Farrington was, in fact, the single person on the job who could speak from experience about the work that lay ahead and who had the clearest idea of the problems there could be.
In the time since Roebling’s departure for Europe, the stonework had proceeded more or less as expected—slowly, gradually, stopping altogether during the winters. There had been a few brief, unexpected delays—because quarries failed to deliver on schedule and once because funds ran low—and there had been more accidents. But generally speaking the towers had gone up about as smoothly and efficiently as could have been hoped.
The stone came from some twenty different quarries and of the thousands of shiploads sent only one was lost. The stone was unloaded at the yard at Red Hook and from there came up to the bridge on big scows that tied up at the tower docks. Then one by one, as needed, individual blocks were picked out of the scows by derricks and placed on small flatcars that ran on rails laid in various directions around the foot of the tower. A couple of men would roll the block around to the back of the tower and from there it would be hoisted up onto the tower, but no longer by the fifty-foot boom derricks mounted on top. The elevation was too great for that now. Instead the system worked this way:
On top of each tower, in the center and projecting over the edge, were two huge iron pulleys, in line with which, and running the full height of the masonry, were heavy timbers, laid up like tracks, to take the chafe of the block as it made its ascent. A steel wire rope, an inch and a half in diameter, attached to the drum of a powerful steam hoisting engine on the ground, passed first through one pulley, then down to the ground, then up again, through the other pulley, and down to the drum of a second engine. To both of the vertical sections of this continuous rope, running up and down the side of the tower, were attached big hooks that engaged the iron eyebolts inserted in the ends of each granite block. The hooks were fastened, in other words, so that one set was coming down while the other went up, or so that raising one block lowered the hooks needed to lift the next block in line.
Sometimes, when a particularly heavy block was being hoisted, the vibrations on the ropes, caused by the straining pulsations of the engine, became so violent that the block would have to be lowered again and extra rigging attached to it. Only once, however, did a block shake loose and fall, from two hundred feet up, demolishing the tracks below and burying itself halfway in the ground.
As each stone got to the top of the tower, it passed between the rails of a track laid lengthwise along the edge on a timber superstructure. When the stone cleared the track, another flatcar was shoved under it and the stone was unhooked and moved quickly to where a boom derrick could pick it up and swing it into place. On the arches of the Brooklyn tower, the keystones, huge blocks weighing eleven tons, were fitted in without any trimming, just as they came from the quarry.
The top of a tower was an extremely busy, crowded place, with perhaps eighty men at a time working up there. Every man had to know just what he was about. A stiff breeze blew nearly all the time, it seemed, and in late fall or early spring it blew bitterly cold. One November a magazine editor who ventured no farther up the Brooklyn tower than the base of the great arches wrote that from the finished span “a prospect will be afforded which, for grandeur, will have no rival in the world,” but doubted there would ever be many sight-seers in wintertime.
Master Mechanic Farrington later wrote this memorable description of an early morning on top of the Brooklyn tower:
There are times when standing alone on this spot, one feels as completely isolated as if in a dungeon. Some three years ago I had an experience of this kind by daylight. It was in the early morning, when a dense fog covered the whole region, that having occasion to examine some machinery, I went on the tower before the time for commencing work. I shall never forget that morning. I found the fog had risen to within twenty feet of the top of the tower, and there it hung, dense, opaque, tangible. It was what you might seem to cut with a knife. It seemed that I might jump down and walk upon it unharmed. It looked like a dull ocean of lead-colored little billows; vast, dead, immovable.
The fog seemed to follow the conformation of the ground, rising to a certain height above it in all directions, and obscuring all below that line. The spires of Trinity in New York, and in Brooklyn, and the tops of the masts of a ship in one of the dry docks, with the roof of the bridge towers, were all that were visible of the world below. Here and there where the heat from the furnace chimneys rarefied the air, white cones would rise like boiling springs, and I could in one direction trace the cautious movement of a steamer by the same means. Rising through this misty veil was the confused crash and roar of busy life below.
By and by the heads of the workmen began to appear, as they clambered up the stairway…The fog lost its density. A thin vapor seemed to rise from it—a fog upon a fog—like a mist from the ocean, and the whole began to settle and to melt away. Spires, masts and chimneys began to appear; boats were seen dodging about like porpoises, just below the surface of the mist. By 10 o’clock the fog had disappeared, and travel, which had been seriously interrupted, was resumed.
Perhaps the biggest problem on top was making signals to the engineers in the yard below to prevent overwinding of the hoisting engines. Shouting seldom worked because of the wind. At times fog made flag signals impossible, and a system of signal bells that had been rigged up was constantly breaking down. Men looking out over the edge had to be prepared always for sudden gusts of wind that could throw them off balance.
Thus far three men had been killed in falls from the towers. The engineers told reporters later that every precaution had been taken against such accidents. Anyone who experienced the slightest giddiness on top was immediately ordered down again and assigned to ground work. But a protective railing of the sort critics of the work had been calling for would have been more trouble than it was worth, the engineers said.
