The Great Bridge

by David McCullough

  With everything working right, it took the carrier about ten minutes to make the full trip from anchorage to anchorage. Along the way men were stationed on the towers and cradles to watch the progress of the traveling wire and to see that each wire was positioned with the proper sag and tension. As the running wire went over the tower, pulled by the carrier, a man would lightly guide it with his hand to keep it from chafing against timbers or masonry. Another man would catch it with a great pair of clamps that were attached to a block and tackle and with this he would draw up the slack until the wires from the tower back to the anchorage hung with exactly the same sag, or deflection, as the others. From the cradle halfway between the anchorage and the tower, men called “regulators” would signal just when to stop, then fit the new wires up against the others, signal again, and one of the towermen would immediately mark the wire with red paint where it passed a similar mark on the other wires, exactly at the point of crossing the axis of support. Similar marks would also be made at the cradle.

  Then the towermen would turn their attention to the river side, where the same system would be repeated, with the regulators on the three river cradles going through the same motions as their turns came up. So by the time a loop of wire reached the New York anchorage, it would be thoroughly “regulated”—its sag properly adjusted all along the line—and the paint marks provided a ready index of any slip or strain that might need correcting.

  Once a strand had been completed, pairs of workmen would go riding down from the towers in “buggies,” compressing the wires into a cylindrical form with big clamp tongs and applying temporary “seizings,” bindings of soft wire, every fifteen inches or so, to hold the strand together until all nineteen strands of the cable had been strung and could be clamped into one compact unit. The buggy was nothing more than a pine wood trough, about 10 by 6 feet, with a side rail, and was suspended from overhead trolley wheels that rolled nicely along the bundled wires on which the work was being done. The men would merely let themselves down from the towers by letting out a long rope.

  During the time a strand was being made, it hung higher than the ultimate position of the cable it was to be part of. At mid-span over the river the difference in elevation was sixty feet. This not only kept the wires well above the topmasts of passing ships, but nearly doubled the tension the wires would have at the lower level—the deeper sag—and that helped straighten any crooks, or kinks, there might be and further tested the strength of the wire. Once the seizings were completed, the strand would be unhitched from the temporary fastening at the anchorage by a powerful block and tackle, let forward carefully into permanent fastenings at the end of the anchor chains and also lowered into the saddles on the tops of the towers.

  It was basically the same system used at both the Niagara and Cincinnati bridges, only here, as with everything else, the work was on a far bigger scale. Judging by previous experience, Roebling estimated that the time needed to make the four cables would be about two and a half years, taking into account that much would depend on the weather.

  Sometimes wires would break when part way over the river. The loose end would have to be hauled in and a splice made. Sometimes the delay would be only a matter of minutes. Other times, when the break occurred on the New York side, more than an hour might be lost. “These delays often occurred in the midst of a promising day’s work,” Farrington wrote, “and were very vexatious.”

  High winds and fog could make the delicate business of aligning the wires virtually impossible. Extreme temperature changes would cause significant expansion or contraction in the wires that would have a pronounced effect on their deflection and in the early stages this could complicate things enormously.

  Before the first wires went across, the engineers had four guide wires strung for the men in the cradles to go by when adjusting the deflection of the first wires. To everybody’s surprise the two land spans had not hung the same. The difference in the deflections could be readily seen just by looking at them. But only after considerable trouble was the cause found. There was a slight difference in the diameter of various lengths of wire and to solve the problem hundreds of coils had to be stretched out, measured, and enough wire selected of uniform size and weight to make up the required lengths. After that the weather had to be watched for periods of perfect calm, during which time the necessary adjustments could be made, to a hairsbreadth. As a result of all this, about six weeks were used up.

  But the wire stringing, once it got going, went faster than had been anticipated. The weather was just about ideal. With a little practice the men were laying up fifty wires a day, which was not bad for a start and would have been better had the wire manufacturer been delivering on schedule. The Eagle was now calling the bridge “The Gigantic Spinning Machine.”

  By July 2 the first of two strands was completed for the two cables on the downstream side of the bridge. The work of lowering the strands into position then began. At the anchorages the strands were drawn back by a hoisting engine until the shoe was released from its fastening. Then shoe and strand were lowered slowly, carefully forward, twelve feet, the hoisting engine and a block and tackle holding the immense pull of the strand. Because there was a twist in the tackle, the shoe turned up on edge as it came forward and slipped neatly in between the eyelets of the anchor bars. The forward motion was stopped then and a seven-inch steel pin was passed through the eyelets and the shoe.

  On the towers, too, the strands had to be lowered into the groove of the saddle, a distance of about three feet. This was done by eight or ten men working a capstan on a platform built over the saddle. The capstan turned a nut on a screw that lowered the strand. Once the strand was properly attached at the anchorages, and at rest in the tower saddles, then it was also at the desired altitude over the water. The whole operation was “difficult and delicate,” as the newspapers reported, requiring “nice calculations.” The great danger, of course, being that the strand might get away. The strain exerted by each strand at the anchorages was about seventy tons.

