The Great Bridge

by David McCullough

  For several days more Roebling lay near death in the same Hicks Street house where his father had died. His assistants came and went. Somebody was with him at all times. Little hope was held out for him. In some of the things written about him a generation later, it would be said that Roebling remained painfully paralyzed, a total invalid from this point on. But the record shows this was not the case. In another few days, much to everyone’s amazement, he went back to work.

  Once when he was seventeen, his father had been faced with a cholera epidemic at Niagara Falls. More than sixty people had died in the first week and the doctors seemed incapable of doing anything to help. “The great secret,” his father had written to Charles Swan, was to “keep off fear.” His father, too, would have succumbed with the rest, according to one man who was there, had it not been for his uncommon powers of concentration. “He determined not to have it,” the man wrote. John Roebling had spent one whole night walking up and down his room, fighting to rid his mind of the very thought of cholera. The incident made an enormous impression on the gentleman who witnessed it and on everyone back in Trenton when the story was told there. Now it seems Washington Roebling too had “determined not to have it.” Other men might resign themselves to their fate, he could not.

  Through the first weeks of summer the attacks kept recurring, however, and he suffered intensely. He made no public mention of this, nor did anybody else. It is only from comments made in private correspondence years afterward that anything is known of his extreme physical suffering. To judge by the Bridge Company’s record books and occasional items in the papers, he was carrying on as though nothing were the matter. It was during this time, for instance, that his report exonerating the management of Bridge Company purchases was read before the board, and knowing this, one cannot but wonder if his physical and emotional torment, the anxiety Emily described, did not have something to do with the discrepancies between that report and some of the things he would say privately much later on.

  On July 12 the filling in of the New York caisson was completed and apparently under the personal supervision of the Chief Engineer. The whole task of sinking the caisson had taken 221 days.

  He took two weeks off and went with Emily to Saratoga. He was somewhat improved when they returned but that lasted only briefly. By September he was staying home two and three days a week. Still his condition remained a private matter. To judge by the official records and items in the papers the Chief Engineer was very much on the job.

  On September 3 bills amounting to $50,000 were ordered paid, on being certified by the Chief Engineer. On September 17 the Chief Engineer was directed to solicit bids for the anchor bars for the New York anchorage and the Chief Engineer and the General Superintendent were authorized to award the contract to the lowest bidder. On October 8 the Executive Committee authorized the president of the Bridge Company to execute a contract with the Bodwell Granite Company of Maine, according to specifications prepared by the Chief Engineer. An agreement made by the Chief Engineer with Louis Osborne of East Boston, for building an expensive double hoisting engine, was also approved, and a number of substantial bills were ordered paid, after being certified by the Chief Engineer.

  In late November it was Roebling who ordered that work on the Brooklyn tower be suspended for the winter. The tower by then had reached a height of about 145 feet, or well beyond the level where the bridge deck would be. It was no longer a solid flat-topped shaft. Now the beginning of the great archways could be seen thrusting upward like three immense teeth separated by the two gaping spaces left for the roadways.

  It was in December, the same month the Committee of Investigation presented its findings, that work on the New York tower was halted, on account of the weather, at a height of nearly sixty feet. And it was in December that Washington Roebling found he was unable to go down to the bridge anymore. His condition was very serious now, extremely puzzling, and a closely guarded secret among the relative handful of men who were running things inside the bridge offices.

  The sudden, violent cramps, the awful dizziness and vomiting had ended after the first horrible days in early summer, just as had been the experience of every other victim from the caisson, indeed as had been his own experience the time before. But the pains and the numbness had continued, coming and going, in his arms and legs primarily. He tired rapidly. He was sick at his stomach much of the time. He became extremely irritable and distraught over the slightest problems or inconveniences and slipped into moods of profound gloom that lasted for days. By December he was a very sick man. Still, he refused to give up. “He was never known to give in or own himself beaten,” the men at the mill had said of his father.

  Emily Roebling went to see Henry Murphy, to talk privately about the situation. Her husband was determined to continue as Chief Engineer, she said. Murphy told her that that would be agreeable with him, just so long as nothing went wrong at the bridge. She expected his troubles would last but a short time.

  Total rest was the only cure prescribed for him through that winter, and Emily was apparently about the only person he wanted anywhere near him for any length of time. The doctors kept telling her that he had little chance of recovery, that she should be prepared for the worst, while he himself had become obsessed with the idea that he would not live to see the bridge finished. And knowing better than anyone how incomplete the plans and instructions for the remaining work still were, he spent that entire winter writing down, in his minute, meticulous hand, all that had to be done, filling page after page with the most exacting, painstaking directions for making the cables, for assembling the complicated components of the superstructure, and illustrating these with detailed freehand drawings and diagrams.

  There was no work going on at the bridge all this time, other than paper work at the Fulton Street offices. Snow piled up in the yards. The two towers stood idle on either side of the ice-choked river. But Roebling in his bedroom on Hicks Street labored on, fighting with everything he had. In his condition writing for even half an hour was a terrible strain. He became extremely nervous and found he could no longer carry on an extended conversation with his assistants, who had been reporting regularly for instructions. His eyes began to fail. He thought he was going blind.

