The Great Bridge: The Epic Story of the Building of the Brooklyn Bridge
Page 77
* 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.
* All figures are based on the bridge as it was when completed in 1883.
* 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.
* Copeland, unlike O’Rourke, had not been acting alone, but was a spy for Sheriff Jimmy O’Brien, a political enemy of Tweed’s, who got Copeland a job in Connolly’s office and intended to use the material to blackmail Tweed. Tweed offered O’Brien $20,000 to keep him quiet and promised more. O’Brien, who wanted $350,000, took the money, then took Copeland’s “research” to the Times.
* Claflin was Tennessee Claflin—sometimes spelled Tennie C.—Mrs. Woodhull’s younger sister and the consort to old Commodore Vanderbilt.
* Harris thought the caisson was made of iron. He describes the work chambers as small, when in fact they were quite large, and his figures for the wages paid, the hours kept, the time spent in the lock, etc., do not jibe with the records.