David McCullough Library E-book Box Set

by David McCullough

  Some years later, after the bridge was finished and the story of Haigh’s swindle had leaked out, the radical economic theorist Henry George, who had set out to resolve the paradox of progress and poverty, wrote of the bridge as a prime example of the good and evil of the age.

  We have brought machinery to a pitch of perfection that fifty years ago could not have been imagined; but in the presence of political corruption, we seem as helpless as idiots. The East River Bridge is a crowning triumph of mechanical skill; but to get it built a leading citizen of Brooklyn had to carry to New York sixty thousand dollars in a carpet bag to bribe a New York alderman. The human soul that thought out the great bridge is prisoned in a crazed and broken body that lies bed-fast, and could only watch it grow by peering through a telescope. Nevertheless, the weight of the immense mass is estimated and adjusted for every inch. But the skill of the engineer could not prevent condemned wire from being smuggled into the cable.

  Come what may the Brooklyn Eagle would not be diverted from its main theme—accomplishment.

  The thousands who daily cross the ferries and look up to the lofty towers that rise on either hand above the water, and note the strands that stretch across the intervening space, hardly realize that the cable making of the great structure is nearing its completion. But such is the fact, and with a fair degree of success, by the time the cold weather sets in we shall see the four great cables completed and ready for the superstructure or roadway of the bridge. It has been steady and patient work—wire upon wire and strand upon strand—through heat and cold and storm and calm, and now this branch of the great enterprise nears the end, and another department of the work of construction appears in the near future.

  Nothing belied talk of political scheming, bankruptcy, labor unrest, vicious rumor, or plain despair quite so much as the great work itself.

  Progress on the cables was in truth very far along. Seventy strands had been completed, which meant there were only six more to go.

  An explanation offered at the time to show the interested layman how the strands were arranged to form a cable was to take seven nickels, place one at the center with six around it, all touching, and then twelve more around the outside of the six. This illustrated the pattern quite rightly, but it was somewhat misleading in that it implied that the first strand put into position was the center one—the middle nickel—then six more were compacted about it, and twelve more around that. The system did not work that way, however. The strands were being laid up in four different tiers and these were arranged in a most ingenious pattern, so that they stacked one on top of the other, like building blocks, rather than being built outward from a center strand, and still they wound up forming the cylindrical shape wanted for the cable. The first tier, consisting of five strands, had three strands forming a bottom row (the middle strand of these three was the first strand put in place) and two put on top, forming half of the next row. The next tier, of five more strands, placed one at each end of the second row (making four strands to that row) and three more on top. Then tier three, also five strands, added one more strand to each end of the third row, two more on top in the middle, and one on top of those. The fourth and final tier consisted of the last four strands stacked two to each side of the three upper strands of tier three.

  The arrangement was quite ingenious and it was entirely Roebling’s doing. “It has pleased the average penny-a-liner,” his wife would write, “to remark that there is nothing new in the East River Bridge and that Colonel Roebling only copied his father’s plans. The fact is there is scarcely a feature in the whole work that did not present new and untried problems.” His arrangement for the strands was a perfect example, she said, comparable to the water-shaft system he had worked out for the caisson, or his use of double tiers of anchor bars, which had been necessary to handle the number of strands required for such large cables (the earlier bridges had had only seven strands to a cable, not nineteen).

  Regulating the strands was found to be the most tedious and time-consuming task of all. The strength of the finished cable would depend on getting each strand into its exact, particular position, and since those positions were at different heights within the cable (there was a difference of about fifteen inches between the first strands, say, and those in the top tier), the length of the strands therefore had to vary. “Each must hang in its own peculiar length and curve to a mathematical nicety,” as one magazine article explained; “for if left but half an inch too long or too short for its true position, it will be too slack or too taut for its fellows, and it will be impossible to bind them solidly in one mass, and make them pull equally together.”

  In the abstract this was simply a matter of mathematics. But in practice there were a number of variables to contend with, just as there had been when stringing the individual wires. Temperature was again a prime factor. Even ordinary temperature changes during a day were such that the length of a strand was seldom the same from one hour to another. And to further complicate the problem, one span could be affected more than another, depending on how the sun was striking it. One strand might be in shadow, while another was taking the full glare; one might be exposed vertically to the sun, while the other was at a more oblique angle. So periods of strong sunshine, like days when the wind was up, were not the easiest times to regulate strands. The best progress was made when the weather was calm and a little overcast or between the first light of day and sunrise.

  Studies made by the engineers showed that the deflection of the cable strands from the towers at a temperature of 50 degrees was 127.64 feet, while at 90 degrees it was 128.64 feet—which was a variation of nearly a third of an inch for every degree of temperature. So it was not uncommon to find the cable strands varying as much as half a foot in height in the course of a single day.

  The way things were going, the two downstream cables would be laid up several weeks before the other two in order to give the men some practice with the wrapping machinery. To bind the strands of each cable into one compact unit required that the cable be tightly wrapped from end to end with iron wire. The work would begin at the towers, with wrapping machines proceeding down the cables toward the center of the river span and toward each anchorage. So ultimately there would be sixteen machines in operation.

