Structures

}For anyone who has ever wondered why suspension bridges dont collapse under eight lanes of traffic, how dams hold backor give way underthousands of gallons of water, or what principles guide the design of a skyscraper, a nightgown, or a kangaroo, this book will ease your anxiety and answer your questions. Structures: Or Why Things Dont Fall Down is an informal explanation of the basic forces that hold together the ordinary and essential things of this worldfrom buildings and bodies to flying aircraft and eggshells. In a style that combines wit, a masterful command of his subject, and an encyclopedic range of reference, J. E. Gordon strips engineering of its technical mathematics and communicates the theory behind the structures of a wide variety of materials.Chapters on How to Design a Worm and The Advantage of Being a Beam offer humorous insights into human and natural creation. For architects and engineers there are cogent explanations of the concepts of stress, shear, torsion, fracture, and compression, and chapters on safety design and the relationship of efficiency to aesthetics. If you are building a house, a sailboat, or a catapult, here is a handy tool for understanding the mechanics of joinery, floors, ceilings, hulls, mastsor flying buttresses. Without jargon or over-simplification, Structures surveys the nature of materials and gives sophisticated answers to the most naive questions, opening up the marvels of technology to anyone interested in the foundations of our everyday lives. }

Table of Contents:
Foreword; The difficult birth of the science of elasticity; Why structures carry loadsor the springiness of solids; The invention of stress and strainor Baron Cauchy and the decipherment of Youngs modulus; Designing for safetyor can you really trust strength calculations?; Strain energy and modern fracture mechanicswith digression on bows, catapults and kangaroos; Tension Structures; Tension structures and pressure vesselswith some remarks on boilers, bats and Chinese junks; Joints, fastenings and peoplealso about creep and chariot wheels; Soft materials and living structuresor how to design a worm; Compression and bending structures; Walls, arches and damsor cloud-cappd towers and the stability of masonry; Something about bridgesor Saint Bnezt and Saint Isambard; The advantage of being a beamwith observations on roofs, trusses and masts; The mysteries of shear and torsionor Polaris and the bias-cut nightie; The various ways of failing in compressionor sandwiches, skulls and Dr. Euler; And the consequence was; The philosophy of designor the shape, the weight and the cost; A chapter of accidentsa study in sin, error and metal fatigue; Efficiency and aestheticsor the world we have to live in.