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Yes sir, you want tuk-tuk?

On May 6, 2013

Are these rickshaws or tuk-tuks? It depends on whom you ask.

When I first went to northeast India in 2009, I learned that the little round three-wheeled taxis that plied the roads were known as rickshaws, just like the two-wheeled hand-drawn carts that I had read about in books. I also heard people call the motorized taxis “auto-rickshaws” or just “autos.”

Then when I went to visit Delhi, I discovered that many of the city’s rickshaw drivers called their own vehicles “tuk-tuks.” I could hardly step outside without a driver chasing me down and yelling, “Yes sir, you want tuk-tuk?” The word was obviously onomatopoeia for the put-putting sound made by some of the vehicles’ two-stroke engines.1 I assumed that “tuk-tuk” was just a regional name for auto-rickshaws.

It turns out that the term “tuk-tuk” did not originate in Delhi, or anywhere nearby. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the earliest recorded texts using the term refer to the three-wheeled taxis used in Thailand. Unfortunately, the OED doesn’t say how and when the term got from Thailand to India. During a summer term in Jaipur last year, one of my fellow students claimed that tourists imported the term “tuk-tuk” from Thailand. It’s not hard to imagine a dazed westerner arriving in India and remarking, “I say, Edward, there are tuk-tuks in India too.”

There are other possibilities too, of course. Business travelers may have introduced the term.

The case of rickshaws and tuk-tuks illustrates that names for technologies, as well as the technologies themselves, move ineffably across borders. In this case, three-wheeled motorized taxis originated in India and spread elsewhere in Asia. One name for the vehicles, though, originated in Thailand and traveled back to the country where the technology got its start.

Not all auto-rickshaws run on two-stroke engines; some have four-stroke engines, which run more smoothly. [↩]

Rebuilding bridges

By Willy

On April 28, 2013

In Archeology and monuments, USA

In the nineteenth century, the American South’s carriage roads used to cross the region’s many streams and rivers by means of wooden truss bridges. Very few of these bridges have survived into the twenty-first century, having falling prey to fire, floods, storms, modernization—and in some cases, the Union Army. A few bridges have survived, tucked away in isolated, underpopulated areas. Perhaps because of their rarity, covered bridges have acquired romantic mythos, even though they were originally built for economic development, not romance.1 Websites like this one catalog the surviving covered bridges in the region.

It came as a surprise when I realized that my map of Lee County, Alabama indicated that there was a covered bridge not far from where I live. According to the map, the Salem-Shotwell Bridge was just off of US-280, the highway that runs from Opelika, AL to Columbus, GA. I followed the map out to the indicated location one Saturday afternoon. Before I quite got to the bridge, a sign planted in the middle of the road claimed: “Bridge Closed Ahead.”

That was an understatement. As I got closer, I discovered that the bridge had vanished completely.

The forlorn original foundation of the Salem-Shotwell Bridge.

My map was more than a half-decade out of date. Come to find out, the bridge had broken in 2005, when a tree smashed into it during one of the fearsome thunderstorms that occur from time to time in the Alabama Piedmont.

The Salem-Shotwell Bridge’s destruction was an unfortunate loss, but it was not a complete waste. Enough of the original timbers and roofing had survived undamaged for the bridge to be reconstructed, with a shorter span, over a creek in Municipal Park in Opelika.

The reconstructed Salem-Shotwell Bridge at its new location in Opelika Municipal Park.

Side view of the reconstructed Salem-Shotwell Bridge.

Interior of the Salem-Shotwell Bridge.

Detail of the Town Truss of Salem-Shotwell Bridge.

Some of the leftover parts were used for the sign that identifies the bridge:

Wasting well: the bridge sign, made from unused parts of the original bridge.

The underside of the bridge holds a secret: steel I-beams, which support the weight of the reconstructed bridge. The original wooden truss (known as a Town Truss, after its inventor) is now just for show.

I-beams or no I-beams, I’m glad that the Salem-Shotwell Bridge was reconstructed. Its reconstruction is an example of what Kevin Lynch would call wasting well. Even in its present state, the bridge teaches anybody who sees it a little about the past.

A good book about southern covered bridges and their mythos is John S. Lupold and Thomas L. French, Bridging Deep South Rivers: The Life and Legend of Horace King (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2004). [↩]

Wasting Well on the High Line

By Willy

On March 21, 2013

In Archeology and monuments, USA

New York City’s High Line is the most unusual park I have seen. The park occupies an abandoned rail bed in lower Manhattan. Reuse of redundant industrial spaces—what Kevin Lynch called “wasting well”—is not uncommon in cities in the deindustrializing West. What is unusual is that the park’s rail line is elevated above street level. It was originally built in the 1930s to remove dangerous freight trains from Manhattan’s crowded streets. Traffic on the line declined during the 1960s, and the last train ran on it in 1980. During its decades of disuse and abandonment, the rail bed grew over with wild vegetation. Threatened with demolition, the line was saved by a group known as Friends of the High Line, which successfully lobbied to have the abandoned structure converted into a park. The first phase of the High Line Park opened in 2009.

The High Line’s conversion into a park did not obscure the place’s past lives as a functioning rail line or a derelict structure. As far as possible, the redevelopers left the original rails in place, or reinstalled them. In some places, the rails run alongside the park’s paved pathway. Elsewhere, the rails have been integrated directly into the pavement.

View of High Line Park.

Rails integrated into the pavement.

The park’s landscaping emphasizes the post-industrial nature of the site. Trees grow between the ties of the abandoned tracks.

Trees growing through the rails.

The current southern end of the High Line ends abruptly where the remainder of the original line was chopped off to make room for new development. The park’s developers left the cut open, allowing a glimpse of the heavy steel structure that was strong enough to hold freight trains above the street.

The southern terminus of the High Line.

The substructure of the High Line.

Since the early period of the republic, Americans have had a reputation for always wanting to throw away the old in favor of the new. This reputation is not undeserved. Americans built much of their industrial infrastructure cheaply, in the belief that something new and better would have come along by the time their infrastructure wore out. In the mid-nineteenth century, when the British were making railway viaducts out of stone so they would last forever, the Americans were making theirs out of wood, which was cheap but not durable. The ruins of abandoned rail lines can be seen all over the country, especially in places such as the mountain West where they have not been replaced by new development.1

In the latter half of the twentieth century, some Americans finally started to realize that the Old, as well as the New, has use and value. The High Line Park is one example of the Old being put to a creative and interesting New use.

Arnold Pacey contrasts the nineteenth-century British interest in monumentality and permanence with the contemporary American obsession with newness in The Maze of Ingenuity: Ideas and Idealism in the Development of Technology, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), 209-15. [↩]

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Technology, History, and Place

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Yes sir, you want tuk-tuk?

Rebuilding bridges

Wasting Well on the High Line

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