Engineers of Dreams: Great Bridge Builders and the Spanning of America

by Henry Petroski

  According to Lindenthal, the official design and the specifications upon which tenders were invited were prepared by the Board of Engineers “after much labor and time” over a two-and-a-half-year period at a cost to the Canadian government of about $500,000. The bidders, on the other hand, “were expected to make their competitive designs without compensation and in four months’ time.” Lindenthal believed that one way such a competition could work was as follows:

  If five or more of the world’s bridge firms had been invited to prepare competitive designs, on a proper general specification, in six months’ time, and for a compensation to cover expenses, then at 20% of the cost of the official design (which afterwards was ignored) and in less than one-quarter of the time there would have been a choice from a number of superior plans with tenders thereon, which would have represented the best practice and advance in the art.

  Lindenthal went into some detail about the matter of compensation for engineering services for more than pecuniary, self-serving reasons. He had long been an outspoken advocate for structures transcending the utilitarian, and for more respect for the engineering profession. Under a section of his notes entitled “Causes of the Disaster,” Lindenthal stated clearly that “the primary cause of both disasters”—namely, the 1907 collapse of the Quebec cantilever under construction and the 1879 fall of the high girders of the Tay Bridge—was simply “bad engineering.” But, rather than going on to detail technical causes, Lindenthal wrote about matters that were to become increasingly the topic of letters, editorials, and articles in Engineering News and other professional publications of the time. In connection with the Quebec Bridge, he wrote, there was “a contributory circumstance of which it is difficult for engineers to speak without a feeling of humiliation.” This circumstance was not only “the beggarly compensation for engineering services on a work of unprecedented magnitude,” but also “the willingness of an engineer of high reputation and unimpeachable integrity to assume very important and laborious duties for a fee for which they could not possibly and seriously be met.”

  Lindenthal admitted that the financial conditions of a company “during the incubation of large work” could be weak, so that the engineers and other professionals “aiding in its promotion” might be quite satisfied to take only nominal compensation until financing was secured and they could be fully paid. His comments vis-à-vis the Quebec Bridge project in particular are well worth quoting at length, because, using Theodore Cooper’s experience as representative, they set down issues that were on the minds of an increasing number of engineers in the early part of the twentieth century, and they provide insight into the practice of engineering generally:

  While the Quebec Bridge Co. was struggling along, it could not pay more than a small amount for engineering advice. It got its plans for the bridge from contractors for nothing. But after the money, with the aid of the Canadian Government, was assured, the large and difficult engineering work should have been thoroughly taken in hand, through an efficient engineering organization, properly compensated.

  Mr. Theodore Cooper, who as Consulting Engineer had assumed the largest share of responsibility, had no such organization and could not afford to have it. The fee of $3,750 per year, which he received for his services, was hardly enough to pay office rent and a stenographer. Most unfortunately Mr. Cooper seemed unable to see the wrong he did to himself, to the profession and to his clients, when he did not advise and explain to the last-named that neither he nor any other engineer could conscientiously undertake the important duties without adequate facilities and a competent working staff, and the compensation should be made sufficient both for his services and theirs. His action was a grievous wrong to the engineering profession, as it tended to create the impression that responsible engineering service was of little account and could be had for next to nothing, provided contractors’ plans were furnished.

  It is most pathetic to notice from the testimony how Mr. Cooper endeavored to serve his employers faithfully, unselfishly but mistakenly. With a proper engineering organization it would not have been necessary to rely in any degree upon the office work and strain sheets of the contractors. Entirely independent computations could and should have been made by the responsible engineer, and the errors in the assumption of dead-load would have been discovered before construction began. Systematic study and analysis could also have been given to the contractor’s design to determine whether and where modifications in form and details, as for instance in the compression members, must be made for greater safety.

  These thoughts, as here mentioned with the kindliest spirit to Mr. Theodore Cooper, an old and valued friend, are more particularly intended to call attention to a most essential requirement of good engineering service on large work, and that is resolute and great executive ability, which is rarer even than great technical ability. The failure of everyone concerned to recognize the importance of that requisite in the engineer’s work contributed greatly to the failure of the bridge.

  The editors of Engineering News recognized that the objection could be raised that “Mr. Lindenthal was one of the participants in the competition and is therefore biased in his views,” but they defended their publication of what was at times the embarrassing diatribe of a loser by appealing to the author’s reputation, which by then had surpassed Cooper’s. The editors were sure that it would be generally agreed that “in the entire engineering profession of this or any other country there is hardly an engineer who is so competent by experience and ability to deal with the problem of long-span bridge design than Mr. Lindenthal.” Indeed, Engineering News could have its own objectivity questioned: it had for two decades advocated Lindenthal’s design for a great suspension bridge to span the Hudson River at New York, a project for the likes of which engineers such as Lindenthal himself were not to be much compensated, if at all, unless the project reached fruition. Ironically, Cooper, whom Lindenthal so severely criticized, had, of course, been among the distinguished engineers in favor of a suspension bridge across the Hudson.

