San Francisco Butterfly Bridge

Rood · Post by **Rood** » Thu Aug 11, 2016 7:10 pm

Anyone remember if there is a thread for the Butterfly Bridge for San Francisco Bay? I must be doing something wrong when I try "Search", because all I get is a list of 150 pages of threads. I actually started going through those 150 pages, one-by-one, but that's a terribly tedious job, and for all I know there isn't a thread.

The reason I'm curious is that I've found an ink drawing that appears to be an early conception sketch of the Bay Bridge design. Of course the next problem would be getting the sketch on this site ... something that appears to be above my abilities.

I have a copy of the sketch on my computer.

SDR · Post by **SDR** » Fri Aug 12, 2016 10:12 am

Thanks, Rood. Yes, searching can be frustrating. If two words are selected, they must be separated by AND. But that only helps somewhat.

I searched "butterfly" and got 49 hits, this among them:

http://savewright.org/wright_chat/viewtopic.php?t=4375

You may use my e-mail address to send me the item, in any form you choose, and I should be able to post it here.

SDR

SDR · Post by **SDR** » Fri Aug 12, 2016 6:48 pm

Rood provides images:

A reinforced concrete pedestrian freeway overpass in Oslo, Norway:

SDR · Post by **SDR** » Fri Aug 12, 2016 8:52 pm

Oh, yes -- he also provided this link -- which will explain what we've seen:

http://www.history.com/news/students-us ... ice-bridge

Rood detects a similarity between Leonardo's early-sixteenth-century design and Wright's.

SDR

Macrodex · Post by **Macrodex** » Fri Aug 12, 2016 9:50 pm

Iirc, the movie Die Hard has a model of the Butterfly Bridge in it.

DRN · Post by **DRN** » Sat Aug 13, 2016 8:59 am

There is also a TV news crew in the Die Hard film with FLW in their call letters.

SDR · Post by **SDR** » Sat Aug 13, 2016 11:30 am

I've seen parts of a movie in which some scenes are shot at the Ennis house. The resident is, of course, evil . . . in keeping with the time-honored tradition in Hollywood of giving the bad guy the modern house.

SDR

DRN · Post by **DRN** » Sat Aug 13, 2016 3:10 pm

Ennis has been in a number of films. The two I remember seeing are "The Rocketeer" and "Black Rain" from the '80's or '90's.

SDR · Post by **SDR** » Sat Aug 13, 2016 3:46 pm

Ah. It was "The Glimmer Man," with Steven Seagal and Keenan Ivory Wayans . . .

SDR

Macrodex · Post by **Macrodex** » Sat Aug 13, 2016 4:23 pm

The TV show Sightings had an episode titled Ghost Report which has parts filmed in the Ennis house.

Rood · Post by **Rood** » Sat Aug 13, 2016 6:14 pm

I discovered da Vinci's 1502 bridge design for the Golden Horn while researching the new, 2.5 billion dollar third bridge over the Bosporus, which is scheduled to open in a few weeks.

Da Vinci's elevation drawing immediately caught my eye, and recalled FLLWright's Butterfly Bridge for San Francisco Bay. Of course da Vinci's bridge was designed to be built of stone, whereas Wright's bridge was based on reinforced concrete, but still there are striking similarities.

To have also discovered that variations of the da Vinci design have recently been constructed ... in wood and in "ice", and that preliminary plans have been made to construct his Galata Bridge over the Golden Horn ... also suggests that under the right circumstances Wright's Butterfly Bridge might yet see the light of day. We can only hope that it doesn't take 500 years.

A letter now in the Topkapi Museum from da Vinci to the Sultan, translated into Arabic, suggests da Vinci also proposed a suspension bridge over the Bosporus!

See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galata_Bridge

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XzbaB7KMQ2Y

SDR · Post by **SDR** » Sun Aug 14, 2016 9:51 am

". . . to pump water with a machine powered by its own motion. . ." (3:46)

Perpetual motion is a concept routinely dismissed by physicists and mechanical engineers. I am surprised to see it mentioned (in translation) by Leonardo, whose inventions seem to be based on sound physics.

SDR