how were bridges designed before, say 1850, sometimes way before, able to handle the weight of a ww2 tank?
Were they overbuilt by orders of magnitude, miracle of the arch, or something else?
In: Engineering
as others have said, the bridges were overbuilt, though that might be selection bias at work (IE the less stable bridges have been removed by the ravages of time).
also, for a LOT of older bridges, it was common to build them at fordable stretches of river, because it was really difficult to build a bridge in deeper water with pre-industrial technology. The water around these old bridges was often shallow enough a tank could drive across, assuming suitable ingress/egress routes either side. What the bridges were vital for was the wheeled support and logistic elements of the army, that couldn’t just drive over the riverbed.
obviously, with larger rivers too deep to ford, the bridges over them tended to be more modern, or they used pontoon (floating) bridges to get the tanks over.
that said, the limits of infrastructure put a lot of constraints on tank design. stuff like the width of railway tunnels, the lifting capacity of dockyard cranes, or the weight limit of assault bridges were all factors that fed into tank designs. one of the issues with some of the late war German tanks with their very long, powerful main guns was they often struggled to move in some medieval street plans because their guns kept getting stuck in building, etc.
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