R E B U I L D
BRIDGE
THE
—AGAI N
MAKING PROGRESS
MEANS MAKING
(SOMETIMES
D E V A S T A T I N G )
M I S T A K E S.
AND THEN LEARNING
FROM THEM.
IN 1904, a group of Canadian workers began the hard slog
of constructing the world’s longest bridge, across the Saint
Lawrence River just south of the city of Quebec. It was a wildly
ambitious project. And it wasn’t just for the Quebecois: Rail-
roads were revolutionizing commerce and communications,
and the bridge would connect people and allow trains to run
from New Brunswick in the east to Winnipeg in the west.
The river was 190 feet deep at the center, and ice piled
high above the water’s surface in the winter. Nothing about
the bridge’s construction would be easy. The engineers chose
a complex cantilever design, a cutting-edge approach but a
cost-efficient one too. Ambition creates risks, and warning
signs started to appear. The steel trusses weighed more than
expected. Some of the lower chords of the bridge seemed mis-
aligned or bent. Workers raised concerns. But the project’s
leaders pressed ahead.
Exactly 100 years later, in February 2004, a young entre-
preneur named Mark Zuckerberg founded The Facebook. His
ambition was nothing less than to remake the internet around
personal relationships and then to remake the world around
BY NICHOLAS THOMPSON Facebook. When the company filed to go public in 2012, he
040
