2-888-570 - The Print Collector/Heritage Images

The Great Exhibition Building in Hyde Park - Testing the Girders, 1850. 'This is effected by means of the hydraulic press invented by Mr. Bramah; an apparatus which, as our readers will doubtless remember, avails itself of the peculiar properties of fluids, which being submitted to compression, the whole mass is equally affected, and the compression operates in all directions. The amount of pressure used in testing the girders varies according to their strength, and the positions they will occupy in the building: those supporting the galleries are tested at 22 and 15 tons; and those which bear the root at 9 tons. Although the weight required to break any of these girders would probably be at least double that to which they are respectively tested, the latter, or testing weight, far exceeds any strain to which the most liberal calculation can imagine they are ever likely to be exposed'. From "Illustrated London News", 1850.