Suspended span

Cantilever Bridge

The Pierre Pflimlin bridge is a balanced cantilever made of concrete, shown here under construction.
Ancestor	Beam bridge, Truss bridge
Related	None
Descendant	Swing bridge
Carries	Pedestrians, automobiles, trucks, light rail, heavy rail
Span range	Medium
Material	Iron, structural steel, prestressed concrete
Movable	No
Design effort	Medium
Falsework required	Very little to none

A cantilever bridge is a bridge built using cantilevers, structures that project horizontally into space, supported on only one end. For small footbridges, the cantilevers may be simple beams; however, large cantilever bridges designed to handle road or rail traffic use trusses built from structural steel, or box girders built from prestressed concrete. The steel truss cantilever bridge was a major engineering breakthrough when first put into practice, as it can span distances of over 1,500 feet (460 m), and can be more easily constructed at difficult crossings by virtue of using little or no falsework.

Engineers in the nineteenth century understood that a bridge that was continuous across multiple supports would distribute the loads among them. This would result in lower stresses in the girder or truss and meant that longer spans could be built. Several nineteenth century engineers patented continuous bridges with hinge points mid-span. The use of a hinge in the multi-span system presented the advantages of a statically determinate system and of a bridge that could handle differential settlement of the foundations. Engineers could more easily calculate the forces and stresses with a hinge in the girder.

Heinrich Gerber was one of the engineers to obtain a patent for a hinged girder (1866) and is recognized as the first to build one. The Hassfurt Bridge over the Main river in Germany with a central span of 124 feet (38 meters) was completed in 1867 and is recognized as the first modern cantilever bridge.

The High Bridge of Kentucky by C. Shaler Smith (1877), the Niagara Cantilever Bridge by Charles Conrad Schneider (1883) and the Poughkeepsie Bridge by John Francis O'Rourke and Pomeroy P. Dickinson (1889) were all important early uses of the cantilever design. The Kentucky River Bridge spanned a gorge that was 275 feet (84 meters) deep and took full advantage of the fact that falsework, or temporary support, is not needed for the main span of a cantilever bridge.