The Great Bridge: The Epic Story of the Building of the Brooklyn Bridge

by David McCullough

  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 discuss 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.”

  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 los
t 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 rulers 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 Su
n, 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.