  In the meantime, the first two strands for the two upstream cables were begun. So by the end of the first week in July all four cables were being strung simultaneously; all four carriers were shuttling back and forth high over the river, as regular as clockwork. Paine and Farrington had been assigned by Roebling to be certain everything was done just so. Collingwood and McNulty had been put to work on the approaches. And Roebling, too, was now watching the work himself once again, for at the start of the month he and Emily had returned to Brooklyn, to the brick house on Columbia Heights. With a pair of field glasses, from a bay window overlooking the river, he could at last follow the day-by-day progress being made.

  That was the summer of the Great Railroad Strike and for much of the country it was a dark, discouraging time. Half a dozen cities were hit by walkouts and violence. In Baltimore twelve people were shot down by militia. Pittsburgh was in the grip of a mob for two straight days. Millions of dollars’ worth of railroad equipment was destroyed in Pittsburgh alone. The Union Depot was burned, stores were looted, and a pitched battle between rioters and soldiers took the lives of fifty-seven. It was the bloodiest labor uprising the country had ever known and it left much of the populace wondering what in the world was happening to life in America.

  But at the bridge things had never gone better. Not in eight long years had the work advanced so smoothly. Even the newspapers seemed satisfied with the way things were being handled and could find fault with no one. “The network of wires across the East River is rapidly beginning to look something like a bridge,” commented the Herald in mid-August. By then four strands had been completed and a new feature added, “regulation cradles,” as they were known, long, narrow, flimsy-looking scaffolds suspended fifty feet below the regular cradles, which put them in line with the lowered strands and made possible a closer surveillance of the strands as they lined up alongside one another.

  Somber-looking trustees in stovepipe hats climbed the stairs
on the James Street side of the Brooklyn anchorage to pose for group portraits at the start of the footbridge, or they went off to Saratoga or the White Mountains with their families, confident the bridge was in good hands. And for thousands of New Yorkers and visitors, the footbridge had become one of the city’s greatest summertime attractions. Virtually anyone could go up and sample the view and test his nerve if he cared to. In fact, so many people were now applying for passes to take the walk that Henry Murphy was spending an hour every morning just listening to what the applicants had to say.

  “People from every corner of the globe have crossed the bridge,” he said, “Australians, New Zealanders, a man from the Cape of Good Hope, and persons from every country in Europe and Asia, from every state in the Union, from Canada and South America. The Governor of Bermuda went across the other day, and the officers of the Russian man-of-war gave us a visit. Captains of steamships and merchantmen are frequent applicants, and we like to pass them, because they will have to sail under the bridge, and we desire their friendship.” As a general rule, five classes of applicants were granted every courtesy—foreign visitors (“They may never come again, and it is natural they should desire to cross the bridge while they have the opportunity,” Murphy explained), newspapermen, engineers, and all politicians and preachers.

  Daily at the Bridge Company’s Brooklyn offices the crowds jammed the hallways and lobby waiting to see Murphy. Everyone had his particular reason for wanting permission to make the walk.

  “I am a stranger here,” explained one applicant.

  “Where are you from?” asked Murphy.

  “From New York,” the man replied gravely, and the story was soon all over Brooklyn.

  A Connecticut couple, both in their seventies, had walked over. Murphy even allowed a doctor and his wife to carry their newborn baby across. But when a Miss Mazeppa Buckingham requested permission to ride over on horseback, he said no. (Her agent proposed to hoist the horse up onto the Brooklyn anchorage with a sling.) “It would have made a great sensation,” Murphy told reporters, “but you see that’s just what we want to avoid. We don’t want to turn the bridge into a show.”

  By the middle of August two or three thousand people had made the crossing, and most all of them went home to tell how he or she had been “one of the very first” to cross the Brooklyn Bridge and thus the claim would be passed along proudly to many thousands of grandchildren and to their progeny.

  Amazingly, there were no accidents. Several men became so dizzy that they got down on their hands and knees and crawled back, hugging the slat floor for dear life. At least one woman fainted and had to be carried off; many started out, then turned back. Several people had gotten about halfway out over the river with no trouble but then suddenly froze with fear, unable to move one way or the other. One of these was a Brooklyn hatter who figured such a conspicuous display of daring would be good for his business.

  Among the children to cross was Al Smith, whose father had been employed as a sort of guard to keep unauthorized people off the bridge and who “gave himself permission to take Alfred across,” as Smith’s sister told the story years later. Smith himself would often describe the hazardous journey over the footbridge as the most thrilling experience of his boyhood, while his sister would remark, “I remember Mother sitting at home, saying ten rosaries all the time they were gone! But my father was determined to take the boy across the bridge so he could say he crossed it before it was built.”

  Murphy saw no reason why anyone should not be allowed to travel the footbridge, providing he had a comparatively valid reason and looked as though he would not do anything foolish out there. He was annoyed by the way people were cutting the wires and taking off pieces for souvenirs, but then it was the people’s bridge. None of the workmen seemed bothered by the sight-seers traipsing along. The thing they found most interesting was the number of women who passed by and how fearless they appeared. Murphy admitted to one reporter that he himself had not been across as yet. “I started to go once,” he said, “and while I looked upward or ahead I was all right; but I chanced to look down, and…and I determined that I couldn’t afford to lose the President of the company just then, and so I went back.”

