The Great Bridge (10 page)

The Wheeling Bridge “…was destroyed by the momentum acquired by its own dead weight, when swayed up and down by the wind…A high wind, acting upon a suspended floor, devoid of inherent stiffness, will produce a series of undulations…[which] will increase to a certain extent by their own effect, until by a steady blow a momentum of force may be produced, that may prove stronger than the cables.
*
And although the weight of the floor is a very essential element of resistance to high winds, it should not be left to itself to work its own destruction. Weight should be simply an attending element to a still more important condition, viz: stiffness.”

The best way to achieve such stiffness was with a strong truss, in this case of timber, composed of a combination of triangles. After the Wheeling news reached Niagara, Roebling straightaway reviewed all his plans and decided to build his trusswork stronger still. (To attain the necessary stability for his bridge over the East River, he had designed iron trusses twelve feet high to run the entire length of the suspended floor, from anchorage to anchorage.)

No lives were lost in the Wheeling catastrophe, but it aroused again all the old fears of suspension bridges, fears that would be a very long time dying. Later it would be said that Roebling went to Wheeling to rebuild the bridge properly. That was not what happened, however. Ellet rebuilt the bridge himself, just prior to the Civil War, using inclined stays the way Roebling would have. The bridge still stands.

When the war came, Ellet took command of a fleet of steam rams of his own design, on the Mississippi. Badly wounded at the battle of Memphis, he lingered on in great pain for several weeks, then died in June of 1862.

At Niagara, in June of 1854, Roebling had his cables finished and work had begun on the deck structure. “My bridge is the admiration of everybody,” he wrote; “the directors are delighted. The woodwork goes together in the best manner. The suspenders require scarcely any adjustment at all.” In January, in a letter to Trenton, he said, “We had a tremendous gale for the last 12 hours; my bridge didn’t move a muscle.”

The bridge was completed in March 1855. Its span was nearly twice that of Stephenson’s Britannia Bridge and was able to carry even heavier loading, and yet it had taken only one-sixth as much material in proportion to length. On Friday the 16th the first train rolled over. It was a triumphant moment for Roebling. The train, made up specially for the purpose, was as heavy a freight as could be assembled. The engine weighed twenty-eight tons and it pushed twenty double-loaded cars. As it started over from the Canadian side, it soon covered nearly the whole length of the upper floor. “No vibrations whatever,” Roebling noted. “Less noise and movement than in a common truss bridge.”

A few days later a passenger train made the crossing, going the other way. It was only three cars long, but people were packed into every available bit of space and some were perched on top as well. They went over in “fine style,” Roebling wrote. After that, trains kept crossing at a rate of about one every hour, and to get an idea of the vibrations such traffic might be causing, he climbed to the top of one tower and sat there for some time. It shook less, he said, than his own house at Trenton whenever an express went by. “No one is afraid to cross,” he wrote his family. “The passage of trains is a great sight, worth seeing it.”

For those who stood with him now, the sight must have been no less stirring, even for the engineers—perhaps especially for the engineers. There was, after all, something quite special about a bridge, almost any bridge. Very few were ever outright ugly, and when built right, with everything in harmony, with everything superfluous done away with, with all elements doing exactly what they were supposed to, then a bridge was a thrilling thing to see, with its own kind of graceful majesty, something quite apart from the practicalities of engineering. This was that sort of bridge.

Of course for a nation so recently torn apart by civil war, a bridge was a particularly appealing symbol. But beyond that a bridge seemed such a magnificent example of man’s capacity to master the forces of nature, and that, according to the preponderant wisdom of the day, was what the whole age was about. Building a bridge seemed such a clean, heroic thing for a man to do.