  The completion of the Quebec Bridge finally occurred in 1917; the distractions of a world war may have partly accounted for the lack of publicity accompanying the opening of what has become a symbol of Canadian resolve. Theodore Cooper had retired the year the first Quebec bridge fell, and he spent the final twelve years of his life in New York City, where he had set up his consulting practice in 1879. When Cooper died, in 1919, almost two years had passed since the Quebec Bridge had finally been completed, and there was less than a week till the twelfth anniversary of the collapse of the structure that was to have been his final work. His obituary in The New York Times declared that he “foresaw” the Quebec disaster, and reported that nearly one hundred lives would have been saved “had a telegram sent by Mr. Cooper been received and heeded.” The obituary in Engineering News-Record, perhaps three times as long as that in the Times, provided no such amelioration of Cooper’s role in the Quebec accident but mentioned the bridge only in passing as among the many projects included in the “consulting work” of the “famous bridge engineer.” Similarly, the memoir of Cooper that appeared two years later in the Transactions of the American Society of Civil Engineers treated his involvement in the Quebec Bridge project as only a passing credit, with no mention of the discredit it was in fact to his own and the professions reputation. Since these sources provided the information on Cooper’s life as presented subsequently in the Dictionary of American Biography, it too omits all mention of his role in the Quebec failure.

  The completed Quebec Bridge (photo credit 3.20)

  The scale of the Quebec Bridge shown by a guard posted during World War I (photo credit 3.21)

  The obituaries and memoirs of Cooper were kind in their words of remembrance, but their generally short length belied their unqualified evaluation of his professional life, which encompassed so much of the latter part of nineteenth- and the early years of twentieth-century engineering. He was, after all, the 1858 civil-engineering g
raduate of Rensselaer Institute who then had begun his career working on the Hoosac Tunnel; who had entered the U.S. Navy at the outbreak of the Civil War and served on boats ranging from the Chocura out of Boston to the Nyack in the South Pacific; who had served as instructor at the Naval Academy in Newport, Rhode Island, and in the new Department of Steam Engineering at Annapolis; who had left the navy as first assistant engineer after Captain Eads appointed him inspector of steel being made for the bridge across the Mississippi; who had taken charge of the erection of the steel by the cantilever method for the great bridge at St. Louis; who had succeeded Eads as engineer of the bridge-and-tunnel company after Eads moved on to construct jetties and promote his dream of a ship railway; who had joined successively the Delaware Bridge Company and the Keystone Bridge Company, rising to assistant general manager of the latter; who had designed and built shops for the Mexican National Railroad; who had remodeled and rebuilt a plant for the Lackawanna Coal and Iron Company; and, with all this experience behind him at the relatively young age of forty, in 1879, had established himself as a consulting engineer in New York City, where twenty years earlier the iron magnate and philanthropist Peter Cooper, no relation to Theodore, had founded the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art.

  Theodore Cooper, as pictured in an obituary (photo credit 3.22)

  Theodore Cooper’s experience, coupled with the reputation he had established with his publications on bridge design and construction, especially with regard to the loadings to which increasingly heavy locomotives subjected steel bridges, had opened up many opportunities for him. In New York City alone, he had worked on projects involving a bridge over the Harlem River, on the first elevated railways, on the New York Public Library, as one of five engineers appointed by President Cleveland to determine the maximum span of a bridge proposed to cross the Hudson River, and as a member of the board of experts who evaluated a design of the Manhattan Bridge. In the context of such a distinguished and varied career, the Quebec Bridge may indeed have appeared to contemporary editors as an inappropriate focus for an obituary.

  In spite of all that had been written of Cooper’s inadequate compensation for his work on the Quebec Bridge, he did not die a pauper. His total assets amounted to about $180,000, the great majority of that in stocks and bonds, mostly in the American Telephone and Telegraph Company. Since Cooper never married, he left the bulk of his estate to a dozen nieces and nephews. The main beneficiaries were the two nieces, Alice and Mary Cooper, who had lived at the same West 57th Street address as their uncle, and who together received about a quarter of his estate.

  Cooper’s intangible and unspoken legacy was, however, the collapse of the Quebec Bridge. That event, no matter what its ultimate cause and who its agent, took the genre of the cantilever bridge from its previously high position of trust, which had been built up by Benjamin Baker’s lectures in the late 1880s on the principle generally and on the Forth Bridge in particular, to its low position of doubt and distrust after 1907. The single event of the Quebec Bridge failure thus altered the course of bridge development, especially in America, from that set by Eads at St. Louis with his articulate argument for and achievement of an arch over a suspension design. Fowler and Baker’s great cantilever over the Firth of Forth had created a further hurdle for proponents of suspension bridges to overcome in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; that the Quebec Bridge was under construction as an even greater cantilever was in fact testimony to the growing competitiveness of the genre at the time. The collapse of the Quebec Bridge—Theodore Cooper’s dashed dream—greatly influenced the bridgescape across our rivers and the bridgeline of our cities to become what we know today.

