#19th century bridge

[theseimmortalcoils]

The Bridge of Sighs, St John's College, Cambridge University. UK.

Almost 200 years old, the only College bridge built in the Victorian Gothic Style (by architect Henry Hutchinson)

Top two images - photographers unknown.

Third image - William Henry Fox Talbot, c. 1844. Courtesy of The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles

The last image includes Wren Bridge, photographer: Harold Jeffreys, 1916

W. H. Fox Talbot was an inventor and pioneer of photography

To read more about the bridge, go here

[pear-spective]

FIDELIA BRIDGES

Milkweeds (1876)

[weirdlookindog]

John Martin (1789-1854) - Bridge over Chaos, 1827

from 'The Paradise Lost of Milton, with illustrations designed and engraved by John Martin', in two volumes, published by Septimus Prowett, London, 1827

[escapismsworld]

Liberty Bridge, Budapest (1896, rebuilt 1945)

[life-imitates-art-far-more]

De Scott Evans (1847-1898) "Daisies" (c. 1885) Oil on linen Located in the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, Arkansas, United States Depicted is the artist’s signature, in the pseudonym S. S. David, appearing on a scrap of paper nailed to the wooden panel beneath the precarious bouquet, at risk of being washed away.

[mythological-art]

Oedipus and Antigone

Artist: Christoffer Wilhelm Eckersberg (Danish, 1783–1853)

Genre: Mythological Art

Date: 1812

Media: Oil on Canvas

Collection: The National Museum in Stockholm

Description

In this painting of Oedipus and Antigone from 1812, Eckersberg presents a doting and concerned Antigone and an elderly Oedipus who is visibly very frail. Oedipus nonetheless shoulders the burden of carrying some heavy clothing on his back, while Antigone walks more freely, albeit while expending energy tending to her father. I love the bright colours in this scene, but also the way Eckersberg manages to capture the melancholy of both characters and the tenderness between them. On they go, in sadness, across the bridge.

In Greek mythology Antigone is a Theban princess and a character in several ancient Greek tragedies. She is the daughter of Oedipus, king of Thebes; her mother is either Jocasta or, in another variation of the myth, Euryganeia. She is a sister of Polynices, Eteocles, and Ismene. The meaning of the name is, as in the case of the masculine equivalent Antigonus, "in place of one's parents" or "worthy of one's parents".

[sesamestreep]

it really is SUCH a shame that there’s no episode of TOS where the enterprise crew time jumps to Regency-era England or goes to a planet that modeled its culture on that era or something, because it would truly slap for every single main character. Like I don’t even have to explain why this would be awesome for Spock— Mr. I’ll-smash-a-computer-with-my-bare-hands-before-I’ll-admit-I’m-horny himself, king of repression, who basically recreated the famous Pride and Prejudice Hand Flex Scene™️ with his beloved Captain that one time, who meets a blind woman with a high tech gown that helps her “see” and LITERALLY tells her to give his compliments to her dressmaker, who mislead a woman once about his affections and tenderly promised to safeguard her reputation forever about it, who has the perfect angular features to be set off by a cravat—I mean, you get it, but then you’ve also got Kirk—handsome, affable, brave Naval captain who loves his crew more than himself, who falls in like deep profound love with every woman the plot throws at him—and then McCoy—cantankerous, sure, (ever heard of a grumpy/sunshine trope??) but with impeccable, downright old school manners towards women and, yeah, a doctor’s not that prestigious in Regency times, but for like a young lady in trouble who needs the protection of a man’s name or who just wants to piss off her stuffy aristocrat family by marrying “beneath” them, who could be better? If you throw Scotty in the mix, well, he’s Scottish, which [points at a whole subgenre of regency romance novels] is all he’d really need. I’m just saying they would have CLEANED UP, okay??

[oncanvas]

The Grand Display of Fireworks and Illuminations at the Opening of the Great Suspension Bridge between New York and Brooklyn on the Evening of May 24, 1883, Currier & Ives, 1883

Lithograph on paper 12 × 17 ½ in. (30.5 × 44.5 cm) The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City, NY, USA

[lindahall]

Kinzua Viaduct – Scientist of the Day

The Kinzua viaduct, a wrought-iron trestle railroad bridge in northwestern Pennsylvania, opened for traffic on Aug. 29, 1882.

read more...

[lionofchaeronea]

Study of a Night-Blooming Cereus, Martin Johnson Heade, 1871

[tanadrin]

on reflection, i think there's a symmetry to, say, doctors who are willing to refer patients to osteopaths or other ""holistic"" healthcare providers and the susceptibility of engineers to certain kinds of crankdom (of the "i-disproved-relativity-in-my-garage" type). both are forms of scientific training of a sort, but they're heavily outcome-focused and not theoretically focused. in large part, this is good! you do not as a doctor need to have a robust theoretical defense of every treatment you provide to patients, and it would be impossible to do so, because medicine is a huge and complicated subject. you do not, as an engineer, need to have a subtle grasp of theoretical physics to build a bridge; you just need to know what the latest developments in bridge-building are.

but it means in both cases you can have people who are skilled in their field, or who even excel, but who don't understand very well why certain techniques work. and in the case of alt medicine, where there has been considerable work to try to obfuscate or deceive people on how shaky the theoretical basis for their techniques are (stuff that literally if you remember your high-school physics and biology at all will make you go, "wait, there is no plausible mechanism for this, that's not how any of this works"), doctors who do not have time to read studies on RCT trials of every type of medicine they have ever heard of will blithely recommend stuff to patients that's actually complete horseshit, especially if the culture around them has been normalizing that woo as part of "holistic" therapy for the last hundred years, spurred on by alternative medicine practitioners and a public with a fear of needles and ~chemicals~ that medical practitioners have not done enough to allay.

it does not help that medicine only emerged very recently from being about 99% bullshit. like maybe at the end of the 19th century at best medicine was starting to be put on a broad-based empirical and theoretical footing--before that it's truly insane the stuff that wasn't just considered perfectly normal medical practice, but was considered serious Science. i mean, this is why we developed double-blind studies in the first place--because theoretical explanations of medical treatments are still necessarily often secondary to the process of finding ones that actually work, so we need really robust mechanisms to avoid confirmation bias or outright charlatanry. and while mainstream medicine is far from perfect in this respect, "alternative medicine" is all far, far worse.

[fascinatingeurope]

🇬🇧 The Conwy Railway Bridge, in Welsh known as Pont Rheilffordd Conwy, and Conwy Castle (Castell Conwy) in Wales - a vintage photochrom print from the 1890s.

The bridge was designed by Robert Stephenson and opened in 1849. It's still in use and protected as Welsh heritage.

[galleryofart]

Barnard Castle

Artist: Joseph Mallord William Turner (British, 1775–1851)

Date: circa 1825

Medium: Watercolor, pen and black ink, gouache and scratching out on medium, slightly textured, cream wove paper, mounted on thick, smooth, cream wove paper

Collection: Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, CT, United States

[weirdlookindog]

An Avenging Shadow, or, The Mystery of the Haunted Bridge

The Princess's Novelettes, published in UK 1886-1904.

[classic-art-favourites]

Ice Rink by August Piepenhagen, 1840s-1850s.

[have-you-read-this-short-fiction]

"An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" is available to read here