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

by Henry Petroski

  The creative genius of mankind, which now in this glorious age of iron is ascending to hyperbolic eminence in every branch of technical science, will leave few if any durable iron monuments to distant prosperity. Among them should surely be, if possible, substantial large iron bridges that could be made to last several thousand years, if properly cared for in countries with stable, high civilizations. But who can look that far into the future?

  Lindenthal may have been able on paper to wrap his steel towers in masonry in the hopes of preserving them for thousands of years, but he would have had to make many other pragmatic modifications to his great bridge if he had hoped to see it begun in his lifetime.

  After the Hell Gate and Sciotoville spans were complete, Lindenthal had returned in earnest to the related issues of the North River Bridge and the “port problem of New York.” In 1918, during an “exceptionally severe winter,” in which New York was cut off from coal and food supplies by a frozen Hudson River, he issued a privately printed pamphlet reiterating much of what he had written three decades earlier, but he was no longer advocating a railroad bridge only—he was now predicting that six million cars per year would also pass over such a bridge. With an uncharacteristic dropping of the definite article, he anticipated “the slowing up and congestion of vehicles at ends of bridge for the purpose of paying toll,” and suggested making the bridge free for highway traffic to avoid the problem. He had come to recognize the motor vehicle as something to be taken into account, but did not see it as a source of revenue. This was especially curious since he repeatedly pointed out that finances, not engineering, were the impediment to progress with his bridge plans. He felt the times were still not right financially, however, and “it would be folly even to think of starting construction and diverting capital to it until a year or two after the war—whenever that may be.” The great toll bridges, like the one across the Delaware at Philadelphia, were still a few years away.

  The 1918 tract was signed “Dr. Engr. Gustav Lindenthal,” reflecting his possession of the honorary doctor-of-engineering degree conferred upon him in Dresden in 1911, but also lending credence to his lack of earlier degrees—why else would he not have appended them to his name before, or made an issue of the matter of degrees in his review of Waddell’s book? He also signed another pamphlet, published the following winter, “Dr. Eng. Gustav Lindenthal,” this time using another form of the abbreviation, suggesting that he was experimenting with the title he had only recently come to use. This study, addressed to the New York, New Jersey Port and Harbor Development Commission, was a comprehensive plan for railroad-terminal plans that included a double-deck bridge with the following capacity:

  Lower Deck:

  4 Railroad tracks for freight (all needed from the start).

  4 Railroad tracks for passenger trains from 7 railroad systems, with together 24 tracks to the Union Station (all 4 tracks needed from the start).

  2 Tracks for moving (or conveyor) platform from under 57th Street.

  Roadway configuration for Lindenthal’s Hudson River Bridge, 1923 version (photo credit 4.40)

  Upper Deck:

  2 Tracks for rapid transit trains to 9th Avenue Elevated.

  2 Trolley tracks for surface cars.

  6 Lines of vehicular traffic.

  2 Sidewalks.

  Lindenthal summarized the history of attempts to bridge the North River, discussed tunnels versus bridges, and referred to his earlier pamphlet discussing the advantages of having private capital build the bridge. Finance and political economy, “the most backward and the least understood” of the “departments of knowledge,” were also the focus of a treatise written by Lindenthal and first published in 1922. As revised in 1933, A Sound Scientific Money System, as a Cure for Unemployment, was the engineer’s Depression-era attempt to apply scientific-engineering principles to “deduce and predict the safety and stability of a money system.” None of his efforts or writings was to bring sufficient investors to his bridge project, however.

  As Lindenthal grew older, each birthday was noted by the press. On the occasion of his eightieth, in 1930, for example, he was reported to have planned to spend part of the day at the office of the North River Bridge Company, in Jersey City, and the rest of the day at his home in Metuchen, New Jersey. He later admitted to being a bit miffed that his associate on the bridge project, the consulting engineer Francis Lee Stuart, called him to come into Manhattan for an important business lunch at the Engineers Club. It proved to be a surprise birthday luncheon, perhaps marred only by his being asked if he was not cheered that the war was over and that the War Department was going to reconsider his proposed North River Bridge. “He waved the inquiry aside,” however, saying “he would rather not discuss the bridge on his birthday.”

