Note 329b — Chapter XVII · Robert Stephenson’s Tubular Bridges at Menai and Conway.

Mr. Stephenson continued to hold that the elliptical tube was the right idea, and that sufficient justice had not been done to it. A year or two before his death Mr. Stephenson remarked to the author, that had the same arrangement for stiffening been adopted to which the oblong rectangular tubes owe a great part of their strength, a very different result would have been obtained.