In 1875 a man named Reed and another named McCann fell from the Brooklyn tower and were killed instantly. Reed, it appears, had been subject to epileptic fits, a fact he had concealed when he applied for a job. A man who had been working nearby claimed he heard Reed groan just before he fell.
McCann had been standing at the edge, on the corner of one of the buttresses, as a box of mortar was about to be raised by a derrick. Instead of walking around the right angle of the corner, he jumped across it. But at the same instant, the mortar box swung into the air and hit him, knocking him beyond the edge of the tower. He fell the distance.
And it had been just that May of 1876 that John Elliot fell from the New York tower. His job had been to shove the flatcar under the blocks as they arrived on top. His foot slipped and he went through the opening in the track. He struck a projecting beam on the way down and landed inside one of the arches.
But these had not been the only horrible deaths. A man named Cope, who had the duty of guiding the rope onto the drum of a hoisting engine, tried to kick the rope into place when it was not winding to suit him. He had been shown how to do the job properly, where to stand and so forth, but ignored what he had been told. He kicked and he missed his mark. The rope caught his foot and wound his leg around the drum. His leg was crushed so badly that he died almost immediately.
Another man was crushed by a block of granite that struck him in the stomach. One of the carpenters was killed by a falling stone. And a man at work somewhere near the base of the Brooklyn tower was rolling a wheelbarrow loaded with dirt across a plank at a fairly considerable elevation, when, by accident, the barrow ran off the edge of the plank. Instead of letting go, he held tight to the barrow handles, falling to his death.
But there had been numerous narrow escapes as well, and one in particular would be talked about for years to come. Near the completion of the Brooklyn tower a man named Frank Harris (not the one who attained literary notoriety) fell head over heels down into one of the hollow spaces between the three main shafts of the tower—a drop of 186 feet, according to later accounts. Hi
s companions, assuming he was dead, started down for the body. But then they heard Harris calling for somebody to lower a rope. He had landed on an empty cement barrel floating in about three feet of rain water that had collected in the pitch-dark stone well and he had received only minor injuries. Eight days later he was back at work on top of the tower.
By the time the towers were finished, the bridge had already taken the lives of a dozen men, but in the early summer of 1876, the engineers were telling reporters that from then on the work would get even more dangerous. It was the sort of statement to double public interest overnight.
Since the summer the bridge began, there had never been a time when the public was not interested in it. But things were different now, with the two gigantic towers facing each other from opposite shores. There was no longer any problem picturing the immense scale of the highway to be slung between them. Nor did it seem very likely now that anything could bring the work to a halt. In the spring of 1876 there had been a much publicized hue and cry from some of the shipping interests. It was claimed the bridge would obstruct traffic on the river. Public hearings had been held; several warehouse owners had spoken out vehemently, calling the bridge a “nuisance” and claiming it would “cramp the commerce” of the river port. But a shipmaster named Leavy had argued for the bridge with great effect. It was too late in the day to start objecting to the bridge, he said. He said he never had had any trouble striking top spars on a ship; indeed, to those shipowners who were claiming it would cost five hundred dollars to strip a ship to pass under the bridge, he said it would be a pleasure to do the job for them at that price. Then he finished his speech by asking, if the bridge were not finished now, “What were they to do with the towers?” It was a question that appeared to dismiss the whole issue, which it did not, as things turned out, but for the moment the bridge had passed through one more trial, intact and in good part because the colossal twin towers seemed to provide a certain psychological momentum it had not had before.
To have the towers completed the summer of the Centennial also seemed especially appropriate, and particularly since the bridge now belonged to the people, quite literally.
On June 5, 1874, nearly two years after Demas Barnes first proposed changes in the original charter, the state legislature in Albany passed an amendment requiring that the cities of Brooklyn and New York be given increased representation among the directors of the Bridge Company. The mayor and the comptroller of each city were to pick eight directors and the mayor and the comptroller of each city were themselves to be directors. The bridge was formally declared a public highway and given a legal name at long last, The New York and Brooklyn Bridge. Then in May of the following year an act was put through dissolving the New York Bridge Company entirely and redefining the bridge as “a public work, to be constructed by the two cities for the accommodation, convenience and safe travel of the inhabitants…” Two-thirds of the cost was to be met by the city of Brooklyn, the remaining third by the city of New York. Private stockholders were reimbursed for their previous payments, with interest, and their title was extinguished.
But once again the old management survived—Murphy as president of the trustees (instead of the old Board of Directors), Kingsley now a member of the Executive Committee instead of superintendent. There was no change either in the engineering staff. So except for Roebling’s physical absence from the scene, the cast of characters was no different from what it had been at the start.
Most of the business of the company was still being conducted behind closed doors. But like the immense, irrefutable presence of the granite towers, a law on the books making the bridge the possession of the people did something important to the way the people felt about the bridge.