At a dinner given in Roebling’s honor on the last night at Niagara Falls, General Henry Slocum was asked to give a toast, which he did, saying to great applause that he would gladly forfeit his war record for the bridge at Niagara—“to have been the engineer of that bridge.” The general, whose political ambition was very large, sometimes said things he did not quite mean, but his toast would be repeated widely in Brooklyn, and it struck everyone present as a fitting tribute to end the tour on—his impressive war record being the most publicized in Brooklyn. (A general at thirty-three, he had commanded a wing of Sherman’s army on the march through Georgia.) The war was past; the time had come to concentrate on “legitimate enterprise”—that seemed the true spirit of the day. A momentous new Age of Progress was dawning and for most of those who raised their glasses to toast John Roebling, as for most Americans, nothing was taken as such proof of that spirit as the works of engineers—”…the great achievements of the present…the strong, light works of engineers…”

In Egypt the French had nearly finished the Suez Canal. In Europe the Mont Cenis Tunnel, then the longest on earth, was being blasted beneath the Alps. But nowhere was there so much happening as on the continent of North America. The Union Pacific was laying track at a rate of eight miles a day by this time. In Massachusetts a hole was being bored nearly five miles through the solid rock of Hoosac Mountain, just to slice a little time off the railroad run from Boston to Albany. Boston itself was being doubled in size by filling in Back Bay swamp. In New York Cornelius Vanderbilt was erecting a very grand new Grand Central Depot, the train-shed roof of which, an immense vault of glass and iron, would contain the largest interior space in the country. There was a new tunnel under the Chicago River, a first bridge over the Missouri at Kansas City, and at St. Louis a river captain named Eads had begun building a railroad bridge over the Mississippi.

That such outsize, unprecedented efforts frequently involved watered stock, political jobbery, kickbacks for contractors, and not a little human suffering was either not altogether apparent as yet or of minor concern. So much good was going to come out of so comparatively little evil, it was generally felt, that the evil seemed a reasonable price to pay, and probably inevitable in any event. What really counted was that things were being accomplished at last on a scale in keeping with the commonly held vision of the future. Man the killer, man the destroyer, would be man the builder for now—now and here, on the infinite, seemingly inexhaustible landscape of America. It was the time and place to be intensely, boldly constructive.

In less than a month, when a much publicized golden spike would be driven with humorous difficulty at Promontory, Utah, the completion of the transcontinental railroad would be hailed as “one of the victories of peace.” In his way Slocum was saying the same thing. The real glory of American achievement lay ahead, as always. But the true heroes now would be those who made possible such victories of peace—the builders. One of the greatest of them, the architect Louis Sullivan, would later write of his own feelings as a boy at about this same time: “The chief engineers became his heroes; they loomed above other men…he dreamed to be a great engineer. The idea of spanning a void appealed to him as masterful in thought and deed. For he had begun to discern that among men of the past and of his day, there were those that stood forth solitary, each in a world of his own.”

THE BRIDGE
tour ended on April 20. “The parties left for the east,” reported the Niagara Falls
Gazette,
“…traveling in a special car well furnished with refreshments.” All, apparently, were still on the friendliest of terms.

In the temporary offices overlooking Fulton Street, work picked up about where it had left off, and with renewed vigor. Directors and stockholders came and went. Orders were placed for drawing tables and filing cabinets and there was a steady tramp of feet on the stairs as inventors came to show patents of tools and machinery, as salesmen arrived with samples of granite or promises of speedy delivery and the best possible price for coal, lumber, sand, or nails. And whenever the senior Roebling was in town and conducting interviews for jobs, the applicants could be seen in the outer office, waiting their turn to go in and sit before the old Prussian and tell him about their special attributes.

A man named William Lane, carpenter, mason, and all-around mechanic, came highly recommended by the Army engineers, Generals Wright and Newton. (“Looks like an energetic good man,” Roebling noted.) Charles Kinkel was a German who told Roebling he had had experience with foundations. John Morgan, an English draftsman, wanted employment badly, he said, while William McNamee looked like a “tolerably good man.”

And so it went. J. W. Jenkins, a diver, said that if he was hired by the month he would work for twenty-five dollars a day, do whatever blasting was wanted, and provide his own tools. Otherwise his regular day rate was a hundred dollars. Two experienced surveyors, Rudolph Rosa and Colonel William Paine, each wanted ten dollars a day and both were hired on the spot.

