The Great Bridge

by David McCullough

  Time was something never to be squandered. If a man was five minutes late for an appointment with him, the appointment was canceled. Once, during the war, so the story went, he had been called to Washington by the War Department to give advice on something or other and was asked to wait outside the office of General John Charles Frémont, the illustrious “Pathfinder.” Roebling took out a pencil, wrote a note on the back of his card, and had it sent in to the general. “Sir,” the note said, “you are keeping me waiting. John Roebling has not the leisure to wait upon any man.”

  In all his working life John Roebling had never been known to take a day off.

  He had settled in Trenton twenty years before, in 1849, when he was forty-three, or past the age, he knew, when most brilliant men do their best work. He had had no money to speak of then and not much of a reputation. All that had come in the years since. How much was generally known in Trenton of his life prior to that time can only be guessed at, but the story was well known among his family certainly, and, for the most part, in the engineering profession.

  He had been born on June 12, 1806, in Germany, in the province of Saxony, in the ancient walled town of Mühlhausen, where for about a thousand years more or less not very much had ever happened. Bach had once played the organ in the church where he was baptized and in the spring of 1815, when Roebling was nine, five hundred of his townsmen had marched off to fight Napoleon at Waterloo, but other than that no one in Mühlhausen had ever done much out of the ordinary.

  His father, Christoph Polycarpus Roebling, had a tobacco shop and the accepted picture of him is of an unassuming, rather comfortably fixed burgher of good family, who had no desire to be anything more than what he was and who smoked up about as much tobacco as he sold. Roebling’s mother, however, was a fiercely energetic sort, with a mind of her own and some very fixed ideas about getting on in the world. It was their proud, determined, long-departed grandmother, Friederike Dorothea, John Roebling’s children were raised to understand, who scraped and saved to send their father to the famous Polytechnic Institute in Berlin, and who later was the first to support his decision to leave Mühlhausen, something no Roebling had done before.

  In Berlin, he had studied architecture, bridge construction, and hydraulics. He also studied philosophy under Hegel, who, according to one biographical memoir, “avowed that John Roebling was his favorite pupil.” The renowned philosopher had been preaching a powerful doctrine of self-realization and the supremacy of reason to a generation of ardent young liberals hemmed in by an autocratic Prussian regime. The effect was pronounced, and not the least on Roebling. The contact with Hegel was a privilege and a calamity for Roebling, according to an old family friend in Trenton. Hegel had taught Roebling to think independently, he said, and to rely on the validity of his own conclusions, but the experience was a calamity “because it begat a pride and arrogance of opinion and a frigid intellectuality that came near putting the heart of him into cold storage.” But according to family tradition, it was Hegel who started the young man thinking about America. “It is a land of hope for all who are wearied of the historic armory of old Europe,” Hegel taught. There the future would be built. There in all that “immeasurable space” a man might determine his own destiny.

  For three years after leaving Berlin, Roebling worked in an obligatory job building roads for the Prussian government. Once during a holiday in Bavaria, he had hiked to the old cathedral town of Bamberg, where he saw his first suspension bridge, a new iron chain bridge over the Regnitz and known locally as the “miracle bridge.” He walked about it, made a number of sketches, and it is the traditional story that he decided then and there on his life’s career.

  In any event, not long afterward, in the spring of 1831, the year Hegel would die of cholera, Roebling returned to Mühlhausen and began organizing a party of pilgrims to leave for America, something that had to be done with caution just then since the government frowned on the immigration of anyone with technical training.

  Talk of immigration was a common thing in Germany. Ever since the July Revolution of the previous year, there had been increasingly less personal freedom, less opportunity for anyone with ambition. Nothing could be accomplished, Roebling would write, “without first having an army of government councilors, ministers, and other functionaries deliberate about it for ten years, make numerous expensive journeys by post, and write so many long reports about it, that for the amount expended for all this, reckoning compound interest for ten years, the work could have been completed.”

