The Great Bridge

by David McCullough

  And then, very gradually, he began to show signs of improvement. In July he was talking to Emily of returning to the bridge and he dictated a letter to Paine to tell him as much. The work he liked best, the work he knew best, was about to begin. When he had first arrived in Cincinnati after the war, the cable spinning had only just begun and he had been the one in charge from then on, not his father, as most people failed to appreciate. Now he grew keenly interested in everything to do with the footbridge. Farrington was the man to build it, he wrote Henry Murphy. Farrington had been through all this before at Cincinnati and knew just what do to. “He is a man of great resource when unforeseen troubles arise,” Roebling told Murphy, who already knew all about Farrington and his abilities, “and he has the necessary coolness and perseverance and does not easily get frightened in time of danger…” It was what someone else might have said about Roebling.

  Then on the afternoon of August 14, shortly past one o’clock, a telegram was sent up to the Roebling house from the Trenton depot. It was from Paine: THE FIRST WIRE ROPE REACHED ITS POSITION AT ELEVEN AND ONE HALF O’CLOCK. WAS RAISED IN SIX MINUTES.

  Two other telegrams followed, one from John Prentice, treasurer of the Bridge Company, and one from Farrington late in the day. They reported what he hoped they would: after the first rope was in position, a second had gone across, the two to form an endless cable stretching from anchorage to anchorage. The whole operation had gone off without a hitch, exactly as planned. It was a moment Roebling had been anticipating for seven years and he had missed seeing it.

  17

  A Perfect Pandemonium

  With its princes of the lofty wire the Brooklyn Bridge is now the cheapest, the most entertaining, and the best-attended circus in the world.

  —New York Tribune

  THEY all stood waiting for the river to clear—Martin and McNulty under the arches on the New York tower; Farrington and a carpenter named Brown out on a hoisting frame at the top of the tower, where they could signal to the engineman in the yard; foreman Dempsey and several workmen close by on the tower itself; and on the wharves below and across the river, in the rigging of ships tied up on both shores, perhaps six thousand spectators, many of whom had been waiting for several hours.

  The idea at first had been to take the rope across on a Sunday or at night, when there would be little traffic on the water. On the average day as many as a hundred craft passed the line of the bridge in an hour’s time. But Farrington had noted that frequently there would be clear water between the towers for stretches of four to eight minutes, even on the busiest days of the week, so the decision had been to go ahead just as soon as everything was ready.

  A few days earlier the ends of two working ropes had been hauled up and over the top of the Brooklyn tower. Made of twisted chrome steel strands, these ropes were three-quarters of an inch in diameter, more than three thousand feet long, and were wound on a big wooden drum set at the base of the tower on the river side. To get the ropes over the top had been relatively simple. A heavy hemp rope had been put over first, then tied to the eyelet at the end of the wire rope. That done, the hoisting engine in the yard was started up. The wire rope was pulled to the top, where it passed through a set of pulleys, then down the other side.

  From the yard the ropes were then hauled inland to the summit of the Brooklyn anchorage in much the same way, except that fenders and trestles had to be erected and men stationed on all intervening housetops to prevent any accidental damage. At the anchorage the two wire ropes were joined and passed around several oak wheels, the main one of which, the driving wheel, as it was called, was mounted horizontally in a massive timber framework and was a good twelve feet in diameter. Back at the base of the tower one of the reels was then put on board a stone scow and hung on a wooden axle, so when the scow started for New York the rope would be unwound by the strain from the Brooklyn shore, where the rope was temporarily lashed tight.

  By nine that morning, Monday the 14th, everything was in order. Huge American flags had been raised on top of both towers and there was much excitement among the spectators. Slack water, the relatively calm interval between tides, would occur in the next hour. Martin, McNulty, and Farrington had gone on board the scow to supervise things, along with the white-bearded O. P. Quintard and two or three young ladies, the identities of whom were never given in later accounts.

