Roebling’s relationship with his brother Ferdinand, the one John Roebling kept home during the war, had grown rather strained, however. Charles Swan, who had always looked after things at the mill whenever a bridge was being built, was not the man he had been, and in the time Roebling had been away from Trenton, Ferdinand, or “F.W.” as he was called, had more or less taken charge. “He lost no opportunity to make me painfully aware of it,” Roebling would write.
Now for the first time in his life, Roebling had become bitter over what he considered an unjust disparity between his own fate and that of his brothers. It was not at all like him. But his physical suffering, the endless confinement, the strain of everything he had on his mind, had begun to tell. And besides, his feelings were not without justification.
He had been the only one of them ready and able to carry on what his father had left undone at Brooklyn and he had been paying a terrible price for it. His brothers, both in perfect health, had had everything handed to them, as he saw it; they were getting rich speedily and effortlessly in a business that had been all set up for them in advance and that he felt he understood better than either one of them. He, on the other hand, and on top of all his other anxieties, was convinced he was nearly ruined financially. He never said a word about this publicly. The only record of his feelings is in private correspondence written years afterward. Nor is it possible to know whether his financial plight was quite so serious as he pictured it. His salary on the bridge remained at ten thousand dollars a year, but his expenses, he estimated later, were twice that. The medical expenses were the worst. The six months in Europe had been particularly costly. There had been Eddie’s private schooling to pay for, as well as that of his own young son. The house in Brooklyn had cost him forty thousand dollars. Moreover, he saw his expenses growing greater in time to come. But realistic or not, his concern was still another severe strain, and his unspoken feeling of indignation was deep-rooted enough to last a lifetime.
Nobody outside the family would ever know anything of this. What is more, the respect he commanded inside the family appears not to have been diminished in the slightest, either by the rise of his brothers’ fortunes or by the tragic turn his own life had taken. When it came time to incorporate John A. Roebling’s Sons, in 1876—when Charles Swan was finally persuaded to retire—Ferdinand was made secretary and treasurer, Washington was made president.
The identification of the name Roebling with the bridge at Brooklyn was, of course, quite a good thing for the family business. Unquestionably the firm’s reputation had already benefited. When a reporter came down from Brooklyn to tour the mill, Ferdinand showed him about.
“Their grounds cover fourteen acres,” the visitor wrote afterward, “and within the walls are five wire rolling mills, and all the buildings needed for their three hundred and fifty workmen and office purposes…Their products amount to three-fourths of all the wire rope made in this country. It was a rare sight to watch these busy workmen taking blocks of red-hot steel in their tongs from white-heat furnaces, passing them through rolling mills which stretched them until they lay upon the iron floor like interlacing snakes in bizarre shapes, ready to be carried by other hands to annealing furnaces, and thence through other draw plates until the wire was prepared to bind together either the delicate handiwork of the jeweler or the two cities of New York and Brooklyn with their millions of inhabitants.” The mill was then producing something like 450 miles of wire a day.
Once the cable spinning commenced over the East River the public would be treated to the most spectacular demonstration imaginable of the Roebling product—or so it was naturally assumed in Trenton—and during the last part of Washington Roebling’s confinement there, he had the pleasant task of helping to plan a display for Machinery Hall at the Centennial Exhibition.
A variety of Roebling wire and cable, some of it on big spools, would be set out within a display area framed with iron rope draped as velvet rope would be customarily. But the centerpiece of the arrangement would be a sample section, or model, of the cable for the East River bridge, mounted on a little pedestal, like a piece of sculpture, and having as its backdrop an enormous drawing of the bridge by Hildenbrand that measured seven by twelve feet and presented “the noble proportions of the structure to great advantage.”
The section was made up at the mill especially for the occasion and exactly as Roebling had decided the real thing would be put together. When finished, it looked like a metal drum about three feet long and fifteen and a half inches in diameter and bound with brass bands. The upper end was cut off and planed smooth so the position of the wires could be seen. In all it contained 5,282 steel wires, each a little over an eighth of an inch thick, and it weighed 1,200 pounds. The wires had been laid as they would be in the cables—parallel and in distinct stages: 278 wires bound together formed a strand, as it was called; 19 strands in one great bundle, all tightly wrapped in protective skin of soft iron wire, formed a cable.
Roebling had worked out the entire arrangement and in the early part of 1876 completed his final specifications. Each of the nineteen strands in a finished cable would be continuous wire some 185 miles in length, drawn from one anchorage to the other, up and over the towers, back and forth, back and forth, above the river. Each cable would contain just over 3,515 miles of wire and the wire in all four cables would come to more than 14,000 miles.
The whole process would begin with a single wire taken across by boat, then lifted up over the towers. After that a heavier steel rope would be pulled over, the “traveler” or “working rope” as it was known, which would do the job of hauling the cable wire itself back and forth. The trick would be getting the wires in each strand in exactly the right position..
Roebling’s specifications called for 6.8 million pounds, or 3,400 tons of wire “of superior quality steel.” The wire was to have a tested strength of not less than 160,000 pounds per square inch, which meant it would have nearly double the strength of the iron wire used at Niagara and Cincinnati. In addition, to guard against the corrosive salt air over the East River, the wire would be galvanized—coated with zinc—something that had not been done before and that a few later-day suspension-bridge builders would neglect to do to their regret. *
Sealed bids, the specifications stated, would be “received by the Trustees of the New York and Brooklyn Bridge, up to the 1st day of December, 1876.” But it seemed a foregone conclusion that the Roebling company would get the contract, and when the Centennial Exhibition opened in May, the prototype slice of bridge cable set up in the Roebling display turned out to be one of the most popular items in Machinery Hall, along with Ben Franklin’s old hand press, a first typewriter, and a telephone displayed by a courtly Scottish immigrant, Alexander Graham Bell. One day in Machinery Hall the fair’s most popular visitor, Emperor Dom Pedro of Brazil, put his ear to Bell’s device, then dropped the receiver, exclaiming, “My God, it talks!” The fair was a success from that moment on.
Machinery Hall was also the place to see the favorite attraction of the entire fair, the gigantic Corliss stationary steam engine. It stood just down the way from the Roebling display, taller than most houses, with two tremendous walking beams, a gigantic flywheel, several flights of stairs and little platforms for the mechanics and oilers. It had been erected in the central transept of the hall and provided the driving power for some thirteen acres of machinery displayed throughout the building.
On the opening day, the hall filled with spectators, every machine had stood motionless as President Grant, dressed all in black and looking pale and tired, stepped to the controls of the giant engine, along with Dom Pedro and George H. Corliss, its creator. Grant and the little Emperor each took hold of a lever. Then Corliss waved his hand, a signal to admit steam into the cylinders (the boilers were located outside of the building). “It was a scene to be remembered,” wrote one reporter, almost overcome with excitement, “…perhaps for the first time in the history of mankind, two of the greatest ruler
s in the world obeyed the order of an inventor citizen.” When the two men swung their levers, the engine hissed loudly, the enormous walking beams began moving, ever so slowly, the floor trembled. Then the walking beams were going up and down. The flywheel gathered momentum, belts moved, shafts and pulleys turned, and machines everywhere came to life—sewing cloth, printing newspapers (the New York Herald, the Sun, the Times), printing wallpaper, sawing logs, grinding out plug tobacco. The Pyramid Pin Company had a machine attended by a little girl that turned out 180,000 pins stuck in paper in a single day.
The giant Corliss itself required only one attendant, which greatly impressed most observers, including William Dean Howells, who wrote: “The engineer sits reading his newspaper, as in a peaceful bower. Now and then he lays down his paper and clambers up one of the stairways…and touches some irritated spot on the giant’s body with a drop of oil, and goes down again and takes up his newspaper; he is like some potent enchanter there…” Americans liked their mechanical marvels done up on a grand scale, the bigger the better, and it was an age that adored pageantry. So a combination of the two was bound to please. But it was the contrast between man and machine that made the machine seem so monstrous big, the man so touched by some blessed new power, and the whole hall so enormously popular.
