I wanted to be a politician! You know, in China to be a politician is to be a statesman, and when I was young I thought that would be great – a way to help the country. But my father, who was a lawyer and a member of the Supreme Court, he advised me to stay away from politics. He said it would be a more solid way to help the country, and more sure to make a living, to be an engineer.

When I was young in China, construction was very important – the country was, shall we say, backwards, and we needed to build many roads and bridges.

So I went to Jiaotong University, which is the number one best engineering university in China. It had at that time three colleges: mine was in Tangshan, where they had the big earthquake in 1976, near Beijing. Immediately after graduating I went to the USA to go to Berkeley. My brother was already in California, in a position as a teaching assistant, and he said he could afford to help me come over.

But when I got there, Berkeley said that they’d never heard of my school at Tangshan. So they said, "We’ll try you for a senior year to see if you are qualified as a graduate." I did the senior year, and did very well, and then another year of graduate study. So it took me two years ot get my Masters, in 1933. From then until now is 64 years, and you know that is very satisfying. You see, bridge engineering takes a long time to learn. So I have learned all about it now.

When I returned to China, being a returned student so to say, I was quite well known. I had written some papers, and I was already very well known after two or three years. I was working on the railways in inland China, near Chongqing, the wartime capital of Chiang Kai-shek’s government. I was doing a job as a section engineer, and one day I went to head office. The chief engineer knew me; he said ‘Young Lin, come over here. See our bridge design,’ and he showed me the plans. He was very proud; it was a very long bridge, about 1.5km. He was trained at ABC – American Bridge Company – and he had a doctoral degree from Cornell. But I looked at the drawings and said to him: ‘Your design is all wrong’. I was only a young fellow, 23 or 24 years old, but I wasn’t scared because I was only doing my job. He said to me: ‘What do you know? Get out!’ So I went outside and a few of them went into a huddle: the chief engineer, assistant chief engineer, and they studied for two hours. Then they called me back. ‘Young Lin,’ he said, ‘you know, everything you said was right. So from tomorrow, you are chief bridge engineer.’

So we redesigned the bridge. But this was during war time, and we didn’t have much steel in China, so I never saw it built. Then around 1951 a colleague showed me a newspaper story about the first railway completed by the communists, and this included that bridge [at Neijiang, over a branch of the Yangtze River between Chongqing and Chengdu in Sichuan province]. I went back there earlier this year [1997] and the bridge is still there – the bridge I designed. It’s a steel truss, I think seven spans of about 100m. I could recognise the rivet arrangement and everything. When it was built, between 1949 and 1951, they didn’t have anyone who could design steel bridges, so they took my drawings. But by that time I was back in Berkeley.

I returned to California in 1946. You see, my wife Margaret was a big fan of American movies – crazy about movie stars – so we applied to my former professor. Near the end of the war he sent me a letter inviting me to go. When the letter arrived in China, the war had also ended there; he mailed it to my address in the interior of China, and it took another half a year for it to travel to Taiwan. By that time I was in Taiwan in charge of Taiwan Railroad.

I was with the nationalist government all the way until the end of the war, and they took over Taiwan. I was sent down to take over the Japanese Sugar Railroad. There were about 52 sugar factories and each had its own narrow-gauge railway, altogether about 1500km. I had the job of connecting them all together into one sugar railway. I did the job for about half a year, then I got this letter.

I went to Berkeley with the title of acting assistant professor – not even at first a real assistant professor. It was very difficult at that time to get a position as assistant professor. After a year, they liked us and we liked them, so we decided to stay. Also by then the communists had taken over in China and at that time I didn’t like the communists at all – I had been with the nationalist government. Shortly after I arrived, one student asked me what I thought about communism, this great new idea of the twentieth century. I told him that I thought the idea was already out of date.

For many people, your name is still associated with the firm TY Lin International, and with the development of prestressed concrete. How did that come about?

I taught at Berkeley for thirty years, from 1946 until 1976. About two years before I finished, a student said to me, ‘Why should you stay a teacher? Teaching is good money but practicing is better money.’ So I began to think about retiring from teaching. I had an office, perhaps 50 people or something like that, mostly from Berkeley; this was TY Lin International. I started developing prestressed concrete.