Early in July of 1876 the New York papers carried accounts of a new apparatus constructed by Colonel Paine at the New York tower by which he could test the strength of steel wire. In Brooklyn the Eagle ran long, optimistic articles titled “The Present Condition of the Work.” “Before winter shall drive the workmen from their positions,” the editors wrote, “we shall see the first strands of the great cable stretching aloft, spanning the river.” A contract for 120 tons of steel wire (“best quality”) was being filled by the Chrome Steel Company of Brooklyn. The bridge, the Eagle reported, would be finished in three more years and added that the engineers in charge were the very best in the business. “One thing is certain, the Bridge Company have been exceedingly fortunate in securing the services of professional gentlemen who are without peer in their respective fields and whose talent and genius have enabled them to surmount every obstacle…” The leadership was all in the plural now. There was no mention of Washington Roebling.
Presently, about the middle of July, Paine reported that the gigantic saddle plates were in position, each weighing 26,000 pounds, or thirteen tons. There were eight of them, four mounted on top of each tower. They were the bases for the big iron saddles, so called, on which the cables would ride. The saddles went up soon after that. They stood about four feet high, rested on rollers, and were elliptical in shape, with a groove on top, about the size of a barrelhead, in which the cable would sit. Each saddle could work to and fro on the rollers, according to the pull of its cable, and thereby alleviate any lateral strain on the tower.
The movable saddles, like the big expansion joints that were to be built into the actual roadway, were essential to the stability of the bridge. Its capacity to move, the fact that it would not be perfectly rigid like a stone bridge, was the thing that would keep it alive, as the engineers said.
Then in early August, when everything seemed to be in order, it was announced that the first wire would be taken across. The bridge was half built.
16
Spirits of ‘76
DUTY—That which a person owes to another; that which a person is bound, by any natural, moral, or legal obligation, to pay, do, or perform.
—As defined in an 1856 edition of
Webster’s American Dictionary of the English Language
belonging to Washington Roebling
FOR THE public the exact whereabouts of the Chief Engineer was a matter of considerable mystery. It was known that he was in a bad way, but nobody seemed sure just where he was or what was wrong with him or how much say he had in the bridge anymore. The papers did nothing to clear up the rumors.
Much nonsense would be written about Roebling in time to come. The impression given would be that he was still in Brooklyn all the while, living in a house overlooking the river, where, from an upstairs window, he kept watch over every move made at the bridge, sending his wife back and forth to tell the men what to do. But this was not the case, not during this particular stage in the story.
Roebling’s original intention, it seems, had been to stay in Wiesbaden only a month or two. But he and Emily had stayed on in the old resort on the Rhine for nearly six months, hoping against hope that the warm alkaline springs would work a transformation for him. Not until late in 1873 did they return to Brooklyn and then they stayed only long enough to purchase a new house on Columbia Heights, on the river side of the street, with rear windows overlooking the bridge, which was about half a mile away.
The journey to Wiesbaden had been to no avail and early in 1874, with the work at the bridge shut down for the winter, his doctors were urging still another change of scene. Roebling left Brooklyn for Trenton this time and there he stayed for nearly three more years.
So the entire time the towers were being finished, the anchorages built, the cable-making machinery assembled and set in position, the Chief Engineer was nowhere near the bridge and could see nothing of it. And in light of this fact his achievements seem all the more phenomenal, for a vigilance from Trenton was an even more extraordinary feat than it would have been from a bay window on Brooklyn Heights.
As it was, the day-by-day progress of the work, the changes in procedure and equipment, the advance preparations for the very different kind of work to come, all went on in his mind,
supported only by letters from his assistants, or from Henry Murphy on occasion. His own orders and instructions had to be issued by return mail. The elaborate, formal specifications now required for all materials purchased he also drew up himself—an enormous task.
It was well after he left Brooklyn, for example, that he did the specifications for the granite for the New York tower, for the face stone, arch stone, and spandrel courses.
…Above the arch is the spandrel-filling of varying thickness of courses, and covered by a broad band-course at the line of the keystone. The space between the keystone and the cornice is occupied by a recessed panel…The interior space above the spandrel-filling is not all solid, but consists of three parallel walls, separated by two hollow spaces. The middle wall is 4 feet 2 inches thick, the outer ones vary from 4 feet 2 inches to 5 feet 3 inches in thickness, and the width of the hollow spaces varies from 4 feet 3 inches to 4 feet 9 inches…
He described precisely how the stone should be cut and joined, how it should be unloaded at the dock, the requirements for delivery. This particular set of specifications was prepared in the fall and the winter of 1874, but at about the same time and shortly thereafter, he also drew up complete specifications for the granite and the limestone backing for the New York anchorage, for the anchor bars and anchor plates, the saddles and saddle plates, and for the several varieties of wire rope needed (steel footbridge rope, iron handrail rope, iron ropes for guy wires under the footbridge).
David McCullough Library E-book Box Set Page 114