David McCullough Library E-book Box Set
Page 151
Washington Roebling’s meeting with Emily and
Stewart, John (husband of Elvira)
Stiles, Henry
Stock of New York Bridge Company graft and
ownership of
scandal over
selling
Tweed Ring control of
value of
Stokes, Edward
Storrs, Richard
Stourbridge Lion (first U.S. locomotive)
Stowe, Harriet Beecher
Stranahan, James S. T.
award of cable wire contracts and
breakup of Tweed Ring and
bridge trains and
Brooklyn Bridge inauguration and
Committee of Investigation report and
crosses roadway
death of
New York World attacks
removal of W. Roebling and
Rink Committee investigation and
stock ownership of
testifies in Miller suit, 4
Stranahan, Mrs. James S. T.
Strauss, Johann
Strikes
attacks of bends and
Great Railroad Strike
Strong, George Templeton
Stroud, Henry
Stuart, Gen. J. E. B. (Jeb)
Subways, opening of first
Suez Canal
Suicides
from Brooklyn Bridge contemplated
first
friend of W. Roebling commits
Sullivan, Louis
Superstructure alterations in
completed
steel for
weight of iron
Supple, Harry
Supply shafts
blowout in
New York caisson
Suspenders
function of
in place
specifications for
Suspension bridges
built by W. Roebling during Civil War
“chain bridge,”
first suspension aqueduct
poorly built
primitive
as spiritual or ideal conception
very first
See also specific bridges
Sutter Street Railways
Swan, Alden S.
Swan, Charles
as member of Bridge Party
retires
J. Roebling and
death of Roebling and
W. Roebling and
Swedenborg, Emanuel
Sweeny, Peter (Brains)
and breakup of Tweed Ring flees the country
Rink Committee investigation and
bridge stock and
at marriage of Tweed’s daughter
Swertcope, John Valentine
Tacoma Narrows Bridge (Wash.)
Talmage, T. DeWitt
Tay Bridge (Scotland)
Telford, Thomas
Tennessee (ship)
Terminals
Thurber, H. K.
Tilden, Samuel
Tilton, Elizabeth
scandal involving
Tilton, Theodore
Timbs, Patrick
Titanic (ship)
Tombs (N.Y.C. prison), materials used for building
Tooker, Commodore Joe
Towers
Allegheny River Bridge
Brooklyn
accidents and deaths
completing
description from top of
granite for
height of
keystone of arch
masonry on
roadway to tower finished
work suspended for winter (1872)
working on top
years taken to complete
Brooklyn Bridge
architectural features of.
capstones for
completing
drawings for
height of
cable positioning between, see Cables
of Cincinnati Bridge
of Clifton Bridge
New York
accidents and deaths
completing
masonry on
specifications for granite for
testing steel wire on
work suspended for winter (1872)
of Niagara Bridge
“righted down” caisson and
see also Caissons
roadway to finished
stores for
wooden foundations for
Trains
Brooklyn Bridge
begin runs
cable car
for center of bridge
device invented for
fare
passengers handled (by 1888)
plans for
Pullman and freight
first locomotive
pneumatic
Travelers
Tree Grows in Brooklyn, A (film)
Trenton Daily State Gazette (newspaper)
Trenton Iron Works
Tribune Building (N.Y.C.)
Triger (French engineer)
Trusswork
plans for
steel used for
to allow train travel
to widen roadways (1948)
Tunnels
advantages of
Big Bend Tunnel
Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel
built under Confederate lines
under Chicago River
Mont Cenis
pneumatic
“Turtles” used in Civil War
Twain, Mark
Tweed, Mary
Tweed, William M. (Boss)
arrested
A. Beach and
Bridge plans and
bridge stock and
death of
downfall of
as executive member of New York Bridge Company
influence of
marriage of daughter of
Murphy opposed by
political ascension of
Rink Committee investigation and
testimonies of
See also Tweed Ring
Tweed Ring
attempts to control Bridge
bookkeeper of
breakup of
Committee of Investigation
effects on Kings County Democrats
1871 elections
New York Times publishes documents
New York World investigates
Rink Committee investigates
caricatured
Grant and
as product of urban environment
system of operation of
Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (Verne)
Union (newspaper)
award of cable wire contract and
breakup of Tweed Ring and
Brooklyn Bridge inauguration and
Union and Argus (newspaper)
Union Ferry Company
Union Pacific Railroad
United States Illuminating Company
Van Anden, Isaac
Vandalia (ship)
Vanderbilt, Cornelius
Vanderbilt, John
Vanderbilt, William H..
Vanderbilt, Mrs. William
Van Keuren, H. R.
