The Tay Bridge Disaster
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The Tay Bridge Disaster
"The Tay Bridge Disaster" is a poem written in 1880 by the Scottish poet William McGonagall, who has been recognized as the worst poet in history. The poem recounts the events of the evening of 28 December 1879, when, during a severe gale, the Tay Rail Bridge The Tay Bridge ( gd, Drochaid-rèile na Tatha) carries the railway across the Firth of Tay in Scotland between Dundee and the suburb of Wormit in Fife. Its span is . It is the second bridge to occupy the site. Plans for a bridge over the Tay t ... at Dundee collapsed as a train was passing over it with the loss of all on board. The number of deaths was actually 75, not 90 as stated in the poem. The foundations of the bridge were not removed and are alongside the newer bridge. The poem is among McGonagall's most well-known works, and has been lampooned by critics as one of the worst poems in the English language. It begins: :"Beautiful railway bridge of the silv'ry Tay :Alas! I am very sorry to say :That ninety li ...
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Poem
Poetry (derived from the Greek ''poiesis'', "making"), also called verse, is a form of literature that uses aesthetic and often rhythmic qualities of language − such as phonaesthetics, sound symbolism, and metre − to evoke meanings in addition to, or in place of, a prosaic ostensible meaning. A poem is a literary composition, written by a poet, using this principle. Poetry has a long and varied history, evolving differentially across the globe. It dates back at least to prehistoric times with hunting poetry in Africa and to panegyric and elegiac court poetry of the empires of the Nile, Niger, and Volta River valleys. Some of the earliest written poetry in Africa occurs among the Pyramid Texts written during the 25th century BCE. The earliest surviving Western Asian epic poetry, the ''Epic of Gilgamesh'', was written in Sumerian. Early poems in the Eurasian continent evolved from folk songs such as the Chinese ''Shijing'', as well as religious hymns (the Sanskrit ' ...
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William McGonagall
William Topaz McGonagall (March 1825 – 29 September 1902) was a Scottish poet of Irish descent. He gained notoriety as an extremely bad poet who exhibited no recognition of, or concern for, his peers' opinions of his work. He wrote about 200 poems, including "The Tay Bridge Disaster" and "The Famous Tay Whale", which are widely regarded as some of the worst in English literature. Groups throughout Scotland engaged him to make recitations from his work, and contemporary descriptions of these performances indicate that many listeners were appreciating McGonagall's skill as a comic music hall character. Collections of his verse remain popular, with several volumes available today. McGonagall has been lampooned as the worst poet in British history. The chief criticisms are that he was deaf to poetic metaphor and unable to scan correctly. His only apparent understanding of poetry was his belief that it needed to rhyme. McGonagall's fame stems from the humorous effects these shor ...
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Tay Bridge Disaster
The Tay Bridge disaster occurred during a violent storm on Sunday 28 December 1879, when the first Tay Rail Bridge collapsed as a North British Railway (NBR) passenger train on the Edinburgh to Aberdeen Line from Burntisland bound for its final destination of Dundee passed over it, killing all aboard. The bridge—designed by Sir Thomas Bouch—used lattice girders supported by iron piers, with cast iron columns and wrought iron cross-bracing. The piers were narrower and their cross-bracing was less extensive and robust than on previous similar designs by Bouch. Bouch had sought expert advice on wind loading when designing a proposed rail bridge over the Firth of Forth; as a result of that advice he had made no explicit allowance for wind loading in the design of the Tay Bridge. There were other flaws in detailed design, in maintenance, and in quality control of castings, all of which were, at least in part, Bouch's responsibility. Bouch died less than a year after the disast ...
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Gale
A gale is a strong wind; the word is typically used as a descriptor in nautical contexts. The U.S. National Weather Service defines a gale as sustained surface winds moving at a speed of between 34 and 47 knots (, or ).National Weather Service Glossary
s.v
"gale"
Forecasters typically issue s when winds of this strength are expected. In the , a gale warning is specifically a maritime warning; the land-based equivalent in N ...
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Tay Rail Bridge
The Tay Bridge ( gd, Drochaid-rèile na Tatha) carries the railway across the Firth of Tay in Scotland between Dundee and the suburb of Wormit in Fife. Its span is . It is the second bridge to occupy the site. Plans for a bridge over the Tay to replace the train ferry service emerged in 1854, but the first Tay Bridge did not open until 1878. It was a lightweight lattice design of relatively low cost with a single track. On 28 December 1879, the bridge suddenly collapsed in high winds. The incident is one of the greatest bridge-related engineering disasters to have occurred. An enquiry determined that the bridge was insufficiently engineered to cope with high winds. It was replaced by a second bridge constructed of iron and steel, with a double-track, parallel to the remains of the first bridge. Work commenced on 6 July 1883 and the bridge opened in 1887. The new bridge was subject to extensive testing by the Board of Trade, which resulted in a favourable report. In 2003, the b ...
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Dundee, Scotland
Dundee (; sco, Dundee; gd, Dùn Dè or ) is Scotland's fourth-largest city and the 51st-most-populous built-up area in the United Kingdom. The mid-year population estimate for 2016 was , giving Dundee a population density of 2,478/km2 or 6,420/sq mi, the second-highest in Scotland. It lies within the eastern central Lowlands on the north bank of the Firth of Tay, which feeds into the North Sea. Under the name of Dundee City, it forms one of the 32 council areas used for local government in Scotland. Within the boundaries of the historic county of Angus, the city developed into a burgh in the late 12th century and established itself as an important east coast trading port. Rapid expansion was brought on by the Industrial Revolution, particularly in the 19th century when Dundee was the centre of the global jute industry. This, along with its other major industries, gave Dundee its epithet as the city of "jute, jam and journalism". Today, Dundee is promoted as "One Cit ...