  On his eighty-first birthday, in the year when the George Washington Bridge was to be opened at 179th Street, The New York Times reported that the War Department had still not ruled on Lindenthal’s bridge 120 blocks to the south. Nevertheless, he was now confident that it would, as he spent the day hard at work in his office from eight-thirty in the morning till five in the evening. The application for a permit was eventually “pigeonholed for eight or nine years,” however, and approval was never to come. Honors, not bridges, came to Lindenthal in his old age. Late in 1932, for example, he was hailed at a dinner given by the Architecture League as the “grand old man of engineering.” In response to his introduction as one of the guests of honor, Lindenthal spoke of his career and “of his difficulties with politicians particularly in the building of the Manhattan, Williamsburg, and Queens-borough bridges and of his feeling of satisfaction when unhampered by political interference he built the great Hell Gate arch.” He evidently never did learn how to or want to deal with politicians, and this, more than any other factor, kept him from realizing his dream of a North River Bridge.

  An illustration showing how New York’s City Hall could fit across the roadway of Lindenthal’s bridge (photo credit 4.41)

  Another view of Lindenthal’s never-realized Hudson River Bridge (photo credit 4.42)

  For all the hailing and reminiscing, there must also have been a certain tension at the dinner, for two other engineers were honored along with Lindenthal. One was Ralph Modjeski, who had already built the Delaware River Bridge, and was currently chairman of the board of consulting engineers for the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge, then under construction. Though soon to be overshadowed by the longer central span of the Golden Gate Bridge, whose construction was just about to begin, the Bay Bridge was in fact a greater project in total length. Comprising back-to-back suspension spans, each with 2,310-foot main spans, a massive tunnel through Yerba Buena Island, and a fourteen-hundred-foot cantilever span across the East Bay, the overall bridge was to dwarf all others. The third honoree at the architects’ league dinner was Othmar Ammann, once Lindenthal’s assistant, but now being honored as the designer and builder of the George Washington Bridge, which, with a thirty-five-hundred-foot main span, was not only by far the longest suspension bridge then in existence, but also the first to cross the Hudson at New York, albeit much farther north than the bridge of Lindenthal’s dreams.

  Gustav Lindenthal, as an old man (photo credit 4.43)

  Among the dinner speakers was Cass Gilbert, who had served as consulting architect to the George Washington Bridge. His speech “emphasized the necessity of cooperation between the engineer and the architect.” Francis Lee Stuart, then a consulting engineer for the city, also spoke, citing “the long span bridge as the most outstanding advance in the science of engineering during the last century.” It will take another chapter to untangle all the past battles, victories, and defeats their remarks must have evoked in the minds of the engineers and architects present at the dinner.

  Lindenthal did not go to his office on his eighty-fifth birthday. He spent it at his New Jersey home, which he had named The Lindens, recuperating after a long illness. He was never to regain his health, and he died two months later. U
ntil his final illness, he had remained active as president and chief engineer of the North River Bridge Company, working on “his dream of forty years.” The funeral was held at the family home. Of the two younger engineers most closely associated with Lindenthal during the construction of the Hell Gate Bridge, only David Steinman was reported to be in attendance.

  AMMANN

  Engineers can dream alone, but they can seldom bring their dreams to fruition by solitary effort. The roots of large-project engineering, such as bridge building, lie in military operations, which necessarily involve generals and soldiers, chieftains and Indians. Though the chief engineer may be the one who holds the grand plan in his head, it may ever remain his dream alone unless he can command a staff of engineers to direct still others to commit the concept to paper, to carry out the voluminous calculations that flesh out the dream and put a price on it, and to make the numerous drawings of details that allow it all to come together in the field. As generals begin as soldiers, and chieftains as Indians, so engineers of record begin as anonymous draftsmen and calculators. The best remember their professional roots.