  By early spring, when the weather was such that the men could return to the towers, it was common knowledge among the bridge workers that the Chief Engineer would not be resuming his command for some time, if ever. It had been decided that C. C. Martin would be authorized to certify bills and the masonry work would proceed as before. In April Roebling formally requested a leave of absence. His doctors had told him his only chance to live was to get away from his work. He and Emily had decided to go to Europe, to the health baths at Wiesbaden. The trip would be a frightful ordeal for him, but in this the darkest time he had ever known, he would turn for relief to Germany and the water cure. His feelings at the time can only be guessed at. But possibly in quiet desperation, everything else having failed, he had concluded that if the ways of his father had put him in this corner, then perhaps they might get him out as well.

  Later that same spring of 1873, Dr. Andrew H. Smith presented the formal report on his experience as Surgeon to the New York Bridge Company, in which he included certain suggestions for future projects of a similar nature. The most important thing to do, he said, was to have some sort of facilities by which compressed air could be readily accessible above ground.

  My plan would be as follows: Let there be constructed of iron of sufficient thickness, a tube 9 feet long and 3½ feet in diameter, having one end permanently closed, and the other provided with a door opening inward, and closing airtight. This tube to be placed horizontally, and provided with ways upon which a bed could be slid into it. Very strong plates of glass set in the door and in the opposite end would admit the light of candles or gas jets placed immediately outside. This apparatus should be connected by means of a suitable tube with the pipe which conveys the air from the condensers to the cai
sson. An escape cock properly regulated would allow the constant escape of sufficient air to preserve the necessary purity of the atmosphere within.

  The bed containing the patient having been slid into the chamber, the door is to be closed, and the pressure admitted gradually until it nearly or quite equals that in the caisson. This should be continued until the patient indicates by signal, previously concerted, that the pain is relieved. The pressure should then be reduced by degrees, carefully adjusted to the effect produced, until at last the normal standard is reached. By occupying several hours, if necessary, in the reduction of pressure, it is probable that a return of the pain could be avoided.

  The concept of the apparatus described by Smith in this proposal is precisely the same as the so-called “hospital lock” used for modern bridge and tunnel construction, whenever men are working in compressed air. Had Smith installed such a device at the New York caisson, and had it been used in the way he describes, there would have been little or no suffering from the bends by anyone, there would have been no deaths, and the subsequent life of Washington Roebling and the story of the bridge would have been very different.

  PART THREE

  15

  At the Halfway Mark

  Everything has been built to endure.

  —FRANCIS COLLINGWOOD

  IT TOOK three more years to complete the towers. The Brooklyn tower, started a year earlier than the other one, was finished a year before, in June 1875. And the last stone on the New York tower was set in July 1876, right when the country, with surprising exuberance and a seemingly insatiable delight in fireworks, was celebrating its one hundredth birthday.

  Times had changed considerably. The terrible panic of 1873 had struck, worse than any ever before. The country had still not recovered from it and would not for some time. Incredibly, Jay Cooke & Company, the most famous banking firm of the day, had gone bankrupt. In no time one Wall Street firm after another had gone under. Thousands of businesses, mostly small ones, had been wiped out and thousands upon thousands of working people lost their jobs. The streets of New York had been filled with drifters and unemployed ever since.

  But for all that the country kept growing, moving ahead. The poor and the hopeful kept streaming in from Europe, landing in New York, passing by the hundreds of thousands through the shabby, makeshift clearing point at Castle Garden.

  Most Americans were anything but dissatisfied with the times. Simple, ingenious devices were coming along one after another, changing the way people lived and the look of the land in the most astonishing fashion—barbed wire and ready-made windmills for settlers on the Great Plains, to name but two.

  In Hartford, Connecticut, Mark Twain was busy working on Huckleberry Finn. Edison was working on electric light at Menlo Park, New Jersey. Carnegie had built the Edgar Thomson works, the biggest steel mill on earth, at Braddock, Pennsylvania, and was producing Bessemer steel in quantities unheard of at the start of the decade. Big corporations were growing bigger, and though some railroads were going bankrupt, other lines kept right on expanding. More and more railroad tunnels and railroad bridges were built, including the nation’s most celebrated new bridge and its longest tunnel.

  In St. Louis, Eads had finished his work. The bridge was hailed as an engineering marvel, which it was. A placard over one arch read: “The Mississippi discovered by Marquette, 1673; spanned by Captain Eads, 1874.” “The love of praise is, I believe, common to all men,” Eads had said in a speech that day, “and whether it be a frailty or a virtue, I plead no exception from its fascination.”

  Then in Massachusetts, later that same year, on Thanksgiving Day, the record-breaking Hoosac Tunnel had been completed, nearly twenty-six years after it was first begun, and at a cost of ten million dollars and an appalling 195 lives, most of them lost because of inexperience in using nitroglycerin.

  In New York the nation’s tallest office building had been completed, the ten-story Western Union Telegraph Building, designed by the architect George B. Post. With its tower rising 230 feet above Dey Street, it was still nearly 50 feet less than the top of the New York tower of the great bridge.

