The Romans, who used bridges to expand the empire through their military crusades, furthered the next iteration of bridge construction. In building their bridges, the Romans utilized their famous arch design, and the use of hydraulic cement that used pozzolana, which hardened to a stonelike consistency when mixed with lime, rubble, and water. Aside from the strength gained from the use of pozzolana, the Romans took advantage of their arch technology and developed a method of building piers, the cofferdam, which could support longer bridges. The cofferdam allowed for the implementation of wooden piles into riverbeds where rock was unavailable. The wooden piles, sealed with clay, formed a sheath. After the clay set, concrete was then poured …show more content…
In Asia, China also has experience with building bridges with arches, both stone, exemplified by the Chaw-Zhou Bridge and wood, represented by the Pu King Bridge in the town of Jinze in Shaghai. Another type of arch bridge, also first developed in Asia, was the flexible masonry-arch bridge. This type of bridge used thin, curved slabs of stone that enabled the bridges to withstand tension and compression pressures caused by the spongy silt that existed in the river valleys. The Chinese also developed the wooden cantilever bridge that took advantage of an ingenious cofferdam system of filling old boats with stone and sinking them between the piers, versus the Roman’s method of building them from scratch. Using a strategic crisscross pattern of logs, the cantilever bridge also allowed water to pass in between the piers, in an attempt to alleviate potential floodwater pressure. A third, and final type of bridge, also utilized by the Chinese, was an early version of reinforced concrete designs that were popular in the 20th Century. The Great Stone Bridge, also known as Zhaozhou Bridge, is an example of