  Shortly past nine two steam tugs pulled alongside. One made fast to the starboard side of the scow; the other stood off slightly, ready to keep other craft at a distance during the trip across. At nine thirty the tugs sounded their bells, moorings were cast off, tugs and scow swung slowly out into the river. At the stern of the scow the wire rope trailed off into the water. The tide was still running out, and as the boats pulled away, the current carried them downstream some but not enough to matter. Slowly, steadily, they pushed for the opposite shore, the rope paying out and sinking to the bottom as fast as it unwound. Two-thirds of the way across the tugs had to stop to allow an English bark to pass upriver across their bows. “She came so close,” wrote a reporter on the lead tug, “that a pebble could have been tossed upon her deck with the most perfect ease.”

  But that had been the single interruption. The whole trip took less than ten minutes and the arrival at the New York tower had been greeted by loud applause. The scow made fast in a very businesslike fashion; the balance of the rope was unwound and laid on the dock.

  The next thing had been to get the rope over the New York tower. A hemp rope had been passed over the tower previously and was now attached to the end of the wire. But nothing more was done until Farrington had climbed to the top of the tower to make a few final checks. At ten twenty he signaled from above. The hoisting engine was thrown into gear and in a matter of minutes the wire was over the top and reeled part way onto the yard engine’s big drum. The main body of the rope, however, still lay at the bottom of the river and there it remained as everyone stood watching for a moment with no boats in the way, or none about to be, when it could be pulled out of the water.

  The waiting seemed interminable. Half an hour went by, three-quarters of an hour, and still there was no break in the traffic. Two barges and an excursion steamer moving out into the stream from Jewell’s dock took forever getting under way. The excursion boat was bound for Oriental Grove, on the Sound, with a picnic party, and everyone on board appeared delighted by the grandstand view of the doings at the bridge.

  At about half past ten, as a precautionary warning to passing ships, a little howitzer had been fired at the foot of the New York tower but that seemed to have no effect. It began to look, in fact, as though several hours would pass before the river would be clear enough to get on with the work. But as some of the subsequent newspaper accounts noted, the long wait did nothing to dampen anyone’s spirits and the delay added considerably to the size of the crowd.

  Then the break came. The river was perfectly empty from tower to tower. At twenty-five past eleven, from the archway on the New York tower, Martin shouted up to Farrington, “Go ahead!” Farrington had Brown signal to the hoisting engine. The cannon was fired a second time—to signal the men on the Brooklyn side to cut loose their lashings and as a warning to approaching ships.

  “In a few seconds the rope began to move,” Farrington wrote later; “there was a ripple around it in the water; it began to draw away from the dock toward Brooklyn, and soon we could see the other part coming from Brooklyn towards us. Faster and faster the space of clear water between the two parts narrowed, and in four minutes from the time of starting, it swung clear of the surface of the water, with a sparkling swish, amid the cheers of spectators, on the wharves and ferryboats, and the shouts of our own workmen.”

  This time the drum in the yard was wound by a thirty-horsepower engine that made 150 revolutions per minute (the engine used to pull the wire over the tower had been only half as powerful). As a result it took just two and a half minutes to pull the wire free from the water, and five minutes, all
told, to get it into proper position for the time being, stretched from tower to tower at an elevation above the water of two hundred feet more or less. Almost immediately a boat passed by below, a lighter called Comet carrying a load of pig iron, and at least one reporter took the opportunity to go up on the Brooklyn tower to take a look at the view.

