sides of the same coin which is modernity manifested in the bridge—national in form and transnational in content.

In the triangle between Toruń to the south, Dirschau to the northwest, and Marienburg to the northeast, Prussia’s ambition to culturally homogenize and gradually Germanize its eastern borderlands manifested in the nationalist iconography of several railroad structures. In the ethnically diverse region of West Prussia, the railroad was one of the devices at hand to create a uniform German “ethnoscape.”¹⁰⁴ The bridges of Dirschau and Marienburg referenced the Teutonic Knights’ medieval state, the Lithuanians’ subjugation, and the economic development of pagan territories. Depicting an openly anti-Polish iconography, the bridge in Thorn even moved one step further. Gregor Thum has coined the accurate term “Mythicization of Germany’s eastern Borderlands.”¹⁰⁵ Along these lines, the bridges served as critical infrastructure between the monarchy’s western and eastern parts. However, their design also shows a feeling of German superiority over other nations in this part of Europe, based on an alleged medieval German national history in its eastern borderlands and beyond. This is part of the broader phenomenon of “invented traditions.”¹⁰⁶

Similarly, the bridge is evidence of increasingly dense transnational engineering networks developing alongside the railroad. While contemporaries praised the Dirschau Bridge as a superb Prussian achievement, eclipsing even the British Britannia Bridge, they often disregarded the transnational genealogy of this crucial Ostbahn railroad structure. Carl Lentze traveled extensively in the years preceding construction and during a building freeze in 1847–1848. As Lentze’s travel reports and evidence from contemporary scientific journals reveal, the bridge’s ultimate design was significantly influenced by structures and technologies from the United States, Great Britain, Ireland, and France. Scientists’ mobility—mostly in first class—may not have been significant in numbers, but it was substantial in the way it shaped the world. Lentze and many others tapped into transnational flows of knowledge multiplied through journals, study trips, congresses, and personal meetings.

The transnational engineering world ultimately demanded a standardized world—be it in terms of a standard time or of international agreements, organizations, and conferences. While the metric system did not entirely replace national measurement patterns, it still left a significant impact as a point of reference for the cross-border transmission of technological knowledge.

NOTES

1.N. N., “Die Eisenbahnbrücken bei Dirschau und Marienburg,” 285.

2.N. N., “Prussian Railway Bridges.”

3.For a comprehensive description of the Vistula bridges at Dirschau, refer to Massel and Malinowski, “Mosty na Wiśle w Tczewie.”

4.Bleich, Der Erste Vereinigte Landtag, 1518.

5.Passarge, Aus dem Weichseldelta, 3.

6.Passarge.

7.Ramm, “Der Bau und das bewegte Schicksal der Dirschauer Brücke,” 64. For a contemporary description of the workshops and factories, refer to Passarge, Aus dem Weichseldelta, 30–38.

8.Preuß, Dirschau’s historische Denkwürdigkeiten, 51; “Dirschau.”

9.On the concept of “civilizing missions,” refer to Schröder, “Mission impossible?”

10.Bleich, Der Erste Vereinigte Landtag, 1518.

11.Breuer, Die ersten preußischen Eisenbahnbrücken, 5.

12.Breuer.

13.As far as the reevaluation of the Gothic style in Great Britain is concerned, refer to Brooks, Gothic Revival, 129–200. For other European countries, refer to pages 261–288.

14.Werquet, “Landschaft und Monument.”

15.On the history of Marienburg Castle, with a strong focus on its nineteenth-century reconstruction, refer to Boockmann, Die Marienburg im 19. Jahrhundert.

16.Thum, “Megalomania and Angst,” 45–46.

17.Traba, “Próby państwowej monopolizacji pamięci”; Ekdahl, “Battle of Tannenberg-Grunwald-Żalgiris.”

18.Thum, “Megalomania and Angst,” 42.

19.Sienkiewicz, Krzyżacy. On Sienkiewicz’s role in the making of the modern Polish nation, refer to Porter-Szűcs, Poland in the Modern World, 28.

20.Freytag, Soll und Haben, e.g., 738, 821, 824. For an English annotated edition, refer to Freytag, Debit and Credit.

21.“Stenographische Berichte . . . 20. Dezember 1849,” 1661.

22.Halicka, “Die Weichsel.”

23.Börsch-Supan and Müller-Stüler, Friedrich August Stüler.

24.Breuer, “Technische Wunderwerke,” 36–42; Klein, “Kollisionen im Stadtraum,” 68, 72–75.

25.Richards and MacKenzie, Railway Station, 30. On the architecture of the historical Dirschau station building, refer to Wołodźko, “Neogotycka architektura mostów kolejowych,” 114–118.