  LINDENTHAL

  At the peak of his career, Gustav Lindenthal would be hailed as “the Nestor” (as had Cooper before him) and also would become known as the “dean” of American bridge engineers, but his life seemed to be a constant striving to establish and maintain himself as precisely those things while holding fast to a dream that was never to be realized, even though he invested in it vast amounts of time and energy. Lindenthal was born in 1850 in Brünn, a manufacturing city in the Austro-Hungarian province of Moravia that, renamed Brno, became a part of Czechoslovakia after World War I. What appears to be incontrovertible about his background is that he was the oldest son of a large family born to a cabinetmaker and his wife, and that Gustav received a formal education through about age fourteen. The details of his further education have recently been revealed to be even more uncertain than one might gather from a close reading of standard biographical works like The National Cyclopedia of American Biography, where he is said to have been “educated at the Provincial College in Brünn and the Polytechnic schools in Brünn and Vienna.” We may speculate that Lindenthal himself was the original source of such information, and, further, that his claim of having been “educated at” a school may have meant little more than having used the library and attended some public lectures there. However, it was natural to assume from the wording that the connection had been somewhat more formal.

  The issue of Lindenthal’s education was raised to a higher consciousness, however, in a 1991 article in The New Yorker that dealt mainly with Lindenthal’s masterpiece, the Hell Gate Bridge, upon which he was working at the same time that he wrote so authoritatively on the Quebec Bridge competition and related professional matters in Engineering News. The writer of the New Yorker article, Tom Buckley, revealed that none of the schools contacted in Brünn or Vienna could find any record of a Gustav Lindenthal’s ever having been a student in the 1860s or early 1870s. According to a memoir of him published in the Transactions of the American Society of Civil Engineers five years after his death, Lindenthal was educated at the Polytechnicum College in Dresden, Germany, but that may have been merely an error based on his receiving an honorary degree from this institution in 1911. Long before then, his career had reached the point where the amount of formal education he had received mattered little in practical terms, for he had risen to the very top of his profession. But it may well have mattered to the man himself, or to his rivals.

  What does seem certain is that young Gustav “received practical training from 1866 to 1870,” for at the age of sixteen or so he “was put to work as a mason and carpenter,” and “also worked in a machine shop.” Perhaps he was forced to help support the family rather than enroll in school, but “the home soon became too confining for him,” according to a tribute published in his hometown on the occasion of his eightieth birthday, and he ran away to Vienna “to start a life of his own.” So young Lindenthal appears to have left home at about the age of twenty to make something of himself in Vienna, where he became an assistant in the engineering department of the Austrian Empress Elizabeth Railroad. Two years later, he joined the Union Construction Company, which was engaged in building an “incline plane and railroad,” and the next year, 1873, he joined the Swiss National Railroad as a division engineer in charge of location and construction. Without a formal engineering degree, however, Lindenthal would have seen his future limited in Europe, and he emigrated to America, where self-educated engineers like James B. Eads and apprenticed ones like Octave Chanute could still, in the young profession, rise to considerable heights.

  Among Lindenthal’s first jobs in America was that of a journeyman stonemason, in which he found himself “working for several months on the foundation of the memorial granite building of the Centennial International Exhibition in Philadelphia” for the 1876 World’s Fair. Lindenthal was to be remembered by his daughter as a man who “stood a little over six feet tall and was solidly built,” and who “wore a mustache and a beard from the time he was a young man.” His physical characteristics and his European experience, along with the self-determination of an immigrant wanting to make something of himself in the land of opportunity, no doubt helped him before too long become “an assistant engineer in the erection of the centennial exhibition permanent buildings in Philadelphia,” a position t
hat he would hold for the next three years. The judgment haltingly expressed by Buckley in The New Yorker—that “it appeared that the most eminent bridge designer of his time had been, in a sense, an impostor”—seems too harsh, for in the 1870s it was still possible to establish oneself as a professional on the basis of performance rather than college degrees. Indeed, the judgment seems to have been too harsh even for Buckley, who had just sung the praises of the engineer’s Hell Gate Bridge, and who now seemed to want to soften the impact of the revelation:

  Lindenthal was neither the first immigrant to these shores nor the last to invent or to embellish his accomplishments or his ancestry—some did it to erase a criminal past, to free themselves from unhappy marriages, or simply to create new, more agreeable, and, perhaps, truer versions of themselves. His ersatz degrees doubtless opened doors, but he would have been quickly booted back onto the street if he had not been able to do the work. What his deception concealed, in fact, was the extraordinary intelligence, energy, and self-discipline that enabled him to teach himself mathematics, engineering theory, metallurgy, hydraulics, estimating, management, and everything else a successful bridge designer had to know—not to mention, in his case, English.

  Whether Lindenthal ever proffered “ersatz degrees” may never be known, but it may indeed have been a “truer version” of himself that enabled him to become the engineer with the grandest dreams on the continent. These dreams were to be articulated in his adopted language in technical papers, prospectuses, tracts, letters, and a steady stream of words which belie the conventional wisdom that engineering and writing are alien endeavors. Indeed, Lindenthal, like virtually all great engineers before and after him, was a master of the pen and pencil as well as of bridge design, which should not be surprising. The dream of a bridge, which typically takes its first tangible shape in the form of a pencil sketch, would win no financial or political support were its engineer not able to flesh it out in words that convey not only the technical excitement of the project but also its benefit to the community of investors, merchants, politicians, and people generally.