  “When it is considered that one has to climb upward of thirty flights of winding stairway, the toil of the ascent on a close August day can be readily imagined,” wrote the young man from the Herald, “but all this is instantly forgotten when the picture from the summit spreads out at one’s feet.” The buildings of both cities, he said, looked dwarfed beneath the overtopping height of the tower; the streets seemed narrowed down to lanes in Brooklyn and to mere pathways in New York. The view of the river and the bay, with their islands and with tiny ships moving restlessly this way and that, all looked extremely fine, he said. “What a splendid set of photographs could be obtained from this point!…Doubtless some enterprising photographer will seize the chance.”*

  With the first half of the working rope thus in place, the drum and hoisting engine in the New York yard had to be freed to haul over the second half. So a huge iron clamp was bolted to the end, near the enginehouse, about ten feet from the ground. A pulley block was made fast to the wharf close to the drum, another to the clamp, and a rope passed between them several times made a lashing strong enough to withstand the pull of the wire rope, the end of which was immediately cast loose from the drum.

  The tugs and the scow, in the meantime, had returned to the Brooklyn tower and about noon they started back with the second rope. By half past three it too had been hoisted out of the river, everything going even more smoothly than the first time. The next step would be to take the ends of the two ropes back to the New York anchorage, splice them, and thereby form one immense loop, or endless “traveler,” over the towers, reaching all the way from anchorage to anchorage. The entire length of the traveler when completed would be 6,800 feet, or considerably more than a mile, making it easily the longest belt connecting machinery anywhere on earth.

  “WEDDED” was the one-word headline in the evening edition of the Eagle. “The thing is done,” the article began. New York and Brooklyn had been joined at last. But no New York paper was willing to go quite that far. The Herald, for example, described the great endless rope draped over the river as only “the engagement ring in the marriage preparations of the two cities.” All the same the event was an enormous popular success and talk of the bridge was everywhere as the papers reported that the next step would be to send a man across on the rope.

  More than a hundred people appeared at the bridge offices to apply for the job, including a twelve-year-old boy who wanted to go hand over hand and a Long Island acrobat who considered it a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. Nearly all of them volunteered to make the trip without pay and C. C. Martin told reporters there were at least a dozen of his own men who would give a month’s wages to be the first one to cross the river.

  To quiet things down some it was announced that the man picked to make the trip would be one of the most trusted employees and probably one of the engineers. The rope would first be run back and forth a number of times. Then the man would go over in a boatswain’s chair, a seat and a sling made fast to the rope. He would start from the Brooklyn anchorage, the announcement said. (Henry Murphy wanted the historic journey to originate in Brooklyn.) He would ride up to the tower, climb out, cross over to the other edge, get back in his seat, and start across the river. “The object of this journey will be to see how the thing works.”

  All the machinery for running the rope was at the Brooklyn anchorage. At the foot of the great stone mass stood a thirty-horsepower steam hoisting engine that would drive the wheels. It was completely enclosed, as was its boiler nearby. Up above, across the face of the anchorage, secured just over the arches, was a line of shafting with several pulleys. A sixteen-inch-wide belt, ninety feet long, connected the pulleys on the shafting with the gears and cogwheels that turned the enormous twelve-foot wheel that carried the working rope. The arrangement of cogwheels was such that the direction of the rope could be reversed without reversing the engine, an important feature since the rope was not to be revolved continuously, but worked back and forth.

  On the New York anchorage the framework of the main pulley was adjustable, so it could be moved forward or back in order to give the rope the prescribed deflection, or sag. (At one deflection the rope would bear greater weight than at another, and thus adjusting the deflection just so would be a vital part of the work to come.) Had there not been some trouble with the delivery of one or two essential belts, the much heralded first crossing would have taken place almost immediately after the traveler was in place, but there were numerous other matters to attend to in any event, and the Eagle, ever the ardent champion of the bridge, wrote, “It is refreshing to see how the work is pushed forward, and yet the thoroughness with which everything is done, in these days of slighted work and ill-performed operations…”

  To the surprise of almost no one who had had anything to do with building the bridge, the man chosen to make the first trip over the river was Master Mechanic E. F. Farrington.