  Othmar Hermann Ammann was born in 1879 in the Swiss city of Schaffhausen and grew up just across the Rhine River in the small town of Feuerthalen, in the canton of Zurich. The river takes a sharp bend there, just above the Rhine Falls, and bridges played an important role in the communication between the people living on the opposite banks. Othmar’s father, Emanuel Christian Ammann, the descendant of a long line of physicians, clergymen, lawyers, merchants, and government figures, was a well-to-do hat manufacturer, and his mother, born Emilie Rosa Labhardt, was the daughter of the noted landscape painter and lithographer Emanuel Labhardt. Thus it was not thought unusual that young Othmar often carried a sketching pad and pencil to the riverbank, where he drew images of a four-hundred-foot-long wooden bridge that had been built there in the previous century by the town carpenter, Hans Ulrich Grubenmann, and that was still remembered throughout the world as the largest of its kind. Two of Othmar’s brothers would grow up to be painters, but he seems to have known early on that he would be either an architect or an engineer.

  Othmar continued to sketch throughout his teenage years, and he enrolled in the state college in Zurich intending to study architecture. However, after he found himself excelling in mathematics, becoming the top student in the subject, and being drawn more and more to scientific subjects, he entered the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology to study engineering. At this prestigious school, known around the world by the initials ETH, which stand for Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule, Ammann studied under such influential and active engineers as Wilhelm Ritter, who had spent three months of 1893 in America, attending the World’s Fair in Chicago and visiting many bridge sites. He incorporated his experiences into his lectures, and a written record of bridge building as he found it in the United States was published in 1895 as Der Brückenbau in den Vereinigten Staaten Amerikas. The final span illustrated in Ritter’s survey was Lindenthal’s proposed Hudson River crossing, and there can be little doubt that Ammann in Switzerland was aware of this.

  While still a student, Ammann had worked one summer at a bridge-fabricating plant; by the time he graduated with a civil-engineering degree in 1902, he knew what kind of structures he wanted to design and build. He began his career as a structural draftsman with the firm of Wartmann & Valette, in Brugg, Switzerland, where he gained some experience surveying for a mountain railway and designing a modest stone arch. After a year or so, he moved to Frankfurt, Germany, where he joined the firm of Buchheim & Heister as an assistant engineer working on reinforced-concrete designs. Apparently looking for a more satisfying experience, Ammann took the advice of another of his polytechnic professors, Karl Emil Hilgard, who had worked in America for three years as a bridge engineer for the Northern Pacific Railroad, and sailed for New York. In America, Ammann thought, he could gain a few years’ experience in an environment where some of the greatest bridges in the world were being built. Furthermore, according to Professor Hilgard, there was more opportunity for a young engineer in America, where “the engineer has greater freedom in applying individual ideas.” He showed his students pictures of the Brooklyn Bridge and of bridges over the Ohio and Mississippi rivers, and told them that, in the United States, he had “seen youngsters in charge of work which, in Europe, only graybeards would be allowed to perform.” Whereas some of young Othmar’s classmates had accused Hilgard of “being more American than the Americans,” Ammann took him at his word.

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  A 1904 photograph shows a young Ammann looking dreamily out a window, his cheek resting on a closed hand and his elbow resting on a table full of books and plans. An engineer’s scale and slide rule are in the foreground, at the ready for the designing of great bridges—as was the young engineer, though only in his dreams at the time:

  My first serious interest in the problem of bridging the Hudson was awakened shortly after my arrival in New York on a visit to the top of the Palisades Cliffs from where I obtained a splendid view of the majestic river. For the first time I could envisage the bold undertaking, the spanning of the broad waterway with a single leap of 3000 feet from shore to shore, nearly twice the longest span in existence. This visit came at that time as near to a dream to see the ambitious effort materialized. Nevertheless, for a young engineer it was a thrill to contemplate its possibility, and from that moment as my interest in great bridges grew I followed all developments with respect to the bridging of the Hudson River with keenest interest.