Paine in particular seemed exactly the sort of man Roebling was looking for. Self-taught in engineering, he had surveyed the so-called Johnson Route of the Union Pacific, across the Sierra Nevada. During the war, wearing civilian clothes, he had slipped through Confederate lines and worked his way from Washington to Richmond, mapping the location of every destroyed bridge along the way. Lincoln had personally made him a captain of engineers for this and Paine was put on the staff of a major general, a position customarily held only by a West Pointer. By the time the war had ended, he was reputedly the leading topographical engineer in the Union Army. It was said he could prop a drawing board on the pommel of his saddle and as he rode along sketch a map of the surrounding terrain that would be accurate enough to go right to the engraver. He was also well read in chemistry, geology, the natural sciences, and he enjoyed literature, he told Roebling. He was from New Hampshire originally, and he was modest, but very firm and sure of himself. His most notable physical feature was a great sweeping handle-bar mustache. Finding him so early was taken as a good sign.

The one technical chore to be finished up before actual construction could begin was the final survey. A center line had to be located and the responsibility for this Roebling had turned over to his son, to whom Paine was assigned forthwith.

The two worked extremely well together and became a familiar sight in Brooklyn that spring. They took their sightings, hammered down their little iron pins, and worked their way steadily inland from the river, through a neighborhood of narrow shops and warehouses and a terrible tangle of waterfront traffic. As each iron pin went in, young Roebling recorded its location, making a small diagram in the black leather notebook he carried. To show where the center line crossed through the juncture of Fulton, Dock, and James Streets, for instance, he drew the basic outline of the intersection—no easy thing, since the streets, like most in the vicinity, did not join at right angles—then the center line, cutting across the intersection at its own angle. Along this he marked points A, B, C, and D. Point A was a notch he and Paine had cut into the belt course of a yellow house on the corner of Dock Street; B was a crow’s-foot chiseled into the curbstone just up from the yellow house; C was an iron pin driven into the crosswalk on Fulton; D was another pin in the middle of the crosswalk, on the opposite side of the street.

St. Ann’s Church was their most conspicuous landmark. The historic old building would have to come down eventually. It was one of those numerous pieces of property the value of which had not been included in the engineer’s original cost estimate and there were those among its parishioners, as there were elsewhere in Brooklyn, who did not view the two intent surveyors with their brass instruments as necessarily the harbingers of progress.

Through most of this time John Roebling remained in Trenton. He would make an occasional visit of a few days, stopping at the Mansion House on Hicks Street, but the rest of the time he was content to leave things to his son, who by this time had apparently become greatly concerned over the possible verdict of the consultants, and who, like Charles Swan, was expected to keep Roebling regularly posted…

That he could write so matter-of-factly of Kingsley, the contractor, proposing to “send” Slocum, the United States Congressman, on such an errand suggests that the engineering department had no doubts about how things stood among the Kings County Democrats and that possibly the bridge tour had been something of an education for the Roeblings as well. The P.S. concerning steel for the cables also suggests that Roebling senior had at last made up his mind on this crucial matter and, moreover, that the son felt at perfect liberty to speak for the father on just about everything concerning the bridge.

In any event Slocum did go to Washington and was doubtless a good choice for the mission, since both A. A. Humphreys, Chief of the Army Engineers, and John A. Rawlins, the Secretary of War, happened also to be prominent Civil War figures and were both well known by Slocum. Rawlins was the one who counted. Grant’s right-hand man through the war, he was generally respected in Washington for being both candid and decisive. That he was also dying of tuberculosis that spring was not generally known. Rawlins told Slocum not to concern himself, he could expect to see everything approved within a week. Kingsley was elated when Slocum returned with the news, as Washington Roebling dutifully informed his father. But by the end of the week nothing more had happened.

On June 12 John Roebling came on from Trenton to meet with his consultants still one final time, to receive their formal approval in writing. Washington Roebling ordered five hundred copies printed, then wrote to his father, who had immediately returned to Trenton, that General G. K. Warren, his wife Emily’s famous brother, was going to Washington and would report back privately “how the matter stands down there.”