I studied in Belgium 1953-1954 for a year under Professor Magnel, which was very satisfying – laboratory testing everything, for a full year. Meanwhile I wrote a book, which got me well-known.

I never met Eugene Freyssinet. The only reason is that I worked for Magnel, who was a close competitor of Freyssinet, so he didn’t encourage me to see Freyssinet – I should have tried to see him.

So TY Lin International became a pioneer of prestressed concrete - that was the whole purpose of the firm, and later of course, the development of other things. The company built up to 500 people, but then I got tired of it. I had to continually find jobs to feed these 500 people, and that is not my nature. In 1989 I decided to sell the firm. I sold it to my colleagues and got half a million dollars – it was worth I would say, six or seven million, but I had no intention of getting money from my people – it would not be right. So I got half a million and I was very happy.

After about three years, the firm was sold again for something like five or six million, and a dispute developed between the buyer and the original owner over payments and bonuses. It went to court and it’s still in court – trial by jury, appeals, etc.

So under these circumstances I did not want to work for the old firm, I hope we can get together – not full time! – but these are my people and perhaps I can help them as a consultant; TY Lin may become a consultant to TY Lin International!

My full name is Lin Tung-Yen, and I use that now to avoid possible conflict. I never actually sold the name TY Lin, but unofficially it is there. Lin Tung-Yen China Inc is based in San Francisco and is associated with offices in Beijing, Shanghai, Chongqing and Hong Kong, but this is a very different operation. These are all independent offices which take their own work and make their own money, I have nothing to do with that at all, and I like that very much. You could say I am a figurehead. Now when we get a big engineering problem they will ask me for advice – in a way I’m a consultant to these firms as well.

The Beijing office is a joint venture with the Ministry of Railways – they own it. The one in Shanghai is with Tongji University, which has 10,000 civil engineering students. They run the show, do everything. I don’t make money, I don’t lose money.

Despite your father’s advice to stay away from politics, have you retained an interest in this area.

I have been lucky to retain close relationships with China. Once upon a time I was wrongly accused by the Chiang Kai-Shek government of being a pro-communist, and I almost got into trouble here in the USA during the McCarthy era. Then the communists saw one of my writings and accused me of being a pro-nationalist. But TY Lin is a simple engineer, although I am interested in politics at very high levels, in what is good for the people and the country. But not party politics.

Both sides have accused me sometimes, both sides have liked me sometimes. But they all know that actually I am a pure engineer. I am in an excellent position now – in fact I tried to put the two governments together, actually I was the one who set up the talks in Singapore [between China and Taiwan] because I have the confidence of both sides. But unfortunately the talks failed.

I have an excellent relationship with the Chinese president Jiang Zemin; by now I must have met him at least 15 times, maybe more. I first met him in 1985 when he was mayor of Shangai; earlier working with his predecessor in 1980 I had proposed the first bridge from Shanghai across the river to a new area, Pudong, of 300 square kilometres. They told me that I had a very good idea, but there was no money to build it – that went on for five years, nothing was done. Later on the previous mayor came to San Francisco, staying at the Sheraton hotel, so I went to see him and I said, ‘Let’s develop that Pudong area, so close to Shanghai, but you don’t pay money. I’ll build the bridge for free because the rise in value of land will be so much – a hundred, a thousand times when the bridge built – I can get a financier from America to pay for it.’ So he invited me to Shanghai to meet the new mayor, who was Jiang Zemin, now the president of China.

Then in 1989, with Tiananmen Square, I thought the idea was dead – the government was apparently going towards the conservative side. But the next year Deng Xiaoping went there. He was very smart, and he said: ‘Let’s do something, let’s develop this project.’ So Deng made the decision but Jiang and his later mayors were all involved. Now, the thing is, they changed the constitution of China. This is a communist constitution, and according to Marxist principles, land is publicly owned. Now there is one amendment to the Chinese constitution: land is publicly owned but it is allowable to lease the land. So my idea to build the bridge changed the constitution – that’s official, they told me that. Even now there is only one amendment to the constitution.

