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If you've been out on Route 30 in North Versailles Township lately, you know that the George Westinghouse Memorial Bridge is under construction.

A PennDOT spokesman says the 1,500-foot concrete span, built between 1929 and 1932, is one of more than 400 bridges statewide considered "structurally deficient." The bridge, which carries 24,000 cars per day, was last overhauled in 1983.

The state earlier this month began a $3.9 million, six-month project to replace parts of the bridge deck (including bearings and joints), repave the surface and perform other repairs.

General contractor on the project is Mosites Construction Co., based in Robinson Township.

Traffic on Route 30 between East Pittsburgh and North Versailles is restricted to a single lane in each direction while the work is being performed.

. . .

The Westinghouse Bridge spans Turtle Creek, Braddock Avenue and the Norfolk Southern (ex-Conrail, ex-Pennsylvania) railroad tracks.

When it opened for traffic in 1932, the bridge was the longest concrete-arch structure in the United States.

Towering 240 feet above the Turtle Creek valley, it remains one of the highest bridges in the nation and was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1977.

While the bridge itself is historic, a trip across the bridge also offers a perspective on the history of the Mon Valley that few other locations can match.

. . .

Motorists inbound to Pittsburgh who look to their left can see U.S. Steel's Edgar Thomson Works. Opened in 1875, it is the oldest continuously operating steel mill in the United States and the home of the last remaining blast furnaces in the Mon-Yough area.

In the distance --- on the opposite of the Monongahela River from ET --- the roller coasters of Kennywood are visible, along with the park's Pitt Fall ride.

. . .

On the right is RIDC's Keystone Commons industrial park. About 50 companies there employ roughly 2,000 people, according to published reports.

The 92-acre site was once the headquarters and main plant of Westinghouse Electric Corp., employing between 17,000 and 20,000 people at its peak. When it closed in 1988, the plant manufactured primarily large generators for power companies.

But at one time, Westinghouse's East Pittsburgh Works was the high-tech capital of Pennsylvania and from 1920 until roughly 1960, it was the birthplace of virtually all of Westinghouse's most historic innovations, including:

• Commercial broadcasting in 1920;


• Early experiments in nuclear fission during World War II; and


• Equipment for the world's first nuclear submarine and commercial nuclear power plant.

. . .

The East Pittsburgh plant nearly became the birthplace of television, too. Russian-born electrical engineer Vladimir Zworykin came to the Mon Valley in 1919 to become a research scientist for Westinghouse while simultaneously earning his doctorate from the University of Pittsburgh.

Until the early 1930s, most experimental TV equipment employed a mechanical spinning wheel to scan pictures, which was impractical for any screens larger than a few inches tall. Zworykin was one of several pioneers who were trying to perfect television cameras and receivers that were fully electronic.

Many of his early experiments were performed at a Westinghouse transmitter building on Greensburg Pike in present-day Forest Hills. (The building is now a municipal park known as the Westinghouse Lodge.)

. . .

Unfortunately for Zworykin and the Pittsburgh area, Westinghouse officials didn't see any practical commercial value to television and encouraged the inventor to work on something "more practical."

In 1929 --- coincidentally at about the time that construction of the Westinghouse Bridge was getting underway --- Zworykin was recruited by David Sarnoff to work for the Radio Corporation of America, or RCA, in Camden, N.J. There, in 1931, Zworykin perfected the camera tube that he called the "Iconoscope," and the rest is history.

There's one other interesting side note. Eighty years ago this week, Zworykin demonstrated for the media what could be considered an early fax machine.

Zworykin's facsimile transmitter and receiver could send any standard-size document --- photos, handwritten diagrams and letters --- in less than a minute.

. . .

It wasn't the first system for scanning and transmitting still pictures; others had been demonstrated as early as 1903, and some commercial versions were in use by the 1920s.

But most of those systems could only scan transparencies, because light had to shine through the image being scanned. The system Zworykin used bounced a beam of light off of the image and then read the reflections.

"The day is not far off when you may flash a photograph or a letter of several hundred words to friends in Tokio, Paris, Buenos Aires or any distant point, in less than a minute," reported the Pittsburgh Sun-Telegraph on March 25, 1929.

"Dr. Zworykin's tele-photo system operates with or without wires. He has made exhaustive laboratory tests and has perfected his apparatus to the extent that its commercial adoption is promised for the near future." (You can read more at Pittsburgh Radio & TV Online.)

Of course, Zworykin was gone in "the near future," and Westinghouse's fax machine research was abandoned, denying the company another technological "first."

. . .

None of this information will make the traffic jams around the Westinghouse Bridge any easier to tolerate over the next six months.

But at least it may give you something to think about as you wait.