Warren Buffet once said, “It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it. If you think about that then you’ll do things differently”. Alas history is littered with instances where his words would have fallen on deaf ears.
Hubris, which means arrogant pride, as in pride before a fall, has been the ruin of many a man, no more so than Thomas Bouch, a Victorian civil engineer, whose life and career were blighted by the fall of the “High Girders” of the first Tay Railway Bridge, in Scotland, which was his design as well as his obsession. He would die a broken man ten months after the collapse.
The bridge before collapse (wiki commons)
The “High Girders” were thirteen long-span (245 feet max.) latticed girders 88 feet above the navigation channel in the middle of the Firth of Tay. On the evening of Sunday 28th December 1879, at around 7.20pm, a hurricane wind was howling down the Firth at an estimated 75 mph (Force 11 on the Beaufort scale) when the girders and their supporting piers came crashing down. To make matters far worse there was a north bound train travelling across the bridge at the time and it plunged down into the icy waters of the Firth of Tay with not one person aboard surviving. Seventy-five souls were said...
