Humber Bridge July 1981. With a centre span of and a total length of , the Humber Bridge was the longest single-span suspension bridge in the world for 17 years, until Japan's Akashi Kaikyō Bridge opened on 5 April 1998. The road-distance between Hull and Grimsby was reduced by nearly as a consequence of the bridge. The bridge's surface takes the form of a dual carriageway with a lower-level foot and cyclepath on both sides. There is a permanent speed limit on the full length of the bridge. Each tower consists of a pair of hollow vertical concrete columns, each tall and
Suspension bridge Clark and it is a larger scale version of Marlow bridge. An interesting variation is Thornewill and Warham's Ferry Bridge in Burton-on-Trent, Staffordshire (1889), where the chains are not attached to abutments as is usual, but instead are attached to the main girders, which are thus in compression. Here, the chains are made from flat wrought iron plates, eight inches (203 mm) wide by an inch and a half (38 mm) thick, rivetted together. The first wire-cable suspension bridge was the Spider Bridge at Falls of Schuylkill (1816), a modest and temporary footbridge built following the collapse of James Finley's