  Farrington, who would so soon become a subject of great public interest, was nearing sixty in 1876, but still agile, tough, and, of course, exceedingly knowledgeable about working with wire rope. Subsequent newspaper articles would reveal also that he came from Massachusetts originally, where he had been put to work in a woolen mill at age nine, that he had been a farmer, a carpenter, a machinist in England, a seaman, a gasworks superintendent, and was considered the best bridge mechanic in the country. On the morning of Friday, August 25, when he arrived at the Brooklyn anchorage ready to make his historic journey, he appeared “perfectly cool and collected”—a spare man of medium height, with gray beard and blue eyes, turned out quite formally for the occasion in a fresh suit of unbleached linen and a new straw hat.

  An announcement that a man was to make the crossing that day had been published in the Eagle the previous afternoon. As a result the crowds had begun gathering since well before nine in the morning. Seen from Brooklyn, the piers adjacent to the New York tower looked black with people, and the gates to the Brooklyn anchorage and tower yard were jammed with spectators.

  Up on the anchorage itself workmen were busy adjusting belts and pulleys, with Martin, McNulty, and Farrington supervising everything. By eleven all looked in order. The machinery was set in motion and the rope began moving across the river. To get every twist and kink out, it had to be worked back and forth several times. Otherwise anything attached to it, including a human passenger, would have been turned over and over. A stick tied to the rope as a marker and sent from the Brooklyn anchorage up to the Brooklyn tower twisted completely around several times while making its slow ascent. But after half an hour of working the rope to and fro, it moved along perfectly.

  There was a break for the noon meal. The day was bright and very hot by then. Up on the Brooklyn tower, a small crowd of privileged spectators had gathered, including Senator Murphy and several ladies. The sun beat down on the exposed stonework and at one point some of the reporters in the group sent a note over the rope to their compatriots on the opposite tower asking for cold beer and sandwiches. An answer was returned by the same route, “Send the money and we will send the beer,” but no money was sent.

  Presently, about twenty past one, the huge American flag was again unfurled from the Brooklyn tower and minutes later another went up the flagstaff on the New York tower. Then two men with red signal flags were seen to wave to each other from the tops of either tower. Everything was set to go. Estimates were that more than ten thousand people were watching.

  Farrington, all this time, had been supervising the preparation of his boatswain’s chair, a simple board seat, two feet long and two inches thick, with rope holes drilled in each corner, like an ordinary swing, and with four ropes drawn through and tied to t
he wire rope just as they might be for a swing. The board itself had been placed so that only one end rested on the rim of the anchorage, while most of it hung out over the edge, eighty feet above the street. So when Farrington proceeded to take his seat, it was, in the words of one bystander, a somewhat delicate operation.

  The men assisting him next passed a rope across his back, to form a rest of sorts, then brought it around, across his chest, and tied it securely to one of the corner ropes. All these precautions, however, appeared to make “the daring voyager” feel only more uncomfortable.

  At thirty-two minutes past one o’clock, Farrington said he was ready. “Timothy McCarthy ran the engine,” Farrington would write later, “and John D. Smallfield handled the starting lever most carefully, according to a system of signals previously agreed upon.” Martin, who was standing close by, dipped a signal flag, John D. Smallfield in the yard below shifted his lever, and in an instant the master mechanic was on his way.

  There was great shouting from down below, and up ahead, on top of the tower, people were waving hats and handkerchiefs. Then all at once, as he went swinging out over the housetops between the anchorage and the tower, Farrington freed himself from the rope about his chest and stood up on the seat. Holding on first with one hand, then the other, he lifted his hat in response to the continuing ovation. Then he sat down again. People were running through the streets beneath him now, shouting and cheering as they ran. He waved, he blew them kisses. Sailing steadily along all the while, his course was nearly horizontal at first, like that of a heavy bird taking flight, because of the sag in the rope. His light coat blew open and began fluttering in the wind. And then he was beyond the sag and climbing sharply, almost straight up, a coat-flapping, gently twirling form that looked very small, fragile, and very birdlike now against the granite face of the tower.