  By this time, Ammann no doubt knew all about the proposals of Lindenthal and others to span the Hudson, and he realized that, for all the opportunity America presented to youth, the matter of credibility still had to be addressed, as well as confidence. As he would reflect and advise a quarter-century later, when he was actually building his dream:

  Get all the experience you can.… Learn from those who mastered your trade or profession before you. I have known many ambitious young men to fret themselves and waste their energies early in life because they could not achieve at once great things, for which, as a matter of fact, they were not prepared.

  It is true of other careers as it is of the engineer’s—the first thing a man must decide is whether or not he has the ability to follow the calling he has chosen. Once convinced of this, it is a matter of hard work and experience; if the experience you need isn’t thrown in your way, you must move heaven and earth to get it.…

  Let me put it another way: Study the career of any man of real achievement, and you will almost certainly find that this is true: from the very start he was not only willing but eager to profit by the experience of others. How true it is that there is nothing absolutely new under the sun! However great a man’s achievement may be, it rests, in the final analysis, not upon radical departures from the experience of those who went before him, but upon the way in which he adapts their experience to his own purpose.

  Ammann, in short, had a vision and a plan, and he assiduously followed the advice he would someday give to others. He knew in 1904, fresh off the boat from Switzerland, that he was not yet in fact ready to build great bridges, but he began immediately to plan to, and to move as much of heaven and earth to his advantage as he could. With letters of introduction from Professor Hilgard, who had advised him to keep his eyes and ears open and his mouth shut while he was gaining experience, Ammann promptly found a position as assistant in the office of Joseph Mayer, on lower Broadway, “the first door he knocked on.” Mayer was a consulting engineer in New York who had been chief engineer of the Union Bridge Company, Lindenthal’s rival for spanning the Hudson, and had produced the monstrous cantilever design for the 70th Street location. No doubt Mayer saw many advantages in hiring this well-trained and talented young immigrant, not least of which were his multilingual abilities, a substantial asset in polyglot New York. It is easy to imagine that Ammann also saw real advantages in associating himself with an engineer so close to large and importan
t projects, albeit still dreams.

  The relationship between Ammann and Mayer was brief, lasting only from the spring to late fall of 1904, during which time the young engineer “designed twenty-five or thirty railroad bridges.” Othmar wrote to his parents in early December that his “boss was simply a skinflint and thought he could save a few dollars, in that he could cut my salary in half during the time that he had no work.” The later image of a shy and retreating Ammann is belied by his report that he did not accept such treatment and extracted from a “morally obliged” Mayer a good recommendation that helped him get a new position with the Pennsylvania Steel Company, located in Steelton, just south of Harrisburg, near where the Pennsylvania Turnpike now crosses the Susquehanna River. Ammann wrote to his parents from Harrisburg, where he lived, that he was working for the second-largest bridge-construction firm in America.

  He was enthusiastic about his new position, in which he was immediately assigned the design of a bridge almost five hundred feet long. He described the office, in which about one hundred engineers and technicians worked, as “very modern and practically organized” and located close to the bridge workshops, which he visited in his free time and in which he gained still more experience. Ammann reported to his parents that his salary was “about $70 per month” plus overtime, but he asked them, without giving a reason, not to share this information with anyone. He wrote that “the more I learn the more ambitious I become and the more I enjoy my work,” and he assured his mother that he was eating well and not drinking so much as the young people back home. To his father he explained that the only photographs he had taken in New York were technical; he promised to take some different ones to send home. In the summer of 1905, Ammann returned to Switzerland, where he married his school sweetheart, Lilly Selma Wehrli, the sister of the Wehrli Brothers, who were well-known photographers. Lilly and Othmar returned to Pennsylvania, and he continued to work in Steelton.