Friday, August 19, 2016

DYWIDAG: Now you know

Heading south on Newark Road toward Toughkenamon, there's a business whose name appears to be a bunch of initials. The company's identity has always been a mystery to me, but I decided to take advantage of a traffic jam the other day to memorize the initials -- DYWIDAG -- and look them up when I got home.
Turns out that DYWIDAG Systems International USA is part of an international company, DSI, that specializes in equipment for building bridges and tunnels: as they put it, "DSI's scope of business is the development and application of Post-Tensioning and Geotechnical Systems for the Construction industry." The Toughkenamon manufacturing plant is one of 10 in the United States and 28 worldwide.
Recent domestic projects that the company has worked on include the Harbor Drive pedestrian bridge in San Diego (2012), the Woodrow Wilson Bridge in Washington, D.C. (2006) and the 2005 retrofitting of the Golden Gate Bridge.
DYWIDAG stands for the names of the two Germans who founded the company in 1869, Eugen Dyckerhoff and Gottlieb Widmann (plus AG, the German abbreviation for company).
The DSI website is packed with information and photos about their history and their projects around the world.

No comments:

Post a Comment