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Wales is the home of a breakthrough in engineering that had profound consequences for the rest of the world.

The Menai Suspension Bridge – the first of its kind – opened on this day in 1826 and linked Anglesey to the mainland of Wales.

It had an immediate and transformational impact for traders. Cattle had routinely risked death trying to swim the Menai Straits as they were driven to market.

The bridge opened up tremendous possibilities for trade with Ireland and slashed journey times between Holyhead and London.

But it did more than that. According to the Institution of Civil Engineers, it “established the potential of suspension bridge technology”.

Engineers with imagination and ambition could look at this marvel and grasp the possibilities the design opened up to bridge other gulfs.

The game-changing Welsh bridge paved the way for the likes of the 1,991-metre Akashi Kaikyo Bridge, which links the Japanese city of Kobe with Awaji Island.

Thomas Telford, the Scottish engineer behind the Menai bridge, is rightly a revered figure in design history.

Wales’ challenge is to once again be the place where men and women from all over the world come to achieve the extraordinary.

Does Wales have another chance to make history?

People who believe humanity has a wonderful opportunity to harness the power of the tides to provide, clean, reliable and affordable energy are excited about the potential for electricity-generating lagoons in Swansea, Cardiff, Newport and Colwyn Bay.

In January 2017, former energy minister Charles Hendry backed the creation of a “pathfinder” lagoon to demonstrate the potential of the technology as a “no-regrets policy”. He concluded his Government-commissioned review with a call to “start that process as swiftly as we can”.

More than a year later, the UK Government has yet to respond.

It is easy to imagine Telford, if he was around today, competing with the likes of Isambard Kingdom Brunel, to be the first to capture the power of the waves on an industrial scale.

Mr Hendry talked about the potential for “cheap indigenous power” and economic regeneration – but great engineers would also revel in the glory of changing a landscape with a mechanical wonder. They would delight in helping end our dependence on costly fossil fuel or energy imported from some of the most unstable countries in the world.

Something of the spirit of such engineers still pops up in Britain. Boris Johnson – who spent much of his time as Mayor of London pushing for the creation of a giant airport – this month suggested building a spectacular bridge between France and the UK.

Telford and Brunel might relish such a commission, but they would probably shake their heads in despair at the state of infrastructure in the country they helped transform.

What happened to our tradition of great engineering?

(Image: Peter Byrne/PA Wire)

If Telford went back to Anglesey he would be dismayed at the rail network. Why, he would ask, does it often take around the same length of time to get from Holyhead to Crewe as it does from Crewe to London?

He would look at the cancellation of the electrification of the Great Western main line between Cardiff and Swansea amid soaring cost estimates and wonder how the home of the industrial revolution appears to have forgotten how to build things.

Telford might tug at his hair in distraction if he looked at the state of rail links between North Wales and the great cities of the north of England, just he could well issue a groan at the volume of a dying whale if he read of the saga of the M4 relief road.

But what would really give him heartburn is the abysmal nature of broadband provision in swathes of our country – especially in the territory he connected to Anglesey.

Some of the worst broadband is in Wales

(Image: Andrew Matthews/PA Wire)

A recent report by the House of Commons Library found that Arfon has among the “lowest average speeds” at just 20 Mbps (megabits per second), compared with a UK figure of 44.6 Mbps.

The authors estimated that 18% of premises in Montgomeryshire and Ceredigion were not able to receive download speeds of a mere 10 Mbps.

There is a true digital divide in the UK, with the researchers reporting that for “those with superfast lines (over 30 Mbps), the average download speed is 77.3 Mbps” but “for those without superfast lines, the average is 11.8 Mbps”.

Households across Wales echo with howls of frustration when the broadband goes down or slows to a pitiful pace but this issue is about much more than ensuring a decent connection speed so families can use iPlayer or upload videos of their labrador to YouTube.

Communities with dire broadband are not viable locations for a host of businesses. We are just at the beginning of the e-commerce revolution and failure to offer world-class broadband speeds will have disastrous economic consequences.

The flip-side is also true. If far-flung towns and villages in Wales are plugged into first-class internet services – both mobile and fibre-based – a galaxy of new opportunities will start to blaze; entrepreneurs will have the opportunity to live in one of the most beautiful parts of the world while doing business with companies and consumers in every time zone.

Wales can't afford to burn its bridges

(Image: publicity picture)

The true Telford spirit is not just about having big ideas – a science fiction writer could come up with a score of proposals to revolutionise Wales’s infrastructure and economy within five minutes. The genius this nation needs is to ability to design, manage and deliver the projects which will transform lives for the better.

This is especially important as Brexit looms. Telford’s bridge took much of the strain (and sometimes terror) out of making the journey from Ireland to the UK via the treacherous straits; today there are deep concerns about how leaving EU will shape the future of trade with the Republic.

As Cardiff University’s Professor Richard Wyn Jones noted in the Irish Times, “80% of Irish-registered HGVs heading for the Continent pass through Welsh ports, the vast majority via Holyhead.”

Just as we need a political culture that has the courage to green-light the infrastructure we require to thrive, it is imperative that Brexit will preserve our most precious trading links – and help us forge new partnerships – rather than burn our bridges.