  And then it was September and a broken and aged-looking Tweed was standing before the New York Board of Aldermen telling the whole truth and nothing but the truth, on the understanding that if he did, “Honest John” Kelly would see that he was set loose from prison and be henceforth immune from further prosecution. It was at this time that Tweed described in his own words the part he had played in getting the bridge started and Henry Murphy and William Kingsley spent the better part of several days denying everything Tweed had to say about as fast as he said it.

  And before the month was out an English seaman walking the footbridge was seized by an epileptic fit and it was all several workmen could do to hold on to him as he writhed in convulsions. In desperation they finally tied him to the narrow floor of the bridge, with his arms and legs hanging over the side. The man recovered shortly and was helped back to the ground, but the story was made so much of by the papers that Murphy promptly stopped issuing any more passes. The fun was over.

  In early October workmen digging foundations for the Brooklyn approach turned up some old Spanish coins worth about sixteen cents at most and the story spread through town that Captain Kidd’s treasure had been discovered. One paper commented that if they kept digging they might find enough to finish the bridge. Another expressed great pleasure that the New York approach required the demolition of one of the city’s worst neighborhoods, and the Eagle, with nothing better to say apparently, ran a long macabre essay on the bridge as the coming place for the truly artistic suicide. “It is hardly necessary to point out to thoughtful men the splendor of a suicide committed from this virgin height.” Hanging, poison, blowing one’s “vulgar brains out” with a pistol, were all condemned for their “despicable lack of originality.” The river below is swift and treacherous, the editors wrote, and there would always be a good-sized audience on board the ferries. If jumping did not appeal, there were other choices. “Let us imagine a man addicted to hanging and think of the unique picture which early passengers would behold should they turn up their eyes in the ghostly dawn and see a man hanging by his neck fifty feet from the water’s edge! A little ingenuity would enable him to so affix one end of his rope that he could not be cut down for hours and could oscillate before the eyes of an admiring though horror-stricken crowd of thousands.” Even poison, shooting, and stabbing would have some style, the editors concluded, if done from the Great Bridge.

  In October a well-to-do New Yorker named Henry Beers, a spokesman for the so-called Council of Political Reform, announced that he was joining the cause to have the bridge stopped. It was nothing but a flagrant waste of public money, he contended, and a serious hazard to navigation, which was the same claim being made by a warehouse owner named Abraham Miller, who had decided to sue the Bridge Company. English law, said Beers, who was assisting Miller, always held rivers and oceans sacred to seamen.

  But the old buildings kept coming down inland from the New York anchorage as the path for the approach pressed toward City Hall Park. And out over the river the carrier wheels, glistening in the sunshine, kept spinning along, faster than ever. Never had he seen such weather for bridgebuilding, C. C. Martin said. By November, twenty-two strands were in place. On the cradles, little sentry boxes had been built where the men could get out of the cold while waiting for the carriers to come by. In the sheds over the saddles, wood stoves had been installed and the men were wearing heavy mittens and shoes of buffalo hide.

  On Thanksgiving Day one of the wires snapped. It was considered a small matter. Nobody was injured and the newspapers heard nothing of it, but Paine decided to send a section of the wire over to Roebling for him to take a look. “It is as brittle as glass,” Roebling wrote back to Paine. “…The first question arises is how much of this same brittle wire has been going
into the cable without our knowledge and secondly what steps must be taken to prevent its reoccurrence. Is it due to a wrong system of inspection or what is the reason in your opinion?”

  Roebling also broke off several pieces of the wire and put them in with a letter to Henry Murphy.

  “This is what Mr. Kinsella is pleased to call the best,” he wrote angrily. “In reality it is worthless…and the most dangerous material that could be employed. How much of this poor wire has been going into the cables I do not know. Can I be held responsible for that? It is scarcely right that the engineers should have to be acting as detectives. I see but one way of preventing such wire being run out and that is to double the number of inspectors at the contractor’s works.”

  If Murphy read Roebling’s letter to the members of the Executive Committee at their next meeting, or to the trustees, there is no mention of it in the official records.

  Kinsella and Roebling were running head on once more.

  Bessemer steel had become a bone of contention again, exasperating the engineers no end. No issue it seemed ever stayed resolved for very long. This time the argument was over the suspenders, the wire ropes that would hang down from the cables to the roadway. Roebling had decided that Bessemer wire would do perfectly well and that was what he specified, but at the last minute, at Murphy’s urging, he had had the word “Bessemer” scratched out of the printed specifications. Again “steel wire” was all that was called for. Kinsella had been furious, exclaiming in the editorial columns of the Eagle that cost was no factor here, that no chain was stronger than its weakest link, etc., etc. The engineers had no business deciding such matters alone, he said. And when John A. Roebling’s Sons, the lowest bidder for the suspenders, was awarded the contract, Kinsella wrote that it was solely because Washington Roebling wanted it that way and that the contract should have gone to a Brooklyn firm (unnamed).