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The Courier (Dundee)
''The Courier'' (known as ''The Courier & Advertiser'' between 1926 and 2012) is a newspaper published by DC Thomson in Dundee, Scotland. As of 2013, it is printed in six regional editions: Dundee, Angus & The Mearns, Fife, West Fife, Perthshire, and Stirlingshire. However, by 2020 this had been reduced to three regional editions for Perth and Perthshire; Angus and Dundee and Fife. In the months July to December 2019 the average daily circulation of the Courier was 30,179 copies. Established in 1801 as the ''Dundee Courier & Argus'', the entire front page of ''The Courier'' used to contain classified advertisements – a traditional newspaper format for many years. In 1809 it was taken over by Robert Rintoul who used the paper to campaign for political reform, and criticism of local politicians such as Alexander Riddoch. In 1926, during the General Strike ''The Courier'' was merged with ''The Advertiser''. From the 10 May to 28 May 1926, the paper adopted the headline-new ...
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Large Girders, Tay Bridge
Large means of great size. Large may also refer to: Mathematics * Arbitrarily large, a phrase in mathematics * Large cardinal, a property of certain transfinite numbers * Large category, a category with a proper class of objects and morphisms (or both) * Large diffeomorphism, a diffeomorphism that cannot be continuously connected to the identity diffeomorphism in mathematics and physics * Large numbers, numbers significantly larger than those ordinarily used in everyday life * Large ordinal, a type of number in set theory * Large sieve, a method of analytic number theory ** Larger sieve, a heightening of the large sieve * Law of large numbers, a result in probability theory * Sufficiently large, a phrase in mathematics Other uses * ''Large'' (film), a 2001 comedy film * Large (surname), an English surname * LARGE, an enzyme * Large, a British English name for the maxima (music), a note length in mensural notation * Large, or G's, or grand, slang for $1,000 US dollars * Large, a ...
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Original Tay Bridge Before The 1879 Collapse
Originality is the aspect of created or invented works that distinguish them from reproductions, clones, forgeries, or substantially derivative works. The modern idea of originality is according to some scholars tied to Romanticism, by a notion that is often called romantic originality.Smith (1924)Waterhouse (1926)Macfarlane (2007) The validity of "originality" as an operational concept has been questioned. For example, there is no clear boundary between "derivative" and "inspired by" or "in the tradition of." The concept of originality is both culturally and historically contingent. For example, unattributed reiteration of a published text in one culture might be considered plagiarism but in another culture might be regarded as a convention of veneration. At the time of Shakespeare, it was more common to appreciate the similarity with an admired classical work, and Shakespeare himself avoided "unnecessary invention".Royal Shakespeare Company (2007) ''The RSC Shakespeare - Wil ...
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Tay Bridge Down
Tay may refer to: People and languages * Tay (name), including lists of people with the given name, surname and nickname * Tay people, an ethnic group of Vietnam ** Tày language *Atayal language, an Austronesian language spoken in Taiwan (ISO 639-3 code "tay") *TAY (singer), Portuguese singer Tiago Amaral (born 1999) Places * River Tay, a river in Scotland ** Tay Bridge, a railway bridge that collapsed, killing all on board a train ** Loch Tay, a freshwater loch ** Firth of Tay, the estuary into which the Tay flows * Tay, Ontario, Canada, a township * Tay River, Ontario, Canada ** Tay Canal, a part of the river * Tay Sound, Nunavut, Canada * Tay, Iran * Tay, Ardabil, Iran * Lough Tay, a lake in County Wicklow, Ireland * Tay Head, Antarctica **Firth of Tay (Antarctica) * Tayside, a former local government area in Scotland Science and technology * Tay (bot), an AI chatbot released by Microsoft in 2016 * Rolls-Royce RB.44 Tay, a turbojet aircraft engine * Rolls-Royce RB.183 Tay, a t ...
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List Of United Kingdom Disasters By Death Toll
The following list of disasters in Great Britain and Ireland is a list of major disasters (excluding acts of war) which relate to the United Kingdom or Ireland, or to the states that preceded them, or that involved their citizens, in a definable incident or accident such as a shipwreck, where the loss of life was forty or more. Over 200 fatalities 100–199 fatalities Fewer than 100 fatalities See also * European windstorm * List of accidents and disasters by death toll (worldwide) * List of accidents and incidents involving commercial aircraft * List of disasters in Antarctica by death toll * List of disasters in Australia by death toll * List of disasters in Canada by death toll * List of disasters in Croatia by death toll * List of disasters in New Zealand by death toll * List of disasters in Poland by death toll * List of disasters in the United States by death toll * List of fires * List of lifeboat disasters in Britain and Ireland * List of natural disasters i ...
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Scottish Poems
Scottish usually refers to something of, from, or related to Scotland, including: *Scottish Gaelic, a Celtic Goidelic language of the Indo-European language family native to Scotland *Scottish English *Scottish national identity, the Scottish identity and common culture *Scottish people, a nation and ethnic group native to Scotland *Scots language, a West Germanic language spoken in lowland Scotland *Symphony No. 3 (Mendelssohn), a symphony by Felix Mendelssohn known as ''the Scottish'' See also *Scotch (other) *Scotland (other) *Scots (other) *Scottian (other) *Schottische The schottische is a partnered country dance that apparently originated in Bohemia. It was popular in Victorian era ballrooms as a part of the Bohemian folk-dance craze and left its traces in folk music of countries such as Argentina ("chotis"Span ... * {{disambiguation Language and nationality disambiguation pages ca:Escocès ...
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