Van Rensselaer, Stephen
Van Schaick, Jenkins
Vaux, Calvert
Vehicle crossings, first
Verne, Jules
Vibrations
of Allegheny River Bridge
of Niagara Bridge.
of Smithfield Street Bridge
Victoria (Queen of England)
Vinton, Gen. Francis
Warren, Edgar
Warren, Emily, see Roebling, Emily
Warren, Gen. G. K.
W. Roebling on
Warren, John
Warren, Sylvanus
Warren, William
Washburn’s (wire manufacturer)
Washington, George
Water closet, pneumatic
Water shafts
/>
blasting and
blowouts of
frequency of
Great Blowout
boulders and
described
failure of
Watson, James
Webb & Bell (shipyards)
Brooklyn caisson built by
Eads visits
location of
New York caisson built by
Weber, Max
Weir, Robert
West, the, opening (1869)
Western Union Telegraph Building (N.Y.C.)
Wheeling Bridge (W.Va.)
collapse of
river span of
Whiskey Ring
Whitman, Walt
Williamsburg Bridge (N.Y.C.)
Wilson, Mrs. William G.
Winona (ferry)
Winterset (film)
Wire fraud.
Wire suspension bridges
first built (1816)
Witte, Otto
Woodhull, Victoria
Woodhull & Claflin’s Weekly (magazine)
“Woodman, Spare That Tree” (Morris)
Working conditions inside Brooklyn caisson, see also Bends
Work crews
Brooklyn caisson
Brooklyn Bridge
for building bridge
maintenance of
New York caisson
strike of
Wright, Gen. Horatio
Yantic (ship)
Young, Brigham
Young, Charles
Young Men’s Literary Association of Brooklyn
Young Men’s Reform Association
*The Pittsburgh Gazette made much of the fact that the structure was strong enough to carry the water plus six heavily loaded barges all at the same time, the editors being unaware apparently that the boats merely displaced their own weight and so the total load remained the same, whether boats were crossing or not.
* Eads had completed the east abutment of his bridge in early April of 1871, with his caisson an incredible 136 feet below the Mississippi. Eads too was having trouble with advancing expenses, with construction costing about double his original estimate, but in October 1871, before work had even begun inside the New York caisson, Eads had written that all the most formidable difficulties had now been surmounted.
* The anchorages were in fact built entirely of limestone, with the exception of the corners, front arches, and the cornice. There was also about 650 cubic yards of granite placed directly over the anchor plates.
* In 1877 a group of architects would be called in as consultants on Hildenbrand’s plans. The best known of them was George B. Post, who was then designing a lofty new Queen Anne-style home for the Long Island Historical Society, at Pierrepont and Clinton Streets, and who would later do the New York Stock Exchange (1903).
* Years later, at Quebec, a huge bridge partly designed by Cooper, by then an engineer of national prominence, would collapse during construction, killing seventy-five men. On hearing the news Roebling would write scathingly of engineers who design bridges but do not give the actual construction their personal attention. “It is one thing to sit in your office and split hairs,” he would write, “but a different thing to get out and command men and meet the realities of great construction.” Ironically, Roebling was unaware, it seems, that Cooper had not been at Quebec because of his health.
* Prior to this time, cables were made of “bright” wire, which was oiled, greased, or painted for protection against the elements.
* At least one photographer had already been to the top of the Brooklyn tower, J. H. Beals, who earlier in the year had made the first great panoramic photograph of lower Manhattan, from the Battery to Rutgers Street, by taking five different views that he later spliced together into one panorama more than seven feet long.
* Crucible steel, steel made in comparatively small quantities in crucibles, or casts, was considered the finest-grade steel and was used principally for tools. Bessemer steel, made in a “converter” according to a process developed by the Englishman Henry Bessemer twenty years earlier, was the least expensive steel on the market, the kind used in the greatest quantity in the 1870’s and for rails chiefly. Between the two, crucible steel was thought to be markedly superior but the quality control of Bessemer steel had, in fact, been perfected to a remarkable degree by Carnegie and others. It could be produced in far greater quantity and was without question a perfectly respectable product.
* The Ashtabula disaster was only the worst of hundreds of bridge failures of the time. Something like forty bridges a year fell in the 1870’s—or about one out of every four built. In the 1880’s some two hundred more fell. Highway bridge failures were the most common, but the railroad bridge failures received the greatest publicity and cost the most lives.
* One of these firsthand accounts of crossing the footbridge was an entire fabrication, Farrington said later, but he never indicated which one it was. The day the reporter appeared at the bridge, Farrington had told him it was too windy for an inexperienced man to go out. Immensely relieved the reporter had returned to his paper, only to be told by the editor that he was to get the story wind or no wind. So he had retired to a quiet place, sat down, and drawn on his imagination.
