David McCullough Library E-book Box Set

by David McCullough

  SAFE ONLY 25 MEN AT ONE TIME.

  DO NOT WALK CLOSE TOGETHER. NOR RUN, JUMP, OR TROT. BREAK STEP!

  W. A. Roebling, Engr. in Chief

  From there the footbridge swept upward to the tower, at an angle of about thirty-five degrees. The width of the bridge was just four feet. There were wire rope handrails on either side, at hip level, but there was nothing to prevent a person from tripping and falling under the handrail and there were spaces between the slats, big enough to look through, put there intentionally to give the wind less hold. Actually with its guy wires and storm cables, the bridge was amazingly solid. Though men walking on it experienced a slight rocking motion, in ordinary weather there was very little horizontal swing. Still Thomas Kinsella was telling people that old John Roebling had said the thing would probably be blown down a dozen times and to judge by the looks of it nobody found that hard to believe.

  Halfway up the walk, between the anchorage and the tower, was the first cradle, a narrow platform, a hundred feet long, with wooden handrails, that was hung on cables, like a slender scaffold, at right angles to the cables. Five such cradles had been put up, one between each anchorage and its companion tower and three over the river, at equal distances. By all reports they were a good deal more stable underfoot than the sensitive” footpath, the main purpose of which was, in fact, to provide access to the cradles, where men would be stationed to see that the wires were hung precisely right and to bind them into strands.

  Once when Farrington and a reporter from the Tribune reached the top of the Brooklyn tower, the reporter sat down to rest and to take in the view. But it was then his troubles began.

  Trinity Church steeple was fencing with Grace Church, the City Hall was bumping into the [Central] Park lake, Governor’s Island, guns and all, was playing shuttlecock and battledore with Harlem, Beecher’s Church shook its windows on the top of St. Paul’s, the top of the Tribune tower had fastened itself somewhere and was swinging the building pendulum fashion, and the reporter leaned against the solid tower in dread lest his weight would push it over. *

  On Washington’s Birthday, about nine in the morning, passengers leaving from Brooklyn on the Fulton Ferry suddenly spotted two young ladies out on the footbridge. “There was no hesitation or misgiving in the demeanor of the ladies,” according to one account. “On the contrary, they stepped out boldly…without the use of the handrail.” Everyone on the boat began waving and calling, as the girls, accompanied by a man and two boys, headed for New York. As was learned later, the girls were the daughters of C. C. Martin, who was the man seen accompanying them (the boys were his sons). They were, as the papers all noted, the first women to make the crossing, but the fact that they had been allowed to do so struck many people as utter lunacy.

  “While Revs. Drs. Storrs and Buddington and several excellent ladies are moving in the matter of providing a new insane asylum for this city,” wrote the Eagle, “a considerable number of our people are providing the necessity for such an institution and their own fitness to be life occupants of it…by crossing the footbridge…without call, without necessity, out of no business or artistic impulse, and from sheer foolhardy and peripatetic ‘cussedness.’”

  Something like a hundred people crossed the footbridge that same day. They were able to go right up onto the anchorage and out onto the footbridge. There were no gates to stop them, no guards on duty. But Martin’s daughters were the only ones to cause any kind of popular stir, “BEAUTY ON THE BRIDGE” ran one headline the next morning and the New York Illustrated Times published a panoramic engraving of the two, their silk scarves and heavy skirts whipping in the wind, stepping nimbly out from the tower, as high as the clouds, a gentleman in a derby showing them the way.

  Enough of a fuss was made over the incident that Henry Murphy decided all visitors would henceforth be required to apply for a pass. This was supposed to put a stop to the traffic, and it did, temporarily.

  For now there was too much going on in preparation for the cable spinning for there to be room for anyone on the catwalk who did not belong there. Outside the Brooklyn anchorage yard, in the vicinity of James and Front Streets, workmen were tearing down old houses to make room for an expanded storage yard for the wire. The air was filled with dust and noise. Rubble was piled in immense heaps, enough brick it seemed to build twice the number of houses being torn down. Old women in shawls and street urchins came daily to gather whatever firewood they were able to carry off.