  First a powerful iron clamp would be used to bring the strands into an exactly cylindrical shape. This was composed of two semi-circles that placed together formed a ring the prescribed diameter of the cable. The clamp would be screwed up tightly to compress the strands and directly behind it would come the wrapping machine, an iron cylinder—about sixteen inches long and cast in halves that were bolted together about the cable—encircled by a reel of wire that wound off the drum through a hole in the rear end of the cylinder where it passed with one turn around a small roller attached to a disk and then to the cable. The reel had handles around it, like a ship’s wheel. Men riding on a “buggy,” a small platform hung to the cable by big trolley wheels, would turn these handles, thereby revolving the reel and winding the wire onto the cable as tight and close as thread on a spool. Once the wrapping machine reached the clamp, the clamp was moved forward and the machine then advanced again, and the process would be repeated until the entire cable was clamped and wrapped. After that the cables would be oiled and a coat of white paint would be applied.

  The system worked well and without mishap except for one close call when the captain of an outward-bound full-rigged ship neglected to trim his top masts. The men in one of the buggies, working over the center of the river, did not see the ship until she was nearly upon them. Then they scrambled out onto the great cable above them and the ship clipped the buggy an instant later, sending it spinning and knocking a shower of tools into the air.

  Now there was a great push on to get the cables finished and wrapped before winter. It was expected that the job would take three months. The next step would be to hang the suspender cables from which the roadway was to be hung.

  In September, as direct
ed by Henry Murphy, the contract for the wrapping wire, awarded to J. Lloyd Haigh at the start of the summer, was quietly changed and awarded to John A. Roebling’s Sons. No explanation was given for the change. No voices were raised about the Chief Engineer having a conflict of interest. The Eagle remained silent. Abram Hewitt remained silent.

  On October 5, 1878, at 4:45 P.M. by the clock on City Hall, the last wire went over, one year and about four months after the cable spinning had begun, or eight months sooner than Roebling had expected. “This desirable event,” wrote E. F. Farrington, “was marked by no demonstrations, save the sounding of a steam whistle, and the raising of a United States flag on the Brooklyn tower.” The greatest length of wire laid up in one day had been eighty-eight miles. The white carrier wheel, which had crossed the river some twenty-three thousand times, would be crossing no more. “The end, then, is near at hand,” announced the Eagle. But a month later, the cable wrapping not half finished, Henry Murphy declared that the work would have to be shut down entirely. “Honest John” Kelly was still holding out on New York’s quota and the money was all gone.

  21

  Emily

  At first I thought I would succumb, but I had a strong tower to lean upon, my wife, a woman of infinite tact and wisest counsel.

  —WASHINGTON ROEBLING

  SHE HAD been born and raised in a house much like this one and her whole life, until she married, had been spent in the upper Hudson Valley, where the river was not only a major event in the landscape, but a central part of everyone’s way of life. Talk of tides, of winter freeze-overs and the spring breakup, had been part of ordinary conversation for as long as she could remember.

  The town dock at Cold Spring stood at the foot of Main Street. In summer when the “up” boats from New York stopped—the Mary Powell, the Emeline—it was always a grand occasion. And at night, from her bedroom as a child, she could hear the steam whistles of the great side-wheelers trailing off through the Highlands.

  She had grown up on that part of the Hudson where, for some fifteen miles, it cuts a deep narrow channel through thickly wooded mountains, the most picturesque and fabled part of the whole valley. She could still see part of the river now, just the very broad leadgray final end of it, emptying into the Upper Bay, beyond the tip of Manhattan. And now, as then, she could stand at her window and watch the afternoon sun go down and the lights come on across the water. The sun set earlier in Cold Spring than it did here, and with the mountains crowding all around, the evening skies had never been so spectacular as these. Then, the lights had been few, from West Point only. Still and all there was enough that was the same to make her feel very much at home here.

  The house stood at a prime spot on the Heights. It was tall, stately, spacious, built before the war in the Greek Revival style, and it was located at the northern end of Columbia Heights, the street running parallel to the river, about half a mile from the bridge. The address was 110 Columbia Heights, in the block between Pineapple and Orange Streets, on the west side of the street, the side with the view. Like nearly every house on that side, it had a deep garden in back, extending out over the top of a carriage house and stable built below the brink of the bluff, fronting on Furman Street beside the wharves. Moses Beach, the publisher and a pillar of Plymouth Church, lived next door. Henry Bowen, who had done much to stir up the Beecher scandal and whose deceased wife was said to have been another paramour of the famous divine, lived just up the street in a colossal white mansion with a two-story Corinthian portico, and Beecher himself lived in the next block.

