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Highlights for November 7
1775- Freedom promised to male slaves who join British army
Lord Dunmore, the British governor of the colony of Virginia, issued a proclamation granting freedom to any slave who was willing to join the British army in its fight against the American revolutionaries. The offer applied only to slaves owned by "rebels". About 800 slaves eventually accepted the offer.
1805 Lewis and Clark Reach the Pacific
The "Corps of Discovery," led by Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, reaches the Pacific Ocean. Lewis and Clark, who set out from St. Louis over a year earlier, are the first European explorers ever to accomplish the feat. On May 14, 1804, one year after the United States doubled its territory with the Louisiana Purchase, the expedition left St. Louis on a mission to explore the Northwest from the Mississippi River to the Pacific Ocean. Even before the U.S. government concluded purchase negotiations with France, U.S. President Thomas Jefferson commissioned Lewis, his private secretary, and Clark, an Army captain, to lead the expedition.
The Corps of Discovery featured twenty-eight men and one woman, a Native American named Sacajawea. The expedition traveled up the Missouri River in six canoes and two longboats, and wintered in Dakota before crossing into Montana where they first saw the Rocky Mountains. On the other side of the Continental Divide, they were met by Sacajawea's tribe, the Shoshone Indians, who sold them horses for their journey down through the Bitterroot Mountains. After passing through the dangerous rapids of the Clearwater and Snake rivers in canoes, the explorers reached the calm of the Columbia River, which led them to the sea.
On November 8, 1805, the explorers reached the Pacific Ocean. After pausing there for winter, the explorers began their long journey back to St. Louis. On September 23, 1806, after two-and-a-half years, the expedition returned to the city, bringing back a wealth of information about the largely unexplored region, as well as valuable U.S. claims to Oregon Territory. Future president Theodore Roosevelt later wrote that the Lewis and Clark Expedition "opened the door into the heart of the Far West."
Only four months after its completion, the Tacoma Narrows Bridge in Washington State suffers a spectacular collapse. The cause was the topography of the Tacoma Narrows, which turned the passageway into a giant wind tunnel. Miraculously, none perished on November 7, 1940, when the bridge collapsed into the waters some two-hundred-feet below.
When it opened in 1940, the Tacoma Narrows Bridge was the third-longest suspension bridge in the world. Built to replace the ferry system that took commuters from Tacoma across the Tacoma Narrows to the Gig Harbor Peninsula, the bridge spanned 2,800 feet and took three years to build. To save cost, the principle engineer, Leon Moisseiff, designed the bridge with an unusually slender frame that measured 39 feet and accommodated just two vehicular lanes.
The Tacoma Narrows Bridge opened with great fanfare on July 1, 1940. Human traffic across the waters of the Tacoma Narrows increased dramatically, but many drivers were drawn to the toll bridge not by convenience but by an unusual characteristic of the structure. When moderate to high winds blew, as they invariably do in the Tacoma Narrows, the bridge roadway would sway from side to side and sometimes suffer excessive vertical undulations. Some drivers reported that vehicles ahead of them would disappear and reappear several times as they crossed the bridge. On a windy day, tourists treated the bridge toll as the fee paid to ride a roller-coaster ride, and the Tacoma Narrows Bridge earned the nickname "Galloping Gertie."
Attempts were made to stabilize the structure, but they were in vain. On November 7, with a steady wind blowing at 42 mph, the roadway began to twist back and forth in an increasingly violent fashion. Before closing the span, the toll keeper on the bridge's west side let one last motorist pass, Tacoma News Tribune copy editor Leonard Coatsworth. Halfway across the bridge, Coatsworth lost control of his car. When the roadway tipped so sharply that it seemed his car would topple off, he decided to flee on foot. He tried to retrieve his daughter's black cocker spaniel from the back seat of the car, but the dog snapped at him and refused to budge. Coatsworth ran to safety and called the Tribune, who dispatched a reporter and photographer to the scene.
Tribune photographer Howard Clifford was the last man on the bridge before the center span broke off at 11 a.m. and plunged 190 feet into the turbulent Tacoma Narrows. Trapped on the suddenly destabilized side spans, he narrowly avoided being thrown off and ran to safety. The sole casualty of the disaster was the cocker spaniel in Coatsworth's car, which fell into the Narrows and disappeared beneath the foam.
At the time, the engineering community was perplexed about how a bridge designed to withstand winds of up to 120 mph could collapse in a wind of 42 mph. Experts still disagree on the exact cause of the bridge's destruction, but most agree the collapse was related to resonance, a phenomenon that also comes into play when a soprano shatters a glass with her voice. In the case of the Tacoma Narrows, the wind resonated with the natural frequency of the structure, causing a steady increase in amplitude until the bridge was destroyed.
After the Tacoma Narrows disaster, bridge builders took care to incorporate aerodynamics into their designs and build structures with complex frequencies. Wind-tunnel testing of bridge designs eventually became mandatory. A new Tacoma Narrows Bridge was finally erected in 1950, complete with a wider roadway, deep stiffening trusses under the roadway, and other features designed to dampen the effect of wind. In 1992, the remains of Galloping Gertie in the Tacoma Narrows were listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
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