Whipple, Squire

Whipple, Squire (1804–88) civil engineer; born in Hardwick, Mass. He worked on canals and railroads until 1841 and devised several new apparatuses. In 1840 he devised an apparatus for weighing canal boats and later a weighing lock scale. In 1841 he patented the bowstring iron truss bridge, then the Whipple trapezoidal bridge. Beyond his actual structures, he made his major contribution with A Work on Bridge Building (1847), a pioneer work of scientific engineering with its method for computing stress.