The Great Bridge

by David McCullough

  Whatever his reasons, he made two decisive moves in quick succession that October, both of which were taken as sure signs of his renewed determination to stay with the bridge.

  About the middle of the month he left Trenton for New York. He was still in a very bad way, physically and emotionally. His condition, in fact, was so precarious that he was unable to make the trip by train, his nervous state being such that he could not endure that much speed or vibration or the crowds of people. So it was arranged for him to go the whole way by canalboat and tug, instead, and as he came up the bay and into the East River, he saw the bridge for the first time in three years.

  It looked to him, he is reported to have said, exactly as he expected it would. The carrier rope was up by then, as well as the first of the cradle ropes. A newspaper item from about this time was clipped out and saved by Emily Roebling:

  There is something colossal in the look of the East River piers as they show in the morning sunlight; the ropes already connecting the two piers seem like slender threads, and as the vessels pass and repass under them some idea may be formed of what may be the effect when the graceful upper wire structure is completed, with the roadway crowded with passengers and vehicles of all descriptions and the high-masted clippers and coasting traders passing underneath.

  He and Emily moved in with her brother, General Warren, and his wife, who were then living on West 50th Street. The intention, it seems, was to stay there just temporarily, before completing the return to the house on the Heights.

  Then, only a short time later, Roebling notified Henry Murphy that he had sold his stock in John A. Roebling’s Sons, three hundred shares, worth $300,000, thereby eliminating any possible conflict of interest. “Please acknowledge receipt of this letter,” he wrote, “and oblige me by making the above fact known to the Board of Trustees of the New York and Brooklyn Bridge at their next meeting.” This Murphy did, on November 6. According to the requirements of the Hewitt amendment, the Roebling company, the major wire manufacturer in the world, and the only one Roebling had total confidence in, could now stay in the bidding.

  But the question of the Chief Engineer’s health had not been resolved in the view of several trustees, including General Lloyd Aspinwall of New York, a most piously civic-minded figure, who urged that “some competent engineer be associated with him [Roebling] at once, in order to protect the future interests of the public.”

  Murphy replied that Roebling was greatly improved and able to see his assistants on a regular basis now that he was living in New York. Stranahan, too, rose to Roebling’s defense. But Aspinwall wanted a consultant just the same. There was a good deal more discussion, with much emphasis on the idea that nothing personal was intended toward Roebling, and in the end it was agreed that a committee be formed to select suitable candidates for the job.

  Abram Hewitt did not attend this session, nor would he appear again for some time. The little Congressman had much else on his mind. The elections were over, and while he himself had won handily enough, there was some question about who had been elected President. Tilden, as the official returns later showed, had a plurality of more than a quarter of a million votes and was the rightful winner, but at that point the outcome in three southern states—South Carolina, Florida, and Louisiana—was still undetermined, and if they were to go for Hayes, then Hayes would have the electoral votes needed to win—which was what the Republicans were claiming. Hewitt, still the moving spirit of the Tilden camp, was doing all he could to rescue his man, writing speeches, sending prominent citizens off to the disputed states to see that a fair count was made (Grant, meanwhile, was sending his own set of “visiting statesmen”), and rallying his fellow Democrats to “boldly denounce all…fraudulent contrivances for the destruction of self-government.” But in the year of the centennial of American democracy, the Presidency was about to be stolen by the Republicans, who were quicker and more efficient with their bribes than the other party. Hayes would win in the Electoral College by a majority of one. But it would be March before that happened, and until then Hewitt was spending most of his time in Washington. How he felt about Roebling’s recent moves he did not say.

  In the meantime there was work to be done and Roebling applied himself to it.

  Still in confinement in New York, he was kept constantly informed by his assistants as the footbridge cables and the second cradle cable went up and he himself kept after Murphy not to let things slide while waiting for a decision on the wire contract. A whole force of men had to be trained for spinning the cables, he explained. It was work in which all would be novices, which would be immensely difficult at best and seem terribly dangerous to anyone not accustomed to it. Men would have to be taught the crucial techniques of regulating the deflection of individual strands. Others would have to be taught to oil and splice the wire. He would need good men to operate the various machinery to be used. “Our previous bridges,” he said, “always came near enough together so that many of the old and experienced hands were to be found to initiate the new ones, but they are entirely wanting for this work.”

  Only a small amount of wire ordered now would be enough for the men to work with and would make a great difference he said. So Murphy ordered thirty tons of wire—ten tons each from John A. Roebling’s Sons and two other firms, one of which was J. Lloyd Haigh of South Brooklyn.

  Roebling sent off a steady stream of dispatches to his assistants—to specify how he wanted the oil kettles housed, to say that a sample ferrule joint sent over for his inspection looked a little short, to explain the differences in working with iron and steel wire (steel wire may crack, he warned). In a long letter to Murphy and Stranahan on the matter of a consultant, he expressed himself with customary bluntness. Any consultant would either be his superior, in which case he would resign, or his equal, in which case he would resign, or his inferior, in which case the man ought to take his place in the ranks. It was understandable that Aspinwall and some of the other New York trustees were concerned lest he die before the bridge was built. But there were things they ought to understand: “Man is after all a very finite being in his capacities and powers of doing actual work,” Roebling wrote, “but when it comes to planning, one mind can in a few hours think out enough work to keep a thousand men employed for years…. Continuing to work has been with me a matter of pride and honor! You must however trust me in so far that the moment I am unable to do full justice to my duties as chief engineer, I shall give you ample warning…” He really did not want to be troubled by any more talk of consultants.