  In the first week of May there had been the farewell visits with school friends and aged aunts, the last Sunday at church, the final evening walks through the ancient cobblestone streets. Then on the morning of the 11th, with his older brother Karl and a number of others, he had set off. His determination now was to become…an American farmer! Having had no previous experience in agriculture, having nothing in his background, training, or temperament that would indicate any interest in or bent for such work, he would become a man of the soil, in a distant land he knew only by reputation. The architect, the scholar, the musician, the philosopher, the engineer, the burning liberal idealist, the twenty-four-year-old bachelor, would now plant himself, willfully, somewhere in the American wilderness. His ambition was to establish his own community, which if not utopian in the religious sense—like Harmony, Pennsylvania, or some of the other earlier settlements founded by zealous Germans—would at least provide the honest German farmer, tradesman, or mechanic, men good with their hands and accustomed to work, a place where they could make the most of themselves, which to Roebling’s particular way of thinking would be about the nearest thing possible to heaven on earth.

  He never saw Mühlhausen or Germany again. In 1867, to prepare for the bridge at Brooklyn, he had sent his son Washington and his pretty, pregnant daughter-in-law back across the Atlantic. It was a journey he would have liked to have made himself no doubt. He could have returned in triumph. As it was, the young couple arrived at Mühlhausen to a rousing welcome, and in a small inn across the street from the old family home, his first grandson and namesake had been born. Later, he had sent the town a sizable gift of cash in gratitude.

  In a bookshop in Mühlhausen in 1867, Washington Roebling found a rare printed edition of the journal his father had kept on route to America, which Washington carried with him on his own return voyage. Diary of My Journey from Muehlhausen in Thuringia via Bremen to the United States of North America in the Year 1831 it is titled. It is an extraordinary little document, a recognized classic of its kind, describing days of howling winds and high seas, and a steamboat—the first Roebling had been—laboring mightily by, and later, like a specter, a derelict hulk of an abandoned sailing ship, a huge brig with all sails gone, drifting on the horizon; then days of no wind and bad drinking water, the burial at sea of a child, and at last, on a night in July, the smell of land in a warm westerly wind. “The odor was strikingly distant and…would also indicate that the entire American mainland is covered with an almost uninterrupted forest and a great abundance of plants, whereby the atmosphere is saturated with aromatic particles, which the winds blowing away from land carry away to a great distance. This scent of land produced a beneficial effect upon all the passengers.”

  His band of pilgrims consisted of fifty-three men, women, and children, most of whom had never laid eyes on salt water. Their ship was the August Eduard, a 230-ton American packet bound for Philadelphia, which, in all, took eleven weeks to make port, or longer than it had taken Columbus to make his first crossing.

  Roebling himself was an immigrant of a kind the history books would pay little attention to, chiefly because they were so relatively few in number. He was seeking neither religious freedom nor release from the bondage of poverty. His quest was for something else. He came equipped with the finest education Europe could offer, he had a profession, and he was traveling first class, which meant he had one bed among four in a cabin he described as “very roomy” and “ex
cellently lighted.” Between them, he and his brother were also carrying something in the neighborhood of six thousand dollars in cash, a princely sum, and he had come on board with a whole trunkful of books—thick geographies, works of physics and chemistry, a German-French dictionary, Euclid’s Elements, volumes of English literature and poetry, and one of English essays that opened with a favorite quote from Johnson: “No man was ever great by imitation.”

  What the American captain and his crew thought of this spare, incredibly energetic young German can be imagined. He started right off, for example, by instructing them on how to build a proper privy for the passengers in steerage, whose only facility was the usual sailor’s seat perched precariously outside the stem of the ship, beside the bowsprit. Such an arrangement, Roebling announced, was altogether unacceptable for the women and children, or for anyone who might become sick or weakened by the voyage. He and the other cabin passengers, like the ship’s officers, were entitled to use a relatively comfortable, enclosed affair that protected its occupant from sudden waves washing across the deck. The same or better should be made available for all on board, Roebling declared. He explained how it could be done and it was done. “If one earnestly desires it,” he wrote, “everything will be brought to pass, even on board a ship…” The great thing, he believed, was getting people “to leave the accustomed rut.”

