Excerpt from Dictionary of National Biography, Vol. 6: Bottomley-Browell In 1863 the first proposals for a Tay bridge were made public, but the act of parliament was not obtained until 1870. The Tay bridge, which crossed the estuary from Newport in Fife to the town of Dundee, was within a few yards of two miles long. It consisted of eighty-five spans - seventy-two in the shal low water, and thirteen over the fairway channel, two of these being 227 feet, and eleven 245 feet wide. The system of wrought iron lattice girders was adopted throughout. After many delays the line was completed from shore to shore on 22 Sept. 1877. The inspection of the work by Maj or - general Coote Synge Hutchinson, re, on behalf of the board of trade, occupied three days, and on 31 May 1878 the bridge was opened with much ceremony. The engineer was then presented with the freedom of the town of Dundee, and on 26 June 1879 he was knighted. The traffic was continued uninterruptedly till the evening of Sunday, 28 Dec. 1879, when during a violent hurricane the central portion of the bridge fell into the river Tay, carrying with it an entire train and its load of about seventy passengers, all of whom lost their lives. Under the shock and distress of mind caused by this catastrophe Bouch's health rapidly gave way, and he died at Mofiat on 30 Oct. 1880. The rebuildin of the Forth bridge was be un in 1882. Ouch became an associate o the Institution of Civil En gineers on 3 Dec. 1850, and was advanced to the class of member on 11 May 1858. He married, July 1853, Miss Margaret Ada Nelson, who survived him with one son and two daughters. His brother, Mr. William Bouch, was long connected with the locomo tive department of the Stockton and Darling ton and North Eastern lines. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.