  To better familiarize himself with what the Europeans were doing with steel, he had begun learning Danish and Swedish. He sent Ferdinand lengthy, highly technical instructions on steel-wire extrusion, and in one such letter, commenting on the deficiency of a Roebling product already in service, there appears what may possibly be a touch of his old humor: “Everybody is getting afraid of the carrier rope, so many wires are breaking in it and when they break they make such a noise you can hear it all over. It hangs right over the Trustees’ office and if it breaks it might kill a dozen of them.”

  Sealed bids for the cable wire were to be received at the bridge offices in Brooklyn up until the first of December. In the meantime, on Pier 29, beside the New York tower, wire samples sent with each bid were being tested on various machines in the presence of the bidders or their agents, all of whom thus far had expressed total satisfaction with the procedure.

  The specifications called for steel wire of what was known as Number 8, Birmingham Gauge (this was a diameter designation), with a breaking strength of not less than 3,400 pounds. The steel was to be of medium quality, neither too hard nor too soft, and the wire had to be “straight” wire, that is to say, when a ring of it was unrolled on the floor, the wire had to lie perfectly straight, without any tendency to spring back into coils.

  The specifications called for 6.8 million pounds of wire. During the tests, the wire would be required to bear a certain amount of strain befor
e it broke, and to stretch a certain number of feet, then recover a certain portion of the stretch when the strain was removed. “In the case of any dispute arising between the inspector and the manufacturer,” the specifications stated, “the Engineer is to be the sole arbiter.” But the way things were, with Roebling bedridden, the tests were actually being conducted, the records kept, by Paine, with Martin in over-all charge.

  On Monday, December 4, the trustees gathered for the formal opening of the bids. There were nine bids in all, including three from European manufacturers. The highest bid, from a wiremaker in Worcester, Massachusetts, came to nearly fourteen cents a pound, which would bring the aggregate cost close to a million dollars. The lowest bid, from John A. Roebling’s Sons, was for less than half that, at six and three-quarter cents per pound for Bessemer steel. The Roebling company had also submitted a bid for crucible steel, but it was higher than the one other bid submitted for crucible steel, that from J. Lloyd Haigh of South Brooklyn. *

  None of the bids were released for publication when the trustees ended their meeting. All further consideration of the subject was to be deferred, reporters were told, until the tests were completed. Just the same, the rumor got about that the Roeblings were the low bidder and everyone assumed that was that.

  But on December 13 the New York Herald published an interview with a man named Albert Hill, who was described as a consulting engineer with offices on Fulton Street in Brooklyn, and who had a number of very unflattering things to say about the wire specifications Roebling had drawn up and about the tests by which the wire was being judged. Nobody connected with the bridge would have believed that cable wire and its technical characteristics could ever become subjects of public interest, but that is just what was about to happen.

  Hill considered the specifications very poorly written (“complex,” “onerous,” and “vague” were some of his adjectives). He thought there was too much emphasis on the manufacture of the wire and too little about the type of steel to be used. He objected strongly to the fact that Roebling had not specified what kind of steel he wanted. Hill’s view was that crucible steel was the only acceptable thing for such a bridge and he said it was what Roebling himself had required in his earlier specifications for the different steel ropes already in use—which was quite true. What possible reason Roebling had for not demanding crucible steel this time was a great mystery to Hill.

  Finally, Hill was not in the least happy that the Chief Engineer, the man with the final say on the tests, was a member of the famous Trenton wire family. Hill wanted the tests conducted by an impartial board of engineers, so as to place the awarding of the contract beyond all suspicion of favoritism.

  The reporter who interviewed Hill went over to Pier 29 the next day to see how the tests were being conducted and to talk to C. C. Martin. But Martin sent him back to Brooklyn to see Murphy, who chose to make no comment.

  Murphy wasted no time contacting Roebling. What was he supposed to say, Murphy wanted to know. Roebling answered that he attached nowhere near the importance to the tests that everyone else seemed to. There was nothing to guarantee that a bidder would supply wire of the kind submitted for the tests. “If one man’s samples were too good he would be sure to reduce his standards, provided he got the contract, and another man, whose wire fell short of the standard, would have to make his wire come up to the mark before any could be accepted.” The point of the tests, Roebling said, was to satisfy him that each bidder could produce the kind of wire called for and to satisfy the bidder that making such wire involved no impossible demands. When he drafted the specifications, Roebling said, he knew the contract was to go to the lowest bidder and he had considered it his duty to include the tests as a simple protective measure. “Of all known materials, wire possesses a shape most susceptible of being tested in every direction. If necessary, a whole mile of it could be tested for its elasticity, throughout every foot of its length, without injuring it in the slightest degree. It is not like a huge casting, which may be full of hidden flaws, or like a big gun which bursts at the first discharge.”

