He had help with all this, of course, from whichever assistant he had assigned to that particular part of the work in question. Still, he had to provide general guidelines for them, evaluate everything they provided in return, make refinements, and make the final decisions on every item.
Inevitably certain details had to be discussed at length with the other engineers, or explained to various members of the Board of Trustees, and all this required voluminous, tiresome correspondence. But always, when it came to making his views known, his language was patient, plain, and to the point. There was never any doubt as to what he wanted done or why he wanted it done that way.
His knowledge of everything happening at the bridge, his total confidence about how each successive step ought to be taken, the infinite, painstaking care he took, seemed absolutely uncanny to the others back in Brooklyn. Had his communications on technical matters alone been written by a healthy man who was regularly on the scene, they would have been regarded as exceptional. But the idea that they were emanating from a sickroom sixty miles away seemed almost beyond belief.
He was attentive to more personal matters as well. He wrote to Collingwood to suggest remedies for a kidney ailment. He requested salary increases for Martin, from $5,000 to $6,000 a year; for Collingwood, from $3,000 to $3,600; and for Farrington, from day wages to “$3,000 per annum.” (The raises went through.) He approved the hiring of an assistant for Hildenbrand, an RPI man named Theodore Cooper, who had worked for Eads in St. Louis. Cooper was to be an inspector of iron for the superstructure. *When the work stopped in winter and Murphy, to save money, began letting men go, Roebling urged that the best of them be kept on. How could they ever replace a man like Hildenbrand, he asked. And in early 1875, when it had looked as though the work might have to stop altogether because money was running short, his seemed the one last voice of confidence. At the close of a long, persuasive letter to Murphy, he wrote:
I would further add, now is the time to build the Bridge. At no period within fourteen years have the prices of labor and material been as low as at present. A rise of 10 per cent in these items during the year is within the experience of all, and is but little thought of; but a rise of ten per cent means a million in the cost of the Bridge. To build now is to save money!
His own condition was much more serious and complicated than generally realized at the time, or than would be said in print later. He was worse even than when he left for Europe. He was in pain much of the time, in his stomach, in his joints and limbs. He suffered from savage headaches. Some days he was so weak he could scarcely hold up his head. Still, miserable as he was physically, he was not so bad off as he would be portrayed. “There is a popular impression that Colonel Roebling has been for years a helpless paralytic,” Emily Roebling would write in some private notes put down later. “This is a mistake as he has never been paralyzed for even one moment and there never has been a time when he has not had the full use of every member of his body.”
The major problem was that his nervous system was shattered. The slightest noise upset him terribly. He was still hounded by visions of his own death before the work could be finished, of disastrous incompetence on the part of some subordinate, of precious days lost at the bridge over some technical problem he could solve in a minute were he there. He felt imprisoned within his own body. He grew extremely short-tempered. When visitors were with him he suffered the whole while. Talk of any kind tired him more than anything else. His eyesight had grown so dim he could neither read nor write nor sign his own name.
His troubles were not solely the bends anymore. That was clear to those who had any regular contact with him. The standard explanation then, and later, was that he was suffering still from the bends. While residual pains and discomforts of the bends can persist, occasionally over a lifetime, the bends were only part of his problem. It is extremely unlikely, for example, that the bends could, at this stage, have had anything to do with his failing eyesight or the terrible discomfort he suffered whenever people were around.
When describing his own condition in private correspondence, Roebling himself does not seem to have used the words “bends” or “caisson sickness.” He spoke only of a nervous disorder and of his crippled physical condition. Farrington would later describe him as being a “confirmed invalid…owing to exposure, overwork and anxiety.” There is, indeed, every indication that the strain he was under, the limits he had pushed himself to during the winter of 1872-73 to get everything down on paper, the anguish and massive frustration of knowing so much about what ought to be done but able to do so very little—all that on top of the physical torment of the caisson sickness, had brought on what in that day was called “nervous prostration.”
He always told others his agony was his own doing. He had pushed himself too far he said. He longed for rest. It was the one and only cure he had faith in, but he simply had no time for that.
Collingwood, it seems, was also nearing a collapse of some sort and Roebling, gravely concerned about his old college friend, offered some revealing advice:
Regarding your health my council would be sit down and keep quiet…. Above all don’t let a fake ambition lead you on to undertaking tasks that will only break you down all the more. You are no doubt beginning to find out, as I have found out long ago, that nervous diseases are as intractable as they are incurable and only through mental rest of all the faculties and especially the emotions can they even be palliated in the slightest degree.
This letter, like all his correspondence with Brooklyn, the specifications and the rest, was dictated to Emily, who was in constant attendance as both nurse and private secretary. Gray-faced, he would lie propped up in bed or sit like an old man with a blanket over him in a chair by the window. She would sit close by taking down what he said in a letter book. When he had finished, she would read it back to him. He would make a few corrections, then she would do a final draft, in longhand, and read that back to him once more. As a result, week by week, month by month, she was learning quite a lot about the engineering of a wire suspension bridge.