  His curiosity about all aspects of seamanship, navigation, ocean currents, rules for passengers, or the personal life history of the captain and each member of the crew seemed inexhaustible. He wanted to know the name of every sail, every stay, brace, bowline, halyard, every rope and how each one worked and he made diagrams to be sure he understood. He talked to the captain (“a very just, straightforward, and sober man”) about astronomy, meteorology, philosophy, history, about Isaac Newton and the American coinage system. He was the first one on deck in the morning and generally the last to leave at night, and once, when nearly every passenger was miserably seasick and lay groaning in his berth, Roebling, his head spinning, his stomach churning, was resolutely walking the deck. The malady, he rationalized, “involves no danger at all,” noting that “a cheerful carefree disposition and a manly, vigorous spirit will have great influence on the sickness.”

  For his son there must have been places in the old diary where the youthful and impressionable narrator seemed a little difficult to identify with the father he had known. One entry, for example, was taken up almost entirely with a long, vivid description of waves. Apparently his father had stood at the bowsprit watching them for hours on end and to no particular purpose. In the account of phosphorescence after dark, as the sea rebounded from the sides of the ship, it was as though the writer had been caught up in a spell:

  …then one perceives in the foam brightly shining stars, which appear as large as the fixed stars in the heavens. Along the entire side of the ship the foam has turned into fiery streaks. The spots of foam in the ocean, distant from the ship, which arise from the dashing together of the waves, appear in the dark night to the astonished eye as just so many fiery masses. In front of the bowsprit, where the friction is greatest, the scintillation is often so bright, that the entire fore part of the ship is illuminated by it.

  For the moment—except possibly for the word “friction”—it was as if nature was not something to be explained endlessly or to be “rendered subservient,” as John Roebling would say in another time and place. And again, as the ship headed into Delaware Bay, there is a moment when the gifted young graduate of Berlin’s Polytechnic Institute reflects with sadness on the Indians who once lived on shore—“quietly on the property inherited from their ancestors,” long before “the sheltered loneliness of these wild surroundings was interrupted by the all-disturbing European.”

  From Philadelphia, Roebling and his followers headed west across Pennsylvania, having decided to settle on the other side of the Alleghenies. At Pittsburgh he and Karl purchased some seven thousand acres located to the north, in Butler County, not far from Harmony (the price was $1.37 an acre, with a thousand dollars down and the balance to be paid in two equal yearly installments “without interest,” as he wrote home). And there he established his town, first laying out one broad Main Street exactly east-west, in the German fashion. He called the town Germania for a while, but then changed it to Saxonburg.

  Roebling had concluded, his son Washington would write in jest, that western Pennsylvania was destined to be “the future center of the universe with the future Saxonburg as the head center, which then was a primeval forest where wild pigeons would not even light.”

  “My father would have made a good advertising agent,” Washington would remark at another time. “He wrote at least a hundred letters to friends in and about Mühlhausen, extolling the virtues of the place—its fine climate—the freedom from restraint—the certainty of employment, etc. Many accepted and came. To each one was sent exact directions how to come, what to take—what to bring along, and what to leave behind. Most tools were to be left behind, because American tools were so much better, such as axes, hatchets, saws, grubbing hoes—nodody could cut down a tree with a German ax.”

  The beginning is hard, Roebling had warned. But there were “no unbearable taxes,” no police commissioners. And finally: “If this region is built up by industrious Germans, then it can become an earthly paradise.” But the soil turned out to be mostly clay, the winters were bleak and bitterly cold, and the roads to Pittsburgh or to Freeport, the nearest point on the Allegheny River, were “atrocious.”