On June 15 Slocum again saw Rawlins, this time at the sumptuous Brooklyn home of J. Carson Brevoort, where Rawlins was a guest briefly. Rawlins said Grant had told him to do whatever he liked about the bridge—the subject did not much interest the President, one would gather—and Rawlins guaranteed the whole business would be settled as soon as he got back to Washington. Taking no chances, Slocum once more was on his way to the capital, accompanied this time by Henry Murphy. “When Mr. Murphy returns we will have an authentic report,” Washington Roebling wrote to his father, which might be taken to mean there was some skepticism between them concerning Henry Slocum or that they simply thought very well of Henry Murphy.

Rawlins was as good as his word. On June 21 General Humphreys informed Murphy by letter that Rawlins had approved both the plan and the location of the bridge so long as it conformed to certain basic conditions stipulated by the Army Engineers.

The center of the river span was “under no conditions of temperature or load” to be less than 135 feet “in the clear above the mean high water of spring tides.” Nothing could be added that might project out from the towers and no guy wires were to be attached that might hang below the river span. (At both Niagara and Cincinnati Roebling had strung such wires below the bridge floor.) The river was to be kept perfectly clear, in other words, and the roadway of the bridge would have to be raised five feet higher than Roebling had intended.

Such seemingly small changes called for some rather serious revisions, however. The increased elevation would mean an increase in the grade of the approaches and land spans, which right away meant an additional cost of some $300,000, as near as the Roeblings could figure. To avoid all this it was decided to change the iron superstructure of the bridge floor. The stiffening trusswork would be built entirely above the roadway, instead of partly above and partly below as in the original design. And just to be certain that nothing projected beyond the pier lines, the length of the river span was extended from 1,600 to 1,616 feet. It was also decided to widen the bridge floor by five feet, to make room for two double roadways for vehicles, instead of single roadways as the elder Roebling had originally planned.

Such alterations were of little or no interest to the general public, but they were no trifling matter for the engineers and they would alter the looks of the finished structure.

Humphreys’ letter was not a very long or impressive document, but it signaled the conclusion of bureaucratic red tape and was big news in Brooklyn. “T
HE
R
OBELING
P
LANS
F
ULLY
E
NDROSED
” ran the headline in the
Eagle
the evening of June 25. The paper carried the complete text of the final report by the consulting engineers and concluded that now, with all obstacles at last out of the way, the work could commence.

Three nights later, at the Brooklyn Athenaeum, Congressman Demas Barnes delivered a lecture on the bridge before an audience “notable for its large representation of solid businessmen,” who listened “with the most evident interest and attention.” Barnes, who had made a fortune in patent medicines, had been the strongest voice for the bridge on the floor of the House. This night he began his talk with an impassioned description of Brooklyn and its future, from which he moved to the bridge itself, speaking with equal ardor. Then, for his grand finale, he proclaimed the following, summing up, it would seem, all that was so fervently felt, all the common expectations, concerning the Great Bridge:

But that same day, Monday, June 28, 1869, beside the Fulton Ferry slip, John A. Roebling had been involved in an accident, which, though extremely painful, seemed of no serious consequence.

The mental torture after the accident had been nearly as severe as the physical, according to his son, who had been with him almost constantly. “He felt at his age he could ill afford to lose any time: this circumstance, combined with the prospect of being crippled to some extent, had a most depressing influence on his spirits.”

To have been struck down by such a foolish mishap did his spirits no good either. It was the sort of slip a new man might make, or one of the politicians or moneymen who invariably had to be conducted about bridge jobs. When he thought of the risks he had taken, the countless dangers he had exposed himself to over the years, to be felled this way was positively infuriating.

The afternoon of the accident had been clear and pleasantly warm in Brooklyn. He and Washington had been working since morning at the foot of Fulton Street, beside the ferry slip, where the Brooklyn tower was to go. He had come down to the waterfront to assist Washington and Colonel Paine in fixing the precise location of the tower. Paine had been over on the other side of the river, signaling to them.

At one point Roebling was standing as far out on the ferry slip as he could get, atop a cluster of piles. Seeing one of the boats approaching, he stepped back off the piles and onto a stringpiece, or beam, that was wide enough to get a footing and where, he supposed, he would be clear of the piles should they be forced against the beam by the docking boat. But there had been a knot—or something he had not noticed—sticking out from one of the piles and it had caught his right foot as the boat ground against the rack, crushing the tip of his boot and his toes.