* There was so much talk about her, in fact, that at the next alumni gathering, a year later, a Brooklyn engineer named Rossiter W. Raymond, who was not an RPI graduate, but was widely known as an afterdinner speaker, was asked to come and give a special toast. (Raymond had such a grandiloquent platform manner that he would one day be invited to succeed Beecher at Plymouth Church, an invitation he declined.) “Gentlemen, I know that the name of a woman should not be lightly spoken in a public place,” he said to his hushed audience, “…but I believe you will acquit me any lack of delicacy or of reverence when I utter what lies at this moment half articulate upon all your lips, the name of Mrs. Washington Roebling.”
* The East River bridge was to be larger in every way. The river span of the Cincinnati Bridge was 1,057 feet, or 543 feet less than what Roebling had projected for the East River. The over-all length of the Cincinnati Bridge, 2,252 feet, was less than half the length, and its width, 36 feet, was also less than half that of the new bridge Roebling had planned.
* There is no official figure for the number of men killed building the bridge. The Bridge Company compiled no list, kept no precise records on the subject, which is characteristic of the age. In a booklet made up from his Cooper Union talks and published after the bridge was built, Farrington says between thirty and forty men died in the work, which is especially interesting if it is remembered that Emily Roebling may have done Farrington’s writing for him. The Chief Engineer and William Kingsley, however, both said twenty had died and from the deaths reported in the papers and mentioned here and there in the minutes of Bridge Company meetings that seems to be a realistic figure.
* Apart from any interest he had in the lighting contract, Thomas Edison was enormously fascinated by the bridge and spent hours watching its progress. He also took some extraordinary movies, among the earliest he made, of the final weeks of construction.
* Joseph Pennell, Joseph Stella, John Marin, Childe Hassam, Georgia O’Keeffe, O. Louis Guglielmi, Raoul Dufy, Ludwig Bemelmans, Lyonel Feininger, Albert Gleizes, and Max Weber are some of the artists who have taken the bridge as their subject. Several, such as Marin and Stella, have gone back to it many times. Stella’s powerful abstraction The Bridge (1918) is probably the best known of all the paintings.
* The first subway, between Bowling Green, in Manhattan, and Joralemon Street, was completed in 1908; and the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel, opened in 1950, is one of the longest underwater tunnels in the world.
* With careful editing and numerous annotations she managed to turn a rather dry, colorless diary kept by a Putnam County preacher into an engaging chronicle. She also included an additional chapter on the Warren family. Titled The Journal of the Reverend Silas Constant, it was published in 1903.
* The most famous latter-day example of this same phenomenon was the collapse of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge, over Puget Sound, in the state of Washington. On November 7, 1940, in a high wind, “Galloping Gertie,” as the bridge became known, began heaving up and down so violently that it soon shook itself to pieces. The bridge lacked “aerodynamic stability” the experts concluded, for the simple reason that the necessary stiffness preached by Roebling had been overlooked by the designer. Eyewitness accounts of the disaster are strikingly reminiscent of the one from the Wheeling Intelligencer, written nearly ninety years before.
* The full title of the translated work, published in 1867, was as follows: A Journal of a Voyage to New York and a Tour in Several of the American Colonies, in 1679—80. By Jasper Dankers and Peter Sluyter, of Wiewerd, in Friesland. Murphy’s other translations include: The Representation of New Netherland (1849), from the Dutch of Adriaen van der Donck, and Voyages from Holland to America (1853), from the Dutch of D. P. deVries. He also wrote Henry Hudson in Holland (1859) and Voyage of Verrazzano (1875), in which he took the mistaken view that Verrazzano’s claims of discovery were unfounded.
* In his Autobiography, Carnegie would tell the story of a personable mechanic named Piper who was sent by the Keystone company to help on the St. Louis bridge. “At first he was so delighted with having received the largest contract that had yet been let, that he was all graciousness to Captain Eads. It was not even ‘Captain’ at first, but ‘Colonel Eads, how do you do? Delighted to see you.’” But presently feelings between them became a little complicated. “We noticed the greeting became less cordial.” Colonel Eads became Captain Eads, then Mr. Eads. “Before the troubles were over, the ‘Colonel’ had fallen to ‘Jim Eads’ and to tell the truth, long before the work was out of the shops, ‘Jim’ was now and then preceded with a big ‘D’.”
* It was about this same time, during construction of the Big Bend Tunnel, in West Virginia, that a Negro railroad worker named John Henry drove just such steel drills faster, it was said, than any man, for which he would be immortalized in what has been called America’s greatest ballad. Henry supposedly met his death competing with a steam drill about 1870. No such steam drills were used in the bridge caissons.