The physical pain came and went. Frequently there were whole days when he felt well enough to be up and about the house. But everyone had to take extreme care not to upset him in any way. Since childhood he had been interested in geology and in collecting minerals. Now they became a passion. He began sending to one place and another around the country for different specimens. How he was able to take any enjoyment from them, with his sight so impaired, is a puzzle. But he did. Once, with a check for some new specimens, he had Emily include a note of explanation. “I am an invalid confined to the house and minerals are the only things that do not tire or excite me.”
A few incidents concerning the bridge upset him no end. Somebody in Brooklyn had suggested there was a secret connection between the Roebling wire works and Carnegie’s Keystone Bridge Company, implying that had been the reason why Keystone, not the lowest bidder, got a contract for anchor bars. Livid, deeply insulted, Roebling had sent off an icy reply to Murphy, saying he had no interest in the Keystone company, financially, politically, socially, or any other way, and further stated that if the policy henceforth was to give “contracts for supplies to the lowest bidders, irrespective of all other considerations, I hereby absolve myself from all responsibility connected with the successful carrying on of this work.” It sounded perilously like a letter of resignation.
The Eads lawsuit had also been a continuing aggravation for years now. In 1871 Eads had put in a claim for five thousand dollars, saying that Roebling, in the New York caisson, had infringed on the design he had used in St. Louis. Roebling called the charge absurd. But presently, after Roebling was stricken with the bends, Eads had angrily attacked him in the pages of Engineering, the esteemed English journal. The thing that had set Eads off was a harmless paper by Roebling published in Engineering in which Roebling had not, in Eads’s opinion, credited Eads properly for placing his air locks at the bottom of the shafts, part way inside th
e air chamber, instead of on top. Eads claimed he had been the first to do it that way and said Roebling should have said as much. He accused Roebling of stealing the idea and in a rather snide, roundabout fashion dismissed the younger man for having no creative talents of his own.
Eads’s letter was written in April 1873, but it did not appear in the magazine until later in the spring, when Roebling had just arrived at Wiesbaden, in no shape for any more emotional strain than he was already under. In a fury he wrote in answer to Eads’s letter: “Its perusal has left only the one prominent impression on my mind, that his skill in blowing his own trumpet is only surpassed by his art in writing abusive and unjust articles about other people.” Roebling said he had always had the greatest respect for Eads until then. He said he had designed his New York caisson before he ever saw anything of Eads’s plans or went out to St. Louis. “My actual experience in the St. Louis caisson,” he wrote, “consisted in nearly breaking my neck, and being half drowned in the bottom of a pitch-dark hole—certainly a forcible way of reminding one where the lock was located.” He said, furthermore, that Eads had ridiculed his idea of using timber for the caissons, that Eads’s prior interest in caissons had been scant and superficial, and that it was ridiculous to think that the position of an air lock was something that could be patented. “You might as well patent contrivances in a ship’s rigging if she were loaded with grain or cotton, or entirely empty.”
Then he wrote: “In conclusion I beg to assure Captain Eads that I feel perfectly competent to take care of the East River Bridge, and to overcome dangers and difficulties of which he has but little conception…. all of the St. Louis caissons together can find room in one of the East River caissons, with space enough left for several more like them…. And where would you go to find an easier material to sink through than at St. Louis, or a more difficult one than in the East River?”
It was an exchange of a sort not often witnessed in the profession, on the printed page at least, and might have been enjoyed as a memorable good fight had it not been known by many readers why Roebling was writing from Wiesbaden. Eads had never had any particular trouble with the bends himself, none personally that is, and this seemed hardly the time for him to be going after Roebling for what appeared to be a minor infraction, assuming even that Eads was within his rights. But Eads apparently was not to be put off by reports of Roebling’s condition and refused to let Roebling have the last word, writing still one more letter to the editors of Engineering.
His time was too valuable, Eads said, to take part in petty arguments, but he spent several columns of small print picking apart the things Roebling had said, and to prove his point about the position of the air lock, he included drawings of both his and Roebling’s designs, which, to be sure, looked remarkably alike.
Who was right in all this is difficult to say and not especially important. But the dispute deepened the division between the two men and caused them both considerable anxiety at a time when each had troubles enough to contend with. Each man believed his good name had been stained by the other. Neither was about to stand by and let that happen, or to have his bridge denigrated. The anger on both sides was all out of proportion to the issue. For Roebling, who let the matter drop, Eads’s accusations were the cause of lasting mental torment, but for Eads, Roebling’s amenity appears to have had some rather different consequences.
Eads needed every friend he could get just then, for it was in that summer of 1873, the summer of the exchange of letters in Engineering, that Grant’s Secretary of War, William Belknap, convened a board of Army engineers to decide whether Eads’s bridge was a hazard to navigation on the Mississippi and ought to be stopped. And it was in September, soon after Eads’s last letter attacking Roebling, that the Army board issued its report calling the St. Louis Bridge “a very serious obstruction” to river traffic. By January the Army engineers were saying that probably the bridge ought to be torn down and what is so extremely interesting about all this is that the most outspoken member of the board was G. K. Warren, Washington Roebling’s brother-in-law.