  Inside the anchorage yard, both back and front, every foot of space was taken up with heavy timber frames, about six feet high, where the wire coils were hung out to dry after being coated with oil. The wire came from the factory galvanized but not oiled. This was done inside a low shed on the Front Street side of the yard. The coils were simply dipped into a trough of linseed oil—a two-man job.

  On top of the anchorage, inside an enormous covered shed, was a wilderness of big wooden drums mounted upright in vertical timber frames, like a convention of water wheels, as someone remarked. Each drum was about two feet in width and eight feet in diameter, but mounted as they were, clear of the floor, they stood nearly twice as high as a man and they had handles all around their outer rims, exactly like a ship’s wheel. Also, standing to the rear of the drums, on the floor, in a horizontal position, were a number of smaller reels, built along the same lines, but only half the diameter.

  Once a coil of wire had been dried out sufficiently in the yard, it would be hoisted to the top of the anchorage, where it would be wound first onto one of the small horizontal reels, then onto one of the big upright drums, the wire going on as smoothly as thread around a spool. It was from the big drums that the wire would play out over the bridge, in much the way a fishing line goes from the reel at the handle out along the rod.

  Since a coil from the factory constituted only a few hundred feet of wire, innumerable splices had to be made before the wire was wound onto the drums. It was essential, of course, that every splice be as strong and weather-tight as the wire itself. It had taken two years of experimenting and testing to develop the system settled on. A galvanized steel ferrule two inches long and about as thick as a lead pencil was double-threaded inside, at both ends, one thread to the right, the other to the left, and corresponding threads were cut on the ends of the wires to be joined so that the same turn of the ferrule would screw both ends at once. The ends of the wires were also mitered, so that once the wires had been screwed tightly they could not twist. With the help of a small viselike apparatus, the wires were held together and the ferrule was put on, great care taken to screw it straight. The sharp edges of the ferrule were then beveled, the joint was cleaned of dirt and oil and dunked into a small ladle full of melted zinc to give it an all-over galvanizing. That done, the joint was coated with red paint.

  In this way coil after coil was spliced and run onto the big drums as a single continuous wire. On each drum there were fifty-two coils, or nearly ten miles of wire. Once things really got going, it was expected that the cable-making machinery would consume some forty miles of wire a day, or about four drums a day. So for months the work crews were kept constantly busy “drumming up” wire.

  On Tuesday, May 29, things were far enough along to send a first experimental wire across the river. (Just to see that everything was in proper order, and that the wire was strung at exactly the right deflection, Farrington, for one, crossed over the footbridge a total of fourteen times in that one day.) On June 11, 1877, the spinning of the great cables was begun. The way the system worked, two cables, those on the downstream side, were built simultaneously.

  The impression among most people was that the wires were to be twisted, like the fibers in an ordinary rope or like the wires in the different steel ropes already in use on the bridge. But this, of course, was not the case.

  In the first place it would have been impossible to twist such a mass of steel over such a distance, and even had it been possible, twisted strands would have less strength than those lai
d up parallel, all in line, as these were, like a bundle of rods, and compacted into what would, in the end, be essentially a great curved bar of solid steel.

  The traveler rope was now working back and forth across the river day in, day out, the big horizontal wheel upon which it revolved turning overhead on the Brooklyn anchorage, first this way, then that, and all the other smaller pulleys and belts and innumerable cogs keeping up a low, steady rumble.