26.Ramm and Groh, Zeugin der Geschichte, tables 19, 21. The indicated source for the reliefs and their descriptions in this book is incomplete. Refer to N. N., “Die Eisenbahnbrücken bei Dirschau und Marienburg”; N. N., “Bläser’s Relief für das Portal der dirschauer Weichselbrücke.”

27.Schivelbusch, Railway Journey, 62.

28.Schultze, “Das Empfangs-Gebäude des Bahnhofs zu Dirschau.”

29.Bömelburg, Friedrich II. zwischen Deutschland und Polen, 217–225.

30.Kola, “Most kolejowy w Toruniu.”

31.Böhning, Die nationalpolnische Bewegung, 139.

32.Passarge, Aus dem Weichseldelta, 4–5. Translation: Jesse Lillefjeld.

33.Eduard Knoblauch was responsible for the Ostbahn station buildings at Bromberg, Elbing, Schneidemühl, Danzig, and Königsberg, among others. Refer to Wallé, Eduard Knoblauch, 34–37, 49; Charbonnier, Carl Heinrich Eduard Knoblauch. Numerous sketches and technical drawings exist of the Dirschau bridge and its construction. In addition, landscape painter Eduard Gaertner immortalized many other original vistas of the now long-gone structures. Refer to Ruta and Usurski, Królewska Kolej Wschodnia.

34.Wucherpfennig, Bahnhof—(stadt)gesellschaftlicher Mikrokosmos, 73.

35.Mieck, “Große Themen der preußischen Geschichte,” 729–733.

36.Kaiser and Schot, Writing the Rules for Europe, 21–47, quotation on p. 21; Pacey and Bray, Technology in World Civilization, 181.

37.Westwood, History of Russian Railways, 22–57.

38.von Gimnig, “Die Eisenbahnbrücke über den Niemen bei Kowno,” 370.

39.Kaiser and Schot, Writing the Rules for Europe, x. On railroad engineers’ study trips more broadly, refer to Dinhobl, “Eisenbahn und Kulturtransfer.”

40.I would like to thank Wieland Ramm and Christoph Groh for their support in researching the achievements of Carl Lentze.

41.Bundesarchiv Koblenz, DB 9, M. Burschenschafterlisten, Berlin. I would like to thank Harald Lönnecker for this clue.

42.A. W., “Geheimer Oberbaurath a. D. Karl Lentze +,” 233–234.

43.Marsden and Smith, Engineering Empires, 227.

44.Breuer, “Technische Wunderwerke,” 30.

45.Lentze, “Bemerkungen über die größeren Brücken-Bauwerke.” The details of the tour are drawn from the original report.

46.Lentze, 105–109.

47.Lentze, 107–108.

48.Wołodźko, “Neogotycka architektura mostów kolejowych,” 111.

49.Mehrtens, “Zur Baugeschichte der alten Eisenbahnbrücken,” 104; Humber, Practical Treatise on Cast and Wrought Iron Bridges, 92.

50.Ramm and Groh, Zeugin der Geschichte, table 8; Darnell, “Pioneering Iron Trusses of Nathaniel Rider,” 69–70.

51.Darnell, “Pioneering Iron Trusses of Nathaniel Rider,” 73.

52.Gasparini, Nizamiev, and Tardini, “G. W. Whistler and the Howe Bridges on the Nikolaev Railway,” 5.

53.Gasparini, Nizamiev, and Tardini, 5–10.

54.Ghega, Über nordamerikanischen Brückenbau, 8–10.

55.Culmann, “Der Bau der hölzernen Brücken.” On Culmann’s trip to the United States, refer to Lehmann and Maurer, Karl Culmann und die graphische Statik, 56–86.

56.Mehrtens, “Zur Baugeschichte der alten Eisenbahnbrücken,” 104.

57.Lentze, “Bemerkungen über die größeren Brücken-Bauwerke,” 112–114.

58.Mehrtens, “Zur Baugeschichte der alten Eisenbahnbrücken,” 101.

59.Mehrtens, 102.

60.Ricken, “Die Anfänge des Eisenbahnbaus in Preußen (Teil 3),” 358. For a detailed reference concerning the design of these two bridges, refer to Fairbairn, Account of the Construction of the Britannia and Conway Bridges. The book’s cover page itself is evidence for the spread of scientific knowledge. The account was sold in Germany (Berlin, Frankfurt, Mannheim), the US (Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Washington, DC), Paris, Rotterdam, Liège, and Calcutta.

61.Brunel was a versatile engineer involved in bridge, tunnel, and steamship construction. Refer to Pugsley, Works of Isambard Kingdom Brunel.

62.For a detailed technical description of both the Britannia and Conwy Bridges, refer to Dempsey, Tubular and Other Iron Girder Bridges.

63.Stephenson, quoted in Ricken, “Die Anfänge des Eisenbahnbaus in Preußen (Teil 3),” 359.

64.Ramm, “Der Bau und das bewegte Schicksal der Dirschauer Brücke.”

65.Mehrtens, “Zur Baugeschichte der alten Eisenbahnbrücken,” 97.

66.Winterstein, “Bericht über die Reise des Architekten-Vereins,” 562.

67.Passarge, Aus dem Weichseldelta, 21.

68.See Lentze, “Die im Bau begriffenen Brücken,” 451–452; Lentze, “Bemerkungen über die größeren Brücken-Bauwerke,” 106.

69.Börsch-Supan and Müller-Stüler, Friedrich August Stüler, 221–223.

70.Wołodźko, “Neogotycka architektura mostów kolejowych,” 105.

71.Börsch-Supan and Müller-Stüler, Friedrich August Stüler, 222–223.

72.Herepath’s Railway Journal no. 1075, “Great Spans in Railway Bridges.”

73.N. N., “International Exhibition,” Mechanics’ Magazine; N. N., “International Exhibition,” Journal of the Franklin Institute.

74.Humber, Practical Treatise on Cast and Wrought Iron Bridges, 94.

75.N. N., “Institution of Civil Engineers of Ireland.”

76.Joanne, Guide du voyageur en Europe, 729.

77.Dreicer, “Building Bridges and Boundaries,” 138, 143–149.

78.At one point in his travel report, Lentze references Martin, Pont de Cubzac. Reference in Lentze, “Bemerkungen über die größeren Brücken-Bauwerke in Frankreich, England und Irland,” 95.

79.Refer to the following journals published in the 1840s, 1850s, and 1860s: Zeitschrift für praktische Baukunst, Verhandlungen des Vereins zur Beförderung des Gewerbfleißes in Preußen, Zeitschrift für Bauwesen, Mechanics’ Magazine and Journal of Engineering, Journal of the Franklin Institute, and Civil Engineer and Architect’s Journal.

80.Daum, “‘Next Great Task of Civilization,’” 292.

81.Daum, 293.

82.Karl Müller, “Der naturwissenschaftliche Völkerverkehr.”

83.Feuerhahn and Rabault-Feuerhahn, “La science à l’échelle internationale,” 5–6.

84.Kohlrausch and Trischler, Building Europe on Expertise, 3.

85.Hübinger, “Wissenschaften, Zeitdiagnosen und politisches Ordnungsdenken,” 13.

86.Feuerhahn and Rabault-Feuerhahn, “La science à l’échelle internationale,” 7, 10.

87.Dreicer, “Building Bridges and Boundaries,” 159.

88.Dreicer, 161–162.

89.Daum, “‘Next Great Task of Civilization,’” 290.

90.Concerning the first railroad bridge in Cologne, refer to Breuer, “Technische Wunderwerke,” 42–50.

91.Ramm and Groh, Zeugin der Geschichte, panels 24 and 25. For an extensive list of bridges following this design, refer to Ricken, “Die Anfänge des Eisenbahnbaus in Preußen (Teil 3),” 356.

92.Ramm and Groh, Zeugin der Geschichte, panels 26–28. On Mehrtens’s relevance for bridge construction, refer to Kurrer, “Georg Christoph Mehrtens.”

93.Schot, Buiter, and Anastasiadou, “Dynamics of Transnational Railway Governance.”

94.Evans, Pursuit of Power, 390.

95.Given a difference in latitude of seven degrees equaling four minutes of time difference for each degree.

96.Roth, Das Jahrhundert der Eisenbahn, 18.

97.Oliver Zimmer, “One Clock Fits All,” 156.

98.Zimmer, 68.

99.Ogle, Global Transformation of Time, 20.

100.Schivelbusch, Railway Journey, 43–44; Schenk, Russlands Fahrt in die Moderne, 131. For greater detail on the discussions in Germany, refer to Ogle, Global Transformation of Time, 33–37; Oliver Zimmer, “One Clock Fits All,” 50–59.

101.Rosenberg, “Transnational Currents in a Shrinking World,” 826.

102.Geyer, “One Language for the World,” 55, 62–63.

103.de Lesseps, Percement de l’Isthme de Suez. Exposé et documents officiels, 71, 74; de Lesseps, Percement de l’Isthme de Suez. Rapport et projet de la commission internationale, minutes of the meetings on pp. 331–366.

104.Smith, Myths and Memories of the Nation, 150–151.

105.Thum, “Megalomania and Angst.”

106.Hobsbawm, “Introduction: Inventing Traditions.”