  From her front windows, overlooking the street, she could see the old Turkish baths that John Roebling had patronized and directly across the street stood a row of three-storied brick houses with beautifully arched doorways and long, polished plate-glass windows, much like her own. The houses fronted directly on to the brick sidewalk, as hers did, giving the street a nicely balanced, orderly look. With the sun casting tree shadows on the pink brick walls, everything looked secure and private, as in a courtyard. But from the back of the house, from the big bay windows on every floor, the whole of the harbor, the river, the bridge, and the city beyond were spread before her.

  For six years in all, this would be the center of her universe. She was anything but a recluse by temperament, and unlike her husband she could come and go at will, but when she did it would be for his sake nearly always and for his sake she would do everything in her power to keep this place of theirs both private and utterly tranquil, like the eye of a storm.

  She was thirty-five years old now. She had been married for fourteen years. For nearly ten of those years her husband had been working on the bridge and for more than half that time he had been an invalid, for a long while very close to death and always greatly dependent on her.

  Their son now was nearly an adolescent and apparently she had known for some time that there would be no more children. She had had a bad fall in Germany shortly before he was born, and afterward had bled for nearly a month in the little inn in Mühlhausen, her husband calling in one German doctor after another. The trip home across the Atlantic had been an agony. But she seems to have kept in almost perfect health thereafter, despite everything she had on her shoulders. And she seems to have made an enormous impression on everyone she met.

  One newspaper article said, “Mrs. Roebling is a tall and handsome woman, strikingly English in style and shows not only in her face, but in her graceful carriage, an aristocratic ancestry.” She was considered an exceptional horsewoman and known for both her “scientific bent of mind” and decided opinions on many subjects.

  Among the best physical descriptions of her is one Washington Roebling wrote during the war, in a letter to his sister Elvira:

  I would send you a little tintype [of Emily] if it didn’t happen to be a horrid picture, not doing a particle of justness to the subject. Some people’s beauty lies not in the features but in the varied expression that the countenance will assume under various emotions, etc., etc…. She is dark-brown eyed, slightly pug-nosed, lovely mouth and teeth, no dimples in her cheeks, like Laura the corners of the mouth supply that, and a most entertaining talker, which is a mighty good thing you know, I myself being so stupid. She is a little above medium size and has a most lovely complexion…

  He would never be satisfied with any photograph of her no matter how many times she tried. They gave no idea of her “peculiar grace of carriage,” he said.

  Six weeks after he had met her he had bought a diamond ring and gone off on a flying visit to Baltimore, where she was staying with her sister-in-law, the general’s wife. He had never had any second thoughts about her and apparently her feelings were the same. By April he was addressing his letters, “My good Mrs. Wash,” and telling her, “You know, darling, that your presence always made me feel so good, a kind of contented feeling pervaded me if you were only near. It was not necessary to say anything, perfect silence was as much companionship as the liveliest chatter.”

  She had written him steadily through the rest of the war, long, affectionate letters full of the everyday details of her life. But he had destroyed them all, almost as soon as he read them, telling her they made the separation that much more difficult for him. She, however, had saved everything he wrote, more than a hundred letters from the front in less than a year’s time.

  “This full moon evening would be delightful if I only had someone to enjoy it with,” she read in a letter from Virginia, shortly before the Battle of the Wilderness. “In fact I would not care how the evening was if I only had you with me. I do wonder which of us two can be called the most lovesick; I am disposed to yield the palm to you because you used to consider such a thing so utterly impossible in your case. How long will it be before we shall get tired of each other, in other words what is the length of the honeymoon among people raised around Cold Spring, just ask your friends about it and tell me dearest.”

  He told her about the things he loved, dogs, astronomy, Thackeray. He told her abou
t a Trenton girl named Gussie Laveille, who, he warned, was coming down to visit his camp if she did not. He told her about the boredom and futility of war, and it seemed he had an infinite number of names for her. “Dearest Emmie,” he called her, or “Sweet Em” or “My good Emily” or “Dearest Girl,” “My dear old woman,” “My charming Miss Warren,” “My loved one,” “My Darling,” “My darling Emmie,” “My Lazy Darling,” “My own particular Darling,” “My own Emily,” “Sweetest Love.”

  “After all, dear Emmie, pray tell me what is love,” he asked. “Is it kissing each other, is it tickling, hugging, etc. one another? Is it writing billy duxes, kicking each other’s shins under the table? That must be it I think—the shins!”

  “Look for a big thief next winter,” he wrote in July, “he proposes to steal the only valuable thing in Cold Spring and intends to escape detection by changing the name of the stolen article which will render identification impossible.”

  “Does the Mary Powellrun when the river is frozen?” he asked later. “When I visit you at Cold Spring I am supposed to fly on wings of love so anything short of the railroad will be too slow. Isn’t it curious that although I was nearly four years at Troy and traveled ever so many times up and down by rail and boat I should recollect every place except Cold Spring. I dare say I must have seen you often when the train passed, rolling a hoop along the street in short frocks.”

  She had gone down to Staten Island soon after that to meet some of his family for the first time—his sister Laura, her Mr. Methfessel from Mühlhausen, and their children. Apparently the experience was something of a cold bath for her, as he learned soon enough, to his great pleasure.