  The wires were taken across the river by what was known as a “carrier,” a big iron wheel that looked like an oversize bicycle wheel with six spokes. Its axle was fastened to the working rope by an iron arm, or gooseneck, and was weighted to make it stand out perpendicular from the rope so as to clear the cradles and supports on the towers. At the Brooklyn anchorage, the end of a wire would be drawn off one of the big drums and a loop of it slipped over the carrier wheel; the end of the wire would be drawn back taut and secured around a hefty iron brace, or “shoe,” that was shaped roughly like a horseshoe magnet, about two feet long and little more than a foot across with a groove around the periphery for the wire to ride in—as a skein of yarn is held on one’s thumbs. The shoe was secured flat on the back end of the anchor bars, or at the end opposite from where the strands would be finally attached. The engineer would then start up the working rope and away would go the carrier, trundling off toward the Brooklyn tower, then over the tower and out across the water, towing the loop of wire behind, which meant that two wires were being strung at once.

  In the meantime another carrier wheel would be coming back from New York, riding on the other half of the endless working rope. So by the time the first carrier was approaching New York with its load of wire, the empty carrier would be arriving in Brooklyn to pick up another loop in exactly the way the first one had. When the outgoing carrier reached the New York anchorage, the engine would be stopped at a signal from flagmen and the loop would be slipped off and drawn taut around a shoe there. Then the engine would be reversed, the empty carrier would start its return trip, while the other one would be starting out from Brooklyn with two more wires. And so it went, always with one carrier going out as the other came back, the two of them in turn constantly towing over big loops of the same unbroken wire that kept playing off an enormous upright drum, until a whole strand was built up—hundreds of wires in unbroken continuity, with uniform tension and with exact parallelism between all of them.

  With everything working right, it took the carrier about ten minutes to make the full trip from anchorage to anchorage. Along the way men were stationed on the towers and cradles to watch the progress of the traveling wire and to see that each wire was positioned with the proper sag and tension. As the running wire went over the tower, pulled by the carrier, a man would lightly guide it with his hand to keep it from chafing against timbers or masonry. Another man would catch it with a great pair of clamps that were attached to a block and tackle and with this he would draw up the slack until the wires from the tower back to the anchorage hung with exactly the same sag, or deflection, as the others. From the cradle halfway between the anchorage and the tower, men called “regulators” would signal just when to stop, then fit the new wires up against the others, signal again, and one of the towermen would immediately mark the wire with red paint where it passed a similar mark on the other wires, exactly at the point of crossing the axis of support. Similar marks would also be made at the cradle.

  Then the towermen would turn their attention to the river side, where the same system would be repeated, with the regulators on the three river cradles going through the same motions as their turns came up. So by the time a loop of wire reached the New York anchorage, it would be thoroughly “regulated”—its sag properly adjusted all along the line—and the paint marks provided a ready index of any slip or strain that might need correcting.

  Once a strand had been completed, pairs of workmen would go riding down from the towers in “buggies,” compressing the wires into a cylindrical form with big clamp tongs and applying temporary “seizings,” bindings of soft wire, every fifteen inches or so, to hold the strand together until all nineteen strands of the cable had been strung and could be clamped into one compact unit. The buggy was nothing more than a pine wood trough, about 10 by 6 feet, with a side rail, and was suspended from overhead trolley wheels that rolled nicely along the bundled wires on which the work was being done. The men would merely let themselves down from the towers by letting out a long rope.

  During the time a strand was being made, it hung higher than the ultimate position of the cable it was to be part of. At mid-span over the river the difference in elevation was sixty feet. This not only kept the wires well above the topmasts of passing ships, but nearly doubled the tension the wires would have at the lower level—the deeper sag—and that helped straighten any crooks, or kinks, there might be and further tested the strength of the wire. Once the seizings were completed, the strand would be unhitched from the temporary fastening at the anchorage by a powerful block and tackle, let forward carefully into permanent fastenings at the end of the anchor chains and also lowered into the saddles on the tops of the towers.

  It was basically the same system used at both the Niagara and Cincinnati bridges, only here, as with everything else, the work was on a far bigger scale. Judging by previous experience, Roebling estimated that the time needed to make the four cables would be about two and a half years, taking into account that much would depend on the weather.

