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Also by David McCullough
JOHN ADAMS
BRAVE COMPANIONS
TRUMAN
MORNINGS ON HORSEBACK
THE PATH BETWEEN THE SEAS
THE GREAT BRIDGE
THE JOHNSTOWN FLOOD
SIMON & SCHUSTER
Rockefeller Center
1230 Avenue of the Americas
New York, New York 10020
www.SimonandSchuster.com
Copyright © 1972 by David McCullough
All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.
The quotation from My Life and Loves, by Frank Harris, is reprinted by permission of Grove Press, Inc.; copyright 1925 by Frank Harris, © 1953 by Nellie Harris, © 1963 by Arthur Leonard Ross as executor of the Frank Harris Estate.
SIMON & SCHUSTER and colophon are registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc.
The Library of Congress has cataloged the hardcover edition as follows:
McCullough, David G.
The great bridge.
New York: Simon and Schuster, 1972.
Bibliography: p.
Includes index.
1. Brooklyn Bridge (New York, N.Y.)
I. Title.
TG25.N53M32 624.5’5’097471 72-081823
ISBN-13: 978-0-7432-1831-3
eISBN-13: 978-1-4516-5825-5
ISBN-10: 0-7432-1831-0
Visit us on the World Wide Web:
http://www.SimonSays.com
For my mother and father
Contents
AUTHOR'S NOTE
PART ONE
1. The Plan
2. Man of Iron
3. The Genuine Language of America
4. Father and Son
5. Brooklyn
6. The Proper Person to See
7. The Chief Engineer
PART TWO
8. All According to Plan
9. Down in the Caisson
10. Fire
11. The Past Catches Up
12. How Natural, Right, and Proper
13. The Mysterious Disorder
14. The Heroic Mo
de
PART THREE
15. At the Halfway Mark
16. Spirits of ‘76
17. A Perfect Pandemonium
18. Number 8, Birmingham Gauge
19. The Gigantic Spinning Machine
20. Wire Fraud
21. Emily
22. The Man in the Window
23. And Yet the Bridge Is Beautiful
24. The People’s Day
EPILOGUE
APPENDIX
NOTES
BIBLIOGRAPHY
INDEX
AUTHOR’S NOTE
WHEN I began this book I was setting out to do something that had not been done before. I wanted to tell the story of the most famous bridge in the world and in the context of the age from which it sprang. The Brooklyn Bridge has been photographed, painted, engraved, embroidered, analyzed as a work of art and as a cultural symbol; it has been the subject of a dozen or more magazine articles and one famous epic poem; it has been talked about and praised more it would seem than anything ever built by Americans. But a book telling the full story of how it came to be, the engineering involved, the politics, the difficulties encountered, the heroism of its builders, the impact it had on the lives and imaginations of ordinary people, a book that would treat this important historical event as a rare human achievement, had not been written and such was my goal.
I was also greatly interested in the Roeblings, about whom quite a little had been written, but not for some time or from the kind of research I had in mind. Moreover, a good deal of legend about the Roeblings—father, son, and daughter-in-law—still persisted, along with considerable confusion. It seemed to me that the story of these remarkable people deserved serious study. It is an extraordinary story, to say the least, not only in human terms, but in what it reveals about America in the late nineteenth century, a time that has not been altogether appreciated for what it was.
And beyond that I had a particular interest in the city of Brooklyn itself, having spent part of my life there, when my wife and I were first married, in a house just down the street from where Washington and Emily Roebling once lived.
But early in my research another objective emerged. It became clear that this, to a large degree, was to be Washington Roebling’s book. There was, for example, that day in the library at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute when I unlocked a large storage closet to see for the first time shelf after shelf of his notebooks, scrapbooks, photographs, letters, blueprints, old newspapers he had saved, even the front-door knocker to his house in Brooklyn. No one knew then what all was in the collection. There were boxes of his papers that had not been opened in years, bundles of letters that so far as I could tell had been examined by nobody. The excitement of the moment can be imagined. The contents of the collection, plus those in another large collection at Rutgers University, both of which are described in the Bibliography, were such that they often left me with the odd feeling of actually having known the Chief Engineer of the bridge. He was not only the book’s principal character, he was the author’s main personal contact with that distant day and age. So it has also been my aim to convey, with all the historical accuracy possible, just what manner of man this was who built the Brooklyn Bridge, who achieved so much against such staggering odds, and who asked so little.
David McCullough Library E-book Box Set Page 77