Victoria Bridge at Montreal, Canada : who is entitled to the credit of its conception? or, A short history of its origin.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
It being* at length officially announced that His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales intends to visit Canada in May or June next, in com- pliance with the invitation of the Legislature and people of the pro- vince, with the view of being present at the inauguration of this great undertaking', any information respecting its originators and designers, it must be presumed, will be interesting alike to His Royal Highness and the public at large.The writer of this notice, a Canadian by birth, being desirous that the just pretensions of his countrymen to share in the honor of conceiving the idea and demonstrating the practicability of con- structing the bridge which now spans the rapid and mighty St. Lawrence, should not be overlooked by His Royal Highness and the people of England, has taken the trouble to procure all the authentic information extant in the province on this interesting subject.The facts thus collected will be found embodied in the following pamphlet.The London Times, in an article which appeared on the 5th January last, in ignorance no doubt of the true state of the case, has ascribed all the credit of the conception as well as the execution of this gigantic effort of engineering skill, to the late lamented Robert Stephenson.The views of the Times on the subject will appear by the following extracts from the article in question: -" A great event has just occurred in Canada.The Victoria Bridge, the greatest work of Robert Stephenson, has been opened for traffic.We believe that seven years and upwards have been consumed in the construction of this wonderful bridge, and at last a train has passed over it, and the St. Lawrence is no longer an obstacle to free communication between the Canadas and the United States.This bridge is the most magnificent work of the kind in existence ; for, although within our own island we have the bridge across the Menai Straits, yet in every point the Victoria Bridge is far superior.""It is, indeed, to be doubted if ever a monument has been raised by human hands which can offer a prouder memorial of the race which reared it than the Victoria Bridge.ToRobertStephensonis due the merit of its conception ; to Messrs. Peto and Brassey the praise which belongs to the contractors for such a work when successfully executed."Had Stephenson lived to have seen the announcement thus made, his high sense of justice and delicacy of feeling would no doubt have prompted him to have set the Times right in regard to the source of the conception of the Victoria Bridge.Fortunately for the fame of those who are entitled to this credit, Mr. Stephenson has left behind him conclusive evidence in their favor.Strictly speaking the "conception" of the idea of constructing a Bridge across the St. Lawrence, at Montreal, may fairly be claimed by the Honorable John Young, of that city, a gentleman to whom the pro- vince is under great obligations for the development of many grand projects for its commercial improvement.But to Thomas C. Keefer, A 2 ?; oy 4 I rJEiq.i civil engineer, a native of Canada, to use the words of the Times, " is due the merit" of demonstrating the entire practicability of accomplishing this truly great work.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.016 | 0.008 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.071 | 0.009 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".