A year and a half later, on December 28, 1879, at four in the afternoon, a crowded passenger train left Edinburgh on schedule for Dundee. It was Sunday; the train’s six cars held 200 passengers. It was another one of those stormy Scottish days. The train was due to arrive in Dundee at 7:15 in the evening; it was already 7:14 when the watchman in the south tower of the bridge signaled the train. To recount the final moments of the train after this final signal, I will turn to the words of Theodor Fontane, in a passage from a poem called “The Bridge on the Tay.”6
There! The train! At the south tower
Gasping on despite the storm’s power.
And Johnny speaks: “The bridge is due!”
But so it is, we press on through.
A rugged boiler, twice the steam,
Victors they with such a team,
It races, churns, does not relent,
Yet will succumb: the element.
Our bridge: our pride. I laugh and sigh
As I ponder times gone by,
All the sorrow, grief; emote!
That miserable old ferry boat!
Many a precious Christmas night
Spied I would our window light
While lingering in the ferry shack
Wishing I would soon be back.
The bridgehouse waits, north of the mouth,
With all its windows facing south,
The bridgemen pacing to and fro’
All southward staring, full of woe;
The wind grew furied, high but high.
And now, like fire from the sky,
It plummets, glory glowing bright,
Into the Tay. Again, it’s night.
There were no eyewitnesses to what happened that night. Not one passenger was saved. To this day it is not known whether the storm had already torn away the middle of the bridge before the convoy reached it, leaving the train to simply hurl itself into the void. Be that as it may, the storm is said to have made such an awful commotion that it drowned out all other sounds. However, other engineers at the time, especially those who had built the bridge, maintained that the storm must have blown the train off its tracks, causing it to hurtle against the guard rail. They insist that the train broke through the parapet and the bridge itself must have collapsed only much later. Thus the first indication of the disaster was not the crash of the tumbling train, but rather a fiery glow noticed at the time by three fishermen, who didn’t suspect it was caused by the plummeting locomotive. When these men alerted the south bridge terminal and communication was then attempted with the north terminal, no contact could be made. The wires had been ruptured. The Tay stationmaster was informed, who immediately set out in a locomotive. In a quarter of an hour he was on the scene. Carefully he drove out onto the bridge. But after roughly a kilometer, upon reaching the first middle support, the engine driver braked so suddenly that the locomotive almost jumped off the tracks. In the moonlight he had detected a gaping hole. The middle portion of the bridge was gone.
When you open the Funkstunde [Radio Times], you’ll see a picture of the collapsed bridge published around that time in the Leipziger Illustrierte Zeitung.7 Even in its iron construction, it bears similarities to a wooden bridge. Iron construction was still in its infancy and had yet to gain confidence in itself. But you all must know, at least from pictures, the structure in which iron first proudly declared its self-assurance, the structure that also stands as a monument to the calculations of the engineer: the tower completed by Eiffel for the Paris World’s Fair, just ten years after the collapse of the Tay Bridge. The Eiffel Tower, when it was built, had no function whatsoever; it was just a landmark, a wonder of the world, as they say. But then came the invention of radiotelegraphy. All of a sudden the soaring structure had found a purpose. Today the Eiffel Tower is the radio transmitter for Paris. Eiffel and his engineers built the tower in seventeen months. Every rivet hole was prepared in workshops with tenth-of-a-millimeter precision. Each of the 12,000 metal parts was specified in advance, down to the millimeter, along with every one of the two and a half million rivets. Not a chisel could be heard in the workshops. Even at the site, as in the draftsman’s studio, thought prevailed over physical strength, which was transmitted to sturdy scaffolds and cranes.8
“Die Eisenbahnkatastrophe vom Firth of Tay,” GS, 7.1, 232–7. Translated by Jonathan Lutes.
Broadcast on Radio Berlin, February 4, 1932, and on Southwest German Radio, Frankfurt, on March 30, 1932. The Berlin broadcast was announced in the Funkstunde for February 4, 1932, from 5:30–5:50 pm; the Frankfurt broadcast was announced in the Südwestdeutsche Rundfunk-Zeitung as taking place March 30, 1932, as the first of two broadcasts on the Youth Hour, which was scheduled to air from 3:15–4:00 pm.