  Sometimes wires would break when part way over the river. The loose end would have to be hauled in and a splice made. Sometimes the delay would be only a matter of minutes. Other times, when the break occurred on the New York side, more than an hour might be lost. “These delays often occurred in the midst of a promising day’s work,” Farrington wrote, “and were very vexatious.”

  High winds and fog could make the delicate business of aligning the wires virtually impossible. Extreme temperature changes would cause significant expansion or contraction in the wires that would have a pronounced effect on their deflection and in the early stages this could complicate things enormously.

  Before the first wires went across, the engineers had four guide wires strung for the men in the cradles to go by when adjusting the deflection of the first wires. To everybody’s surprise the two land spans had not hung the same. The difference in the deflections could be readily seen just by looking at them. But only after considerable trouble was the cause found. There was a slight difference in the diameter of various lengths of wire and to solve the problem hundreds of coils had to be stretched out, measured, and enough wire selected of uniform size and weight to make up the required lengths. After that the weather had to be watched for periods of perfect calm, during which time the necessary adjustments could be made, to a hairsbreadth. As a result of all this, about six weeks were used up.

  But the wire stringing, once it got going, went faster than had been anticipated. The weather was just about ideal. With a little practice the men were laying up fifty wires a day, which was not bad for a start and would have been better had the wire manufacturer been delivering on schedule. The Eagle was now calling the bridge “The Gigantic Spinning Machine.”

  By July 2 the first of two strands was completed for the two cables on the downstream side of the bridge. The work of lowering the strands into position then began. At the anchorages the strands were drawn back by a hoisting engine until the shoe was released from its fastening. Then shoe and strand were lowered slowly, carefully forward, twelve feet, the hoisting engine and a block and tackle holding the immense pull of the strand. Because there was a twist in the tackle, the shoe turned up on edge as it came forward and slipped neatly in between the eyelets of the anchor bars. The forward motion was stopped then and a seven-inch steel pin was passed through the eyelets and the shoe.

  On the towers, too, the strands had to be lowered into the groove of the saddle, a distance of about three feet. This was done by eight or ten men working a capstan on a platfor
m built over the saddle. The capstan turned a nut on a screw that lowered the strand. Once the strand was properly attached at the anchorages, and at rest in the tower saddles, then it was also at the desired altitude over the water. The whole operation was “difficult and delicate,” as the newspapers reported, requiring “nice calculations.” The great danger, of course, being that the strand might get away. The strain exerted by each strand at the anchorages was about seventy tons.

  In the meantime, the first two strands for the two upstream cables were begun. So by the end of the first week in July all four cables were being strung simultaneously; all four carriers were shuttling back and forth high over the river, as regular as clockwork. Paine and Farrington had been assigned by Roebling to be certain everything was done just so. Collingwood and McNulty had been put to work on the approaches. And Roebling, too, was now watching the work himself once again, for at the start of the month he and Emily had returned to Brooklyn, to the brick house on Columbia Heights. With a pair of field glasses, from a bay window overlooking the river, he could at last follow the day-by-day progress being made.

  That was the summer of the Great Railroad Strike and for much of the country it was a dark, discouraging time. Half a dozen cities were hit by walkouts and violence. In Baltimore twelve people were shot down by militia. Pittsburgh was in the grip of a mob for two straight days. Millions of dollars’ worth of railroad equipment was destroyed in Pittsburgh alone. The Union Depot was burned, stores were looted, and a pitched battle between rioters and soldiers took the lives of fifty-seven. It was the bloodiest labor uprising the country had ever known and it left much of the populace wondering what in the world was happening to life in America.

  But at the bridge things had never gone better. Not in eight long years had the work advanced so smoothly. Even the newspapers seemed satisfied with the way things were being handled and could find fault with no one. “The network of wires across the East River is rapidly beginning to look something like a bridge,” commented the Herald in mid-August. By then four strands had been completed and a new feature added, “regulation cradles,” as they were known, long, narrow, flimsy-looking scaffolds suspended fifty feet below the regular cradles, which put them in line with the lowered strands and made possible a closer surveillance of the strands as they lined up alongside one another.