  Mayor Havemeyer was dead and Tweed was out of jail and on the loose somewhere. One morning in December 1875, Tweed had left the Ludlow Street Jail, with his son and two guards, to take a carriage ride. Tweed had wanted some fresh air. On the way back, they had stopped off at his house and were sitting in the parlor when he asked if he might go upstairs to see his wife. The guards had agreed and that had been the last anyone had seen of Tweed.

  Across the river, beside the Brooklyn tower, a new ferryhouse had been built, a costly expression of confidence in the future of the ferry system, bridge or no bridge. The building stood where the old one had, at the foot of Fulton Street, but it was a much more elaborate affair, with tall mansard roofs, a particularly elegant cupola, and in a niche over the main entranceway, a life-sized statue of Robert Fulton now gazed impassively over the throngs of commuters that swarmed in and out below. New business buildings had gone up in Brooklyn. New industries had been started, whole new residential sections had been built. The sound of hammer and nails was still one of the characteristics of the place.

  But the event that had stirred people up more than any other, more really than anything that had happened in Brooklyn since the war, was the Beecher-Tilton Trial, which began in the City Courthouse in January 1875. Theodore Tilton had decided to bring suit against Beecher for alienation of his wife’s affections. The show lasted six months and was the talk of the country. Beecher denied every charge against him. Not until late June, when the Brooklyn tower was being finished, did the jury retire. Then eight seemingly interminable days went by—the summer heat stupendous—before the jury returned to report no decision. Immediate tumult had broken out in the courtroom, with Beecher’s parishioners rejoicing as though he had been completely vindicated.

  Whether Beecher was guilty of adultery with Theodore Tilton’s shy and decidedly neurotic little wife would never be proved. Beecher had turned out to be an inconsistent, fumbling witness. His testimony, like nearly everything said at the trial, had been treated by the papers as news of the highest importance, and a large part of the American public, not to mention the populace of Brooklyn and New York, had concluded he was just as guilty as could be.

  Writers of later generations would decide that Beecher was absolutely guilty and, in general, a posturing fraud. He would be portrayed as the prime example of Victorian hypocrisy and his trial described as a watershed in the nation’s social history. But it does not appear as though the people of the time saw it quite that way. For the millions of Americans who had read the word from Plymouth Church, week after week, for nearly thirty years, taking it as very nearly the word of the Almighty, Beecher’s fall was assuredly a shattering blow. Still, nobody seems to have discarded his religion overnight, or his notions of right and wrong, because of what the Reverend Henry Ward Beecher allegedly did with Mrs. Tilton. Moreover, a great many people who thought Beecher might be guilty after all would continue to regard him as an extraordinary human being and felt he had suffered more than enough. And a very great many more people would believe in his innocence until their dying day. As a matter of fact, it is altogether possible that Beecher was innocent.

  But apart from all that, something had very definitely happened in Brooklyn to the way people regarded the place. Brooklyn’s cherished reputation for respectability had suffered irreparable damage. The name Beecher could be an emblem no more. Rightly or not, the man had been pulled down by a running tide of public sensation over what a pamphlet of the day called “Wickedness in High Places.” No longer could the East River be viewed, as it had by many on the Heights, as the great dividing line between good and evil. No longer could Plymouth Church be regarded as the symbolic center of Protestant American virtue or as Brooklyn’s answer to Tammany Hall. So by the time the talk had turned to other momentous events of the day, to the great Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia, for
example, Brooklyn had but one monument to take pride in. Brooklyn now had its bridge. The plain, barnlike church, never much of an architectural beauty, had been replaced by the immense Gothic bridge, which had been under way for seven years now, but still had a long way to go.

  Building the bridge without the Chief Engineer on hand to direct things had posed no serious problems. The plans were very clear, his written instructions quite thorough, to say the least. Nor was there anything especially novel or complicated about the work. Most of it was straightforward masonry construction, the only significant difference being the immense size and height of the towers. (The towers were actually eight and a half feet higher even than John Roebling had initially said they would be. This was one of several changes that had been made as the work progressed. The height of the completed towers above the water was 276 feet 6 inches.)

  But Roebling, it must also be remembered, was served by an exceedingly able staff of assistants, all of whom had been on the job since the beginning and each of whom had developed an uncommon loyalty both to the work and to the Chief Engineer.

  “…probably no great work was ever conducted by a man who had to work under so many disadvantages,” Emily Roebling would write in time to come, when her own role in the engineering of the bridge had become the talk of Brooklyn. “It could never have been accomplished but for the unselfish devotion of his assistant engineers. Each man had a certain department in charge and they worked with all their energies to have the work properly done according to Colonel Roebling’s plans and wishes and not to carry out any pet theories of their own or for their own self-glorification.”

  Martin, the senior man among them, efficient, pleasant, colorless, was still serving as Roebling’s stand-in, supervising the work over-all. Collingwood, the Elmira jeweler whose initial intention had been to stay with the job only a month, was now assigned to completing the Brooklyn tower, while the inventive and reliable Paine had charge of the New York tower.