Excerpt from Strength of Materials: A Comprehensive Presentation of Scientific Methods of Locating and Determining Stresses and Calculating the Required Strength and Dimensions of Building Materials Every layman is fascinated by a great engineering work - a large sewage system, a Keokuk dam, a twenty-story steel structure - and wishes he might be able to construct such work and carry it to completion. And yet he hardly appreciates the knowledge, experience, and judgment necessary to bring such a work to a satisfactory close. Time was when all of the details of such structures were determined by guesswork, but the developments in science and mathematics have changed all that. Formulas for the various types of stresses have been worked out; constants for every known material have been collected; and a multitude of diagrams and tables contribute to making the engineer's work as precise as a bookkeeper's balance. The strength and size of every rivet and the length and cross section of every girder in a steel structure are figured so they will bear the strains put upon them. The design of a masonry dam, the strength of the concrete mixture, and the amount of steel reinforcement are all mathematically determined in order to safely restrain the given volume of water behind it. The final judgment, therefore, as to the size of every part of the structure -must depend upon the designer's knowledge of "Strength of Materials." The treatment of Strength of Materials, as found in standard textbooks, is so clothed in abstruse mathematics that it is impossible for the average trained man to obtain a working knowledge of the subject. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.