1 J. J. Grandville, Un autre monde (Paris: H. Fournier, 1844), 138–9. For further references by Benjamin to the image of Saturn in Grandville, see The Arcades Project, 8, 18, 64–5 [B1a, 2], 151 [F1, 7]; and “The Ring of Saturn, or Some Remarks on Iron Construction,” also in The Arcades Project, 885–7, where Benjamin mentions the railway catastrophe at the Firth of Tay, and which might be an early draft of what eventually became the radio broadcast; Das Passagen Werk, in GS, 5.1, 51, 66, 112–13 [B1a, 2], 212 [F1, 7], and GS, 5.2, 1060–3.
2 Antoine Joseph Wiertz (1806–1865), Belgian painter and sculptor.
3 George Stephenson (1781–1848), the English engineer known as the “Father of the Railways,” is credited with building the first public railroad line powered by steam locomotive.
4 See John Ruskin, Modern Painters, vol. 3 [1856], in The Works of John Ruskin, eds. E. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn (London: George Allen, 1903–1912), vol. 5, 370.
5 This is almost certainly a reference to Sir John Fowler (1817–1898), an English engineer who devoted his career to railway construction in Britain and abroad. After the collapse of the Tay Bridge, which had been designed by Victorian engineer Sir Thomas Bouch, Fowler was one of the engineers appointed to review and redesign Bouch’s plan for another bridge in Scotland, the Forth Rail Bridge.
6 See Theodor Fontane, “Die Brück’ am Tay” [1880], in Werke, Schriften und Briefe, eds. Walter Keitel and Helmuth Nürnberger, vol. 6 (Munich: Hanser, 1978), 286.
7 The Illustrierte Zeitung (Leipzig), Germany’s first illustrated newspaper, was a popular weekly published from 1843 to 1944. This image was featured in the Funkstunde’s announcement of Benjamin’s broadcast. See Funkstunde 5 (January 29, 1932), 106.
8 For the last three sentences, see Alfred Gotthold Meyer, Eisenbauten: Ihre Geschichte und Ästhetik (Esslingen: P. Neff, 1907), 93. For this passage elsewhere in Benjamin, see The Arcades Project, 160–1 [F4a, 2]), 887; Das Passagen-Werk, GS, 5.1, 223 [F4a, 2] and GS, 5.2, 1063.
CHAPTER 27. The Mississippi Flood of 1927
When you open a map of middle America and look at the Mississippi — that giant-sized 5,000-kilometer-long current — you’ll see a somewhat sinuous and meandering line, with frequent bends but still clearly heading from north to south, a line on which you might think you could rely, just as you would on a boulevard, or on a railroad line. The people, however, who live on the banks of this current — the farmers, the fishermen, and even the city folk — know this appearance is deceptive. The Mississippi is continuously moving: not only its waters, flowing from source to mouth, but also its banks, which are forever changing. Within ten to fifty miles of the present-day watercourse lie countless lakes, lagoons, swamps, and ditches whose forms reveal themselves to be nothing other than segments of the former riverbed that has since shifted to the west or to the east. As long as the river flows through solid rock, roughly until the southern tip of the state of Illinois, its path is pretty straight. Further down, however, it enters into the flood plains and in this loose ground its restlessness and unreliability are revealed. Never is it satisfied with the bed it has made for itself. And on top of all this, every spring, great volumes of water from the lower Mississippi’s swollen tributaries, such as the Arkansas, the Red River, and the Ouachita, descend upon the flanks of the glutted Mississippi and their waters not only force out those of the main river but also create, so to speak, a barrier that congests the Mississippi, further contributing to the flooding of its adjacent states. And so it was that every year, for centuries, all the land within hundreds of miles was flooded. The plantations, fields, settlements, primeval forests, and gardens rested under a meter of water such that the area surrounding the river resembled an ocean whose islands were the summits of trees. At the beginning of the last century people began to secure individual segments of the shore against the annual mood changes of the river.