  Among the early arrivals there were only two who knew a thing about farming. But according to one of the old histories of the town, they all “possessed to a remarkable degree the valuable attribute of industry, and, though many of their first attempts were ludicrous and miserable failures, they yet persevered until they became adepts at handling the ax and agricultural implements.” Every newcomer was heartily welcomed and encouraged to stay. Presently more and more did come and settle and the surrounding country, only sparsely settled earlier by Scotch-Irish, began filling up with Germans. “They have made good farmers,” an old Butler County history concludes, “succeeding, by patient industry and close economy, in gaining an independent condition where the people of almost any other nationality would have failed, in a majority of instances, to have secured more than a mere living.”

  The first building to go up in Saxonburg was a plain two-story house built by Roebling at the head of Main Street. It was clapboard on the outside, but brick behind that, and like everything he ever built, it was built to last. Five years later Saxonburg, if not exactly paradise, was at least a going concern, populated by a weaver, a grocer, a blacksmith, a cabinetmaker, about six carpenters, a tanner, a miller, a baker, a shoemaker, a Mecklenburg tailor, a Mühlhausen tailor, one artist, one brewer, a veteran of Waterloo, and an increasing number of plain farmers with names like Emmerich, Rudert, Goelbel, Heckert, Graff, Schwietering, Nagler, and Helmhold. And in May 1836, in his own front parlor, Roebling married Johanna Herting, the oldest daughter of the Mühlhausen tailor.

  But in less than a year, with everything going about as well as he could have hoped, Roebling seems to have run up against the one problem he had not figured on. He had become bored. When he heard the state was in need of surveyors, he immediately wrote to Harrisburg. That was in 1837, the year he became a citizen, the year Karl died of sunstroke while working in a wheat field, the year Roebling became a father for the first time. In a letter to the chief engineer of the Sandy and Beaver Canal, he wrote, “I cannot reconcile myself to be altogether destitute of practical occupation…”

  “So he took to engineering again, his true vocation,” Washington Roebling wrote, “and let my mother do the farming again, which she did very well when he would let her.” By the time the son was old enough to understand such things, the father’s agrarian dream, if indeed that is what it was, was long since over.

  Roebling built dams and locks on the Sandy and Beaver, between the Ohio and t
he lakes, then on the Allegheny feeder of the Pennsylvania Canal near Freeport. In 1839 he began surveying a prospective railroad route east of Pittsburgh that would later be adopted, in part, by the Pennsylvania Railroad. Living in tents, working in all kinds of weather through the roughest kind of wilderness, he and a few assistants covered more than 150 miles, plotting a line through the Alleghenies. His work was such that he was made Principal Assistant to the Chief Engineer of the state, a man named Charles L. Schlatter, and his report to Schlatter included not only full details on the grades, embankments, bridges, and tunnels required, but a number of prophetic observations about the locale around the village of Johnstown, where one of the nation’s principal iron and steel industries would one day rise. “The iron ore on the Laurel Hill is only waiting for means of transportation to be conveyed to the rich coal basins below, where also limestone is to be had in quantity and, moreover, where an abundance of water power can be furnished by the never-failing waters of the beautiful mountain stream…and certainly capitalists could hardly find a more eligible situation for starting mammoth furnaces on the largest scale…”

  At Johnstown he also became familiar with the workings of the newly built Portage Railroad, a system of long, inclined planes devised to haul canalboats up and over the Alleghenies, between Hollidaysburg at the foot of the eastern slope and Johnstown at the foot of the western slope. It was popularly thought to be one of the engineering marvels of the age and Roebling was fascinated by it. He also decided, after a good deal of study, that it could be greatly improved by dispensing with the immense hemp hawsers then in use. These were about nine inches around, more than a mile long in some cases and cost nearly three thousand dollars. They also wore out in relatively short time and had to be replaced or, as happened more than once, they snapped in two, sending their loads crashing down the mountainside. In one such accident two men had been crushed to death.