My project today is another kind of bridge, which I call a bridge from communism to democracy. China is a very old country, and never had democracy. Communism helped the Chinese revolution – most people are farmers and it helped them. But now we are entering into a modern era of industry and science, and only with this can we talk about democracy. If 80% of the people are farmers, and you have one man one vote, every vote is a vote for farming – you can never get science and industry. So you cannot develop into a modern democracy overnight. You’ve got to have a scheme to gradually develop from agriculture into industry, and then democracy.

Marxism was written for the old days of agriculture, labourers, hard working people, and Marx didn’t understand the power of capital. Now we can build the country faster with capital than with labour. So the thinking is quite different, and the Chinese leadership knows that now.

In connection with the Pudong development, they offered me a piece of land for a nominal price. I told them that I emphasise the importance of profit-making, not for myself, so I did not accept the land. They appreciated that very much. One day I was at a reception in San Francisco with the vice-mayor of Shanghai, and he said, ‘You know, the one person who did the most to develop our Pudong area is right here in the room. That’s professor TY Lin. He not only started the whole thing, and worked with us, but he did not accept payment.’ So that took me by surprise!

What do you consider to be your greatest engineering achievements?

I think it has to be the development of prestressed concrete, which was invented by Freyssinet and pioneered by the European engineers. They must get the credit for that, but I did write the first readable textbook and put all the practice into a theory. I had the opportunity of experimenting for the theory a full year in Belgium, and later on at Berkeley for many years. The combination of formulating the theory and verifying with experiments, and later developing it into buildings and bridges – that’s my biggest achievement.

I think my best bridge design was one which was not built, the Ruck-A-Chucky bridge. The problem was to cross a valley which was going to be flooded by a dam – water would be 450 feet [150m] deep, and both sides were steep hills. The Bureau of Reclamation proposed a straight bridge, 1300 feet [400m] span, with tunnels both sides. I looked at the problem and said: ‘Can we build a curved bridge?’ If we could do that we could eliminate both tunnels – the road could follow the hillside.

It took myself, plus 12 consultants from around the country, six months’ work to arrive at this design; a curved bridge with no piers, hanging from the mountainside – but actually it has about 80 piers – tension piers. No compression piers. This was presented to the Bureau of Reclamation and we won the job, but the people voted against building the dam, so it was never built.

That project is a good example of how engineering can also produce beauty – is aesthetics important in engineering?

Aesthetics is a very important part of engineering. With Ruck-A-Chucky, both architects and engineers recognised that basic science and engineering can produce an object which is so beautiful.

Actually economics and aesthetics generally come together: there are examples of the most economical also being the most aesthetic. The main thing is that the structure itself must fit into its environment – if it fits well, it produces beauty.

I would say that most engineers have not been trained to understand this. Hopefully this will change, and that is already beginning to happen. I think it’s very important that we should integrate into our engineering education not only aethetics but also economics, politics, and even legal, and other, things. We have got to broaden our engineers’ education.

But you cannot do this in four years, not even in five. So I think a graduate engineer soon will be a minimum of five years, and hopefully six or seven years. On the other hand, we have to produce some technicians who can take only four years. We should develop a class structure, like the medical profession which has nurses and doctors; so we have technicians and super-engineers.

Engineering is a good career. In engineering you are dealing not only with numbers and science, you are dealing with human beings, so I would advise a young engineer to be as broad as possible in education.

Everything is changing faster and faster, and the fastest-changing part is actual creation of new types of bridges, and the emphasis on aesthetics. Materials and methods are changing, and the advance of computers has completely changed the way that I was taught at school.

Computers have made a big difference, but they are a double-edged sword – hopefully more good than bad. We not only need to learn to calculate but must learn to think. Engineering is a total concept that is beyond aesthetics; it is art, or total science.

I was brought up in the old days, when you learned to deal with numbers in your head. Computers are vital now, but I have hesitated to learn about that. I can say that, so far, I cannot use a computer.

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