There were some, of course, who saw the Corliss engine as a menace, “ready at the touch of a man’s fingers to show its awful power”; but most people went back to the cornfields of Indiana or the dry goods store in Fall River or wherever it was they came from filled with pride and admiration for all they had seen.
Two of the Roebling brothers went over to Philadelphia to attend the opening ceremonies. Charles probably considered the Corliss engine overly large for its purpose and inefficient, which it was, and Ferdinand must have been extremely pleased by the attention paid the section of bridge cable. The fair would be attended by eight million citizens by the time it ended in the fall, or about one American out of every five, a very large percentage of whom took some time to look over the Roebling display.
For Washington Roebling news of all this, like news of everything else happening beyond his walls, came to him second or third hand. The fair was an easy morning’s train ride from Trenton, but for him it could as well have been on the other side of the world. The opening ceremonies in Machinery Hall and all the other attractions were described at great length in the papers. There was Old Abe, the famous eagle mascot of the Civil War, which, for fifty cents, could be seen dining on live chickens; or the gigantic hand and torch of the great statue Liberty Lighting the World, a one hundredth birthday gift from the people of France. These he could readily picture as Emily read aloud for him, just as later the following month he could see the gruesome scene on the high plains of Montana when she read about the slaughter of 264 federal cavalrymen and their commanding officer, George Armstrong Custer. Roebling and Custer were of about the same age. That the Little Big Horn and Machinery Hall were part of the same America said perhaps as much as anything about the sort of country it was after a hundred years if one stopped to think about it, which doubtless Roebling did.
And then, very gradually, he began to show signs of improvement. In July he was talking to Emily of returning to the bridge and he dictated a letter to Paine to tell him as much. The work he liked best, the work he knew best, was about to begin. When he had first arrived in Cincinnati after the war, the cable spinning had only just begun and he had been the one in charge from then on, not his father, as most people failed to appreciate. Now he grew keenly interested in everything to do with the footbridge. Farrington was the man to build it, he wrote Henry Murphy. Farrington had been through all this before at Cincinnati and knew just what do to. “He is a man of great resource when unforeseen troubles arise,” Roebling told Murphy, who already knew all about Farrington and his abilities, “and he has the necessary coolness and perseverance and does not easily get frightened in time of danger…” It was what someone else might have said about Roebling.
Then on the afternoon of August 14, shortly past one o’clock, a telegram was sent up to the Roebling house from the Trenton depot. It was from Paine: THE FIRST WIRE ROPE REACHED ITS POSITION AT ELEVEN AND ONE HALF O’CLOCK. WAS RAISED IN SIX MINUTES.
Two other telegrams followed, one from John Prentice, treasurer of the Bridge Company, and one from Farrington late in the day. They reported what he hoped they would: after the first rope was in position, a second had gone across, the two to form an endless cable stretching from anchorage to anchorage. The whole operation had gone off without a hitch, exactly as planned. It was a moment Roebling had been anticipating for seven years and he had missed seeing it.
17
A Perfect Pandemonium
With its princes of the lofty wire the Brooklyn Bridge is now the cheapest, the most entertaining, and the best-attended circus in the world.
—New York Tribune
THEY all stood waiting for the river to clear—Martin and McNulty under the arches on the New York tower; Farrington and a carpenter named Brown out on a hoisting frame at the top of the tower, where they could signal to the engineman in the yard; foreman Dempsey and several workmen close by on the tower itself; and on the wharves below and across the river, in the rigging of ships tied up on both shores, perhaps six thousand spectators, many of whom had been waiting for several hours.