Very possibly Warren’s opinion was a purely professional judgment. Had there been no bad blood between Roebling and Eads, Warren might have arrived at exactly the same conclusions. But the wording of his opinion suggests otherwise.
“I am convinced,” he wrote in summary, “that a bridge suited to this great want [spanning the Mississippi], at an expense much less than has already been made, almost if not entirely unobstructing navigation, could years ago have been completed, upon designs well-known and tried in this country, had not the authors of the present monster stood in the way.”
Since neither the construction cost nor the aesthetic merits of the St. Louis Bridge were at issue, Warren’s comments on both were uncalled for, as well as quite debatable. The “monster,” as he called it, happened, for example, to be regarded by many as one of the handsomest bridges in the world. Moreover, it is pretty obvious that the “well-known and tried” designs referred to were those by John A. Roebling.
But fortunately for Eads and his bridge, Secretary Belknap, General Warren, and the other Army engineers were overridden when Eads, as a last resort, went to the White House to see his old friend Grant. Congress had authorized the building of the bridge, Grant told Belknap, so only Congress could decide to pull it down, which Congress did not do.
In another couple of years, with his bridge completed and being talked about everywhere, Eads had become a great popular hero. He was “the noble engineer.” Early in 1876, a Presidential election year, it was discovered that Secretary Belknap had been getting kickbacks from the sale of Indian trading posts in the West. This on top of the sensational disclosure of a “Whiskey Ring” operating in St. Louis under the direction of Grant’s supervisor of internal revenue had the whole country wondering where, from what walk of life, an honest leader might be found. The editors of Scientific American decided they had the answer. “In war and peace his commanding talents and remarkable sagacity have been devoted to patriotic labors…We nominate for the Presidency Captain James B. Eads of St. Louis. The man of genius, of industry, and of incorruptible honor.”
Eads kept on pressing his claim against Roebling and Roebling got so he could not bear even the mention of the man’s name. Finally, in May, Roebling gave in. “I am willing to accede to the proposition of Captain Eads in order to settle this matter,” he wrote to Paine. “I give my consent more as a matter of expediency than from conviction. I am not in a frame of mind to stand any further worry about a lawsuit.”
The issue was thereupon settled out of court and that at least was one less worry for Roebling to dwell on.
The previous winter had been a particularly bad time for Roebling. At one point, his nervous state had become so unsettled, his physical discomfort so acute, that in a moment of total despair he decided to give up on the bridge.
“My health has become of late so precarious a nature,” he wrote to Henry Murphy, “that I find myself less and less able to do any work of any kind. I am therefore reluctantly compelled to offer my resignation as Engineer of the East River Bridge. The hopes that time and rest would effect a change have been in vain, rest being simply impossible.”
The letter must have been ignored in Brooklyn, or perhaps it was never even sent. The one and only copy of it is in Emily Roebling’s cardboard-backed letter book, written in pencil, in December 1875. Maybe, just possibly, she wrote it herself, without his knowing it, at a moment when her own endurance failed, but then the moment passed. In any case, nothing came of the letter.
The extraordinary thing is that Roeblmg’s mind through all this time seems not to have been affected in the slightest. If anything, his powers of concentration, his remarkable gift for recalling in every detail things he had seen, seemed greater. No longer able to work problems out on paper, as he always had, he did everything in his head, and when his younger brothers came to call on him, as they did from time to time, to inquire about his health or to di
scuss problems at the mill, it was he who seemed able to sort things out quickest and come up with solutions. In fact, his ability to direct the family business, in absentia, seemed no less than his ability to direct the bridge, and nearly as vital.
His brother Charles, who had come into the business in 1871, after finishing at Troy, had grown into a fastidious, intelligentlooking young man who wore a stovepipe hat and whose primary interest now was his work, which was the production side of the business. Ferdinand, who with his rimless spectacles and mustache appeared older than his age (thirty-four by 1876), was supposed to see to commercial matters.
Roebling thought highly of Charles. He admired his unfailing industry and his technical competence. “He was his father over again, to a far greater degree than any of the other children,” Roebling wrote. “He inherited his temperament, his constitution, the concentrated energy which drives one to work and be doing something all the time.” Charles, at twenty-seven, was still a bachelor.
When Charles had returned from college in 1871, everything had been prepared for him to take his place in the mill, and since Ferdinand knew comparatively little engineering, Charles had been more or less his own master from the start and old Charles Swan, his guardian, had turned over to him something like $300,000 “in good securities.”
“Charles had one very strong point,” his oldest brother would write admiringly, “he never copied; [he] tried to solve every problem according to the best of his ability. Every task was an education to him.”
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