Cable-Stayed Bridge

A cable-stayed bridge is a bridge whose deck is supported directly by cables running from one or more towers, typically arranged in a fan-like pattern or in parallel lines, rather than by the continuous main cables of a suspension bridge. The Croatian-Venetian inventor Fausto Veranzio illustrated an early cable-stayed design in his 1595 book Machinae Novae, and several nineteenth-century suspension bridges, including the 1817 Dryburgh Abbey Bridge, the 1836 Victoria Bridge in Bath and the 1883 Brooklyn Bridge, incorporated cable-stayed elements alongside their main suspension cables. The modern form was developed independently in the twentieth century by engineers including Franz Dischinger, Fabrizio de Miranda, Riccardo Morandi and Fritz Leonhardt; Dischinger's Strömsund Bridge in Sweden, completed in 1955, is most often cited as the first modern cable-stayed bridge, and the type became widely popular again in the late twentieth century as new materials and construction machinery made it practical to replace aging older bridges.