The idea at first had been to take the rope across on a Sunday or at night, when there would be little traffic on the water. On the average day as many as a hundred craft passed the line of the bridge in an hour’s time. But Farrington had noted that frequently there would be clear water between the towers for stretches of four to eight minutes, even on the busiest days of the week, so the decision had been to go ahead just as soon as everything was ready.
A few days earlier the ends of two working ropes had been hauled up and over the top of the Brooklyn tower. Made of twisted chrome steel strands, these ropes were three-quarters of an inch in diameter, more than three thousand feet long, and were wound on a big wooden drum set at the base of the tower on the river side. To get the ropes over the top had been relatively simple. A heavy hemp rope had been put over first, then tied to the eyelet at the end of the wire rope. That done, the hoisting engine in the yard was started up. The wire rope was pulled to the top, where it passed through a set of pulleys, then down the other side.
From the yard the ropes were then hauled inland to the summit of the Brooklyn anchorage in much the same way, except that fenders and trestles had to be erected and men stationed on all intervening housetops to prevent any accidental damage. At the anchorage the two wire ropes were joined and passed around several oak wheels, the main one of which, the driving wheel, as it was called, was mounted horizontally in a massive timber framework and was a good twelve feet in diameter. Back at the base of the tower one of the reels was then put on board a stone scow and hung on a wooden axle, so when the scow started for New York the rope would be unwound by the strain from the Brooklyn shore, where the rope was temporarily lashed tight.
By nine that morning, Monday the 14th, everything was in order. Huge American flags had been raised on top of both towers and there was much excitement among the spectators. Slack water, the relatively calm interval between tides, would occur in the next hour. Martin, McNulty, and Farrington had gone on board the scow to supervise things, along with the white-bearded O. P. Quintard and two or three young ladies, the identities of whom were never given in later accounts.
Shortly past nine two steam tugs pulled alongside. One made fast to the starboard side of the scow; the other stood off slightly, ready to keep other craft at a distance during the trip across. At nine thirty the tugs sounded their bells, moorings were cast off, tugs and scow swung slowly out into the river. At the stern of the scow the wire rope trailed off into the water. The tide was still running out, and as the boats pulled away, the current carried them downstream some but not enough to matter. Slowly, steadily, they pushed for the opposite
shore, the rope paying out and sinking to the bottom as fast as it unwound. Two-thirds of the way across the tugs had to stop to allow an English bark to pass upriver across their bows. “She came so close,” wrote a reporter on the lead tug, “that a pebble could have been tossed upon her deck with the most perfect ease.”
But that had been the single interruption. The whole trip took less than ten minutes and the arrival at the New York tower had been greeted by loud applause. The scow made fast in a very businesslike fashion; the balance of the rope was unwound and laid on the dock.
The next thing had been to get the rope over the New York tower. A hemp rope had been passed over the tower previously and was now attached to the end of the wire. But nothing more was done until Farrington had climbed to the top of the tower to make a few final checks. At ten twenty he signaled from above. The hoisting engine was thrown into gear and in a matter of minutes the wire was over the top and reeled part way onto the yard engine’s big drum. The main body of the rope, however, still lay at the bottom of the river and there it remained as everyone stood watching for a moment with no boats in the way, or none about to be, when it could be pulled out of the water.
The waiting seemed interminable. Half an hour went by, three-quarters of an hour, and still there was no break in the traffic. Two barges and an excursion steamer moving out into the stream from Jewell’s dock took forever getting under way. The excursion boat was bound for Oriental Grove, on the Sound, with a picnic party, and everyone on board appeared delighted by the grandstand view of the doings at the bridge.
At about half past ten, as a precautionary warning to passing ships, a little howitzer had been fired at the foot of the New York tower but that seemed to have no effect. It began to look, in fact, as though several hours would pass before the river would be clear enough to get on with the work. But as some of the subsequent newspaper accounts noted, the long wait did nothing to dampen anyone’s spirits and the delay added considerably to the size of the crowd.
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