Imagine a monument to the very first highway in American history. You likely picture towering marble columns in Washington, D.C., or grand bronze plaques gleaming in the sun. You certainly wouldn’t picture a bizarre, crooked, literally S-shaped pile of stones sitting quietly in the middle of Ohio. In this episode of pplpod, we conduct a structural archaeology of S Bridge 2, a $1828 engineering marvel in Muskingum County. This "oddball" structure serves as the physical anchor for the National Road, the first federally financed highway in the United States. We unpack the "Perpendicular Paradox," analyzing why architect Benjamin Latrobe chose a zigzag path over a straight line to satisfy the brutal physics of stone masonry and the $90$-degree requirements of the arc ...