  Were he asked point-blank which were the finest samples tested to date, he told Murphy, it would be those from Richard Johnson & Nephew of Manchester, England. As far as the bids themselves were concerned, he remained “in total ignorance.”

  Hill, however, had still more to say. The mathematics in the specifications were not up to snuff, he next claimed, and the Herald presented his own computations, in several long, dense paragraphs, full of wire weights and measurements, diameters and principles of physics, very little of which anyone other than a professional engineer could or would wish to struggle through. But seeing it all set forth in print in one of New York’s most powerful papers had a profound effect on the nervous system of those trustees who had had any prior misgivings about Roebling’s ability to handle the job, most of whom knew next to nothing about engineering.

  “Of course this is only a theoretical demonstration,” Hill remarked in conclusion. Just how the Herald happened to come upon Hill or why the editors chose to give his opinions such a play was not made clear. He had never built a suspension bridge, as he admitted. None of the assistant engineers had ever heard of him, including Martin, who had been a Brooklyn man for more than twenty years. But the Herald called Hill’s argument clear and lucid and claimed the errors in Roebling’s calculations were so glaring that the specifications were worthless and no contracts should be made on them. Herald reporters looked up another engineer who agreed with Hill, a General Francis Vinton, professor of civil engineering at Columbia, who was interviewed at his bachelor quarters at the Racquet Club. Herald editorials demanded that the bridge trustees answer the charges and every one connected with the management of the bridge began getting extremely edgy.

  The gist of all Hill’s arithmetic was that the Number 8 wire being specified had a breaking strength of 3,600 pounds instead of 3,400 as Roebling had it.

  In actual fact, there was nothing at all to Hill’s charges, as anyone working on the wire tests could have shown, and as would be explained by Paine very shortly. But before that happened three badly informed trustees agreed to be interviewed on the subject. General Aspinwall made the silly comment that with 6,300 wires in each cable he did not see how a difference of two hundred pounds one way or the other mattered much; Thomas Kinsella said simply that he was going along with Hewitt on all this and that Hewitt, who was a wire manufacturer himself, had found nothing wrong with the specifications. And the third man, who refused to be named, said he could understand why Roebling might want his brother to get the contract. If he were Roebling, he said, he would want his brother to get the contract.

  Hill fired back that a difference of 200 pounds per wire among 6,300 wires added up to a 1,260,000-pound difference and that he was not out to prove Roebling was no engineer. In conclusion he added a last gratuitous comment, which Roebling doubtless found about as revolting as anything said about him to date:

  I fully appreciate that Colonel Roebling would, to a certain extent, be liable to criticism for these errors, but, taking into consideration the facts that Colonel Roebling is only following out the work commenced by his father, and had also impaired his health…there are extenuating circumstances that the trustees should bear in mind. The errors that I have pointed out might have been made by some subordinate in whom Colonel Roebling had confidence, and were thus printed without his having really supervised the work. As for the gentleman saying that were he chief engineer he also would desire his brother to obtain the contract under him, that is a matter of taste.

  To a great many people it probably seemed that an absurdly big fuss was being made over very little. But the effect on several trustees was quite serious just the same. Hastily it was decided that the specifications and tests were “worthy of investigation” and Murphy told Paine to come up with an answer to Hill’s charges at once.

  Ferdinand Roebling came on from Trenton to tell Henry Murphy that the Roebling family had h
ad about enough of all this and to simplify things would just as soon withdraw their bid. But Murphy, who seems to have maintained his composure, talked him out of it.

  Two days before Christmas Murphy called a private meeting of the Executive Committee to consider the bids and make a recommendation. The tests, he announced, were now completed and he had a report on the results from the Chief Engineer. He also had Paine’s reply.

  Hill’s theoretical mathematics, Paine explained, were based on Hill’s own figures for the specific gravity and diameter of Number 8, Birmingham gauge. These were different from the ones the bridge engineers were going by, which, he acknowledged, were round figures. “These specifications were intended for the guidance of practical wiremakers,” Paine said, “and are written in plain language, easily understood by practical men, and are not incumbered by the formula employed, or the details of calculations necessarily used in their construction.” He proceeded then to disprove each of Hill’s charges, point by point, confirming the accuracy of the specifications to the satisfaction of everyone at the meeting. Paine did not, however, attempt any answer to the question Hill had raised about the quality of steel to be used.

  Murphy next read Roebling’s report on the tests.

  The letter was dated December 18. Roebling still had not been told which firm was lowest bidder or what any of the bids were. He said that nearly every bidder had been able to meet the standards required. Except for a few cases, he had no information concerning the variety of steel used in the numerous samples submitted. Nor did he know whether the manufacturers had provided that information with their bids. Regardless, he said, “It would be very unwise to accept two special prepared rings, as an absolute guarantee of the perfection of 6,000,000 pounds.” He then gave a brief account of each manufacturer’s samples, describing the first on his list this way: