The Great Bridge

by David McCullough

  Two days later the Haigh people were caught trying the same thing again. This time Paine and three others, concealed behind a fence, had watched a wagonload of good wire being unloaded, then replaced with rejected wire, which was all very carefully weighed to be sure the weight of the shipment tallied exactly with what it had been when it left the mill. The good wire was then returned to the mill, where it was submitted to an inspector once more, who, supposing it to be new wire, tested it all over again, gave it another certificate of approval, and sent it on its way, only to go through the same routine.

  “The distressing point of this affair,” Roebling told Murphy, “is that all the rejected wire which has come to the Bridge has been worked into the cables, and cannot be removed.” How long Haigh had been practicing his little scheme, Roebling could not say. “We know that it has been going on for two months, and the probability is that it extends as far back as last January.” According to the inspectors’ books, nearly five hundred tons of wire had been rejected to date. Most of this, Roebling suspected, had gone into the cables. To determine the precise quantity would be extremely difficult he said. “An engineer who has not been educated as a spy or detective is no match for a rascal.”

  For the time being he had ordered that a man on horseback accompany each load of wire from Haigh’s mill to the bridge and he had instructed Paine to withhold his signature to Haigh’s monthly estimates and thereby prevent Haigh from receiving any more money until the extent of the fraud had been more thoroughly investigated.

  This, Roebling said, was the first instance of deliberate, incontrovertible fraud that had come to his notice in the nine years he had been Chief Engineer and he urged the trustees to make it known publicly without delay. But in the brief covering note to Murphy that he included with the letter, Roebling made a rather different point: “…in case a want of strength shall in the future be found in the cables I wish the responsibility to rest where it belongs, with the Board of Trustees.” And this appears to have troubled Murphy about as deeply as the fraud itself.

  Murphy took three days to answer Roebling. His concern was very great, clearly enough, but so too was his instinctive caution. No action ought to be taken he said until they had a better notion of the real damage done and until he was clear on the technical remedies Roebling might have in mind. It was a lawyer’s letter. “I have waited with much anxiety for the report of Col. Paine,” he wrote, in regard to the wire on hand and not used, which he has been engaged in retesting, since the suspicions arose in regard to the action of Mr. Haigh, and to the possible extent to which any rejected wire has been foisted upon us in the cables…. It is manifestly proper, before any definite course be taken by us, that we should know the nature and extent of the injury, and that so far as the work itself is concerned, we should have your distinct recommendation in the premises.” In the meantime, he wanted to know what possible responsibility Roebling could conceive of resting with the trustees.

  “The responsibility of any weakness that may be found in the cables,” Roebling answered, “rests with the old board of trustees, because they awarded so important a contract as the cable wire to a man who had no standing, commercially or otherwise, and the same responsibility must be assumed by the present board if they fail to at once put an end to Mr. Haigh’s contract…” Out of tact, perhaps, or out of sympathy for the position Murphy was in, Roebling did not remind Murphy that he had warned him about Haigh, quite explicitly, well before the wire contract was awarded.

  Given a week’s notice, the Cleveland Rolling Mill or Washburn’s of Worcester could supply all the wire needed to finish the cables, Roebling assured Murphy. The price would be about the same and the quality could be relied upon. As for Haigh, a committee of trustees and an engineer should be appointed to assess the damage to the cables and fix the value of the condemned wire. That sum should then be deducted from the money currently being withheld from Haigh as security. “This,” said the engineer, “is a straightforward way of dealing with a dishonest contractor.”

  But the trustees chose not to do that. The trustees, in fact, decided not to do anything at all about Mr. Haigh. The whole unfortunate affair would be very neatly and quietly swept beneath the carpet.

  …They gathered for their regular monthly meeting on the afternoon of August 5, and the record states that the president read letters from Engineer Roebling “relating to alleged frauds practiced by the contractor for cable wire”—no more. And nothing on the matter was released to the press. Several years later, however, William Marshall, the one trustee who had voted against granting Haigh the contract in the first place, said Paine appeared before the board that afternoon and told the entire story of what Haigh had been up to. “I was in favor at the time,” Marshall said, “and so said in the Board, of giving the whole history of the matter to the public, but was overruled.”

  According to an item in the Eagle, there was a meeting of the Executive Committee immediately following the board meeting. “The executive session lasted until 6 o’clock, but the subject matter under discussion was not divulged by the members,” the paper reported. But Marshall said Haigh himself appeared at this session and that Haigh denied any intention of trying to deceive the bridge people, professing to be wholly uninterested in any money that might be in question. “All I am anxious about,” he said, “is lest the trustees may entertain a poor opinion of me.” That they certainly did, responded several men in the room. “I am sorry for that,” declared Haigh. “Do you know that is what I was afraid of? Indeed, it was the only thing I was afraid of.” Haigh spoke the whole time, Marshall said, “with imperturbable coolness.”

  Interestingly, the record kept by the Bridge Company carries no mention of an executive session being held that afternoon.

  The following morning Roebling wrote once again to Murphy to answer several questions Murphy had sent along. Most of the letter was taken up with technical explanations of current cable strength, assuming, as Roebling now did, that some 221 tons of rejected wire had actually been laid up. But in closing, Roebling reminded Murphy that the cables had been designed to have a margin of safety of six, that is, they were six times as strong as they had to be. And he recalled for Murphy that his report of January 1877 had stated specifically that such allowances would have to be made “for any possible imperfection in the manufacture of the cables.” So even with Haigh’s bad wire hanging up there, the cables had a safety margin of at least five, Roebling concluded, and that he regarded as perfectly safe, provided no more bad wire was used.

  Roebling’s say on the matter was quite comforting for Murphy and for the other trustees apparently. The whole unpleasant business could now be very conveniently forgotten. Wasting no time, they reconvened the next day, August 7. When the meeting adjourned, the president had been directed “to continue the contract with Mr. Haigh for the wire required to complete the large cables, on such conditions and terms as he deems proper under the circumstances.”

  It was just as though nothing had happened. The papers carried no mention of any of this. The public remained ignorant of the entire affair.

  The Chief Engineer, however, after a great deal more thought on the problem, ruled that the contractor would have to supply additional good wire for the cables, at his own expense, to make up for the calculated deficiency of the bad wire already in place. As a result each of the cables would contain some 150 more wires than originally planned.

  From Washington Roebling’s private day journals, kept by his wife, a few further pieces of information emerge to complete the picture. Haigh’s original samples of crucible steel wire were made by somebody else, while a good percentage of the wire he delivered was of Bessemer steel after all, but sold to the Bridge Company at the crucible price. Roebling estimated that Haigh netted $60,000 on this bit of deception alone and that he had also cheated his supplier out of several hundred thousand dollars. In all Haigh’s illegitimate profits came to $300,000.

  Some years later, after the brid
ge was finished and the story of Haigh’s swindle had leaked out, the radical economic theorist Henry George, who had set out to resolve the paradox of progress and poverty, wrote of the bridge as a prime example of the good and evil of the age.

  We have brought machinery to a pitch of perfection that fifty years ago could not have been imagined; but in the presence of political corruption, we seem as helpless as idiots. The East River Bridge is a crowning triumph of mechanical skill; but to get it built a leading citizen of Brooklyn had to carry to New York sixty thousand dollars in a carpet bag to bribe a New York alderman. The human soul that thought out the great bridge is prisoned in a crazed and broken body that lies bed-fast, and could only watch it grow by peering through a telescope. Nevertheless, the weight of the immense mass is estimated and adjusted for every inch. But the skill of the engineer could not prevent condemned wire from being smuggled into the cable.

  Come what may the Brooklyn Eagle would not be diverted from its main theme—accomplishment.

  The thousands who daily cross the ferries and look up to the lofty towers that rise on either hand above the water, and note the strands that stretch across the intervening space, hardly realize that the cable making of the great structure is nearing its completion. But such is the fact, and with a fair degree of success, by the time the cold weather sets in we shall see the four great cables completed and ready for the superstructure or roadway of the bridge. It has been steady and patient work—wire upon wire and strand upon strand—through heat and cold and storm and calm, and now this branch of the great enterprise nears the end, and another department of the work of construction appears in the near future.

  Nothing belied talk of political scheming, bankruptcy, labor unrest, vicious rumor, or plain despair quite so much as the great work itself.

  Progress on the cables was in truth very far along. Seventy strands had been completed, which meant there were only six more to go.

  An explanation offered at the time to show the interested layman how the strands were arranged to form a cable was to take seven nickels, place one at the center with six around it, all touching, and then twelve more around the outside of the six. This illustrated the pattern quite rightly, but it was somewhat misleading in that it implied that the first strand put into position was the center one—the middle nickel—then six more were compacted about it, and twelve more around that. The system did not work that way, however. The strands were being laid up in four different tiers and these were arranged in a most ingenious pattern, so that they stacked one on top of the other, like building blocks, rather than being built outward from a center strand, and still they wound up forming the cylindrical shape wanted for the cable. The first tier, consisting of five strands, had three strands forming a bottom row (the middle strand of these three was the first strand put in place) and two put on top, forming half of the next row. The next tier, of five more strands, placed one at each end of the second row (making four strands to that row) and three more on top. Then tier three, also five strands, added one more strand to each end of the third row, two more on top in the middle, and one on top of those. The fourth and final tier consisted of the last four strands stacked two to each side of the three upper strands of tier three.

  The arrangement was quite ingenious and it was entirely Roebling’s doing. “It has pleased the average penny-a-liner,” his wife would write, “to remark that there is nothing new in the East River Bridge and that Colonel Roebling only copied his father’s plans. The fact is there is scarcely a feature in the whole work that did not present new and untried problems.” His arrangement for the strands was a perfect example, she said, comparable to the water-shaft system he had worked out for the caisson, or his use of double tiers of anchor bars, which had been necessary to handle the number of strands required for such large cables (the earlier bridges had had only seven strands to a cable, not nineteen).

  Regulating the strands was found to be the most tedious and time-consuming task of all. The strength of the finished cable would depend on getting each strand into its exact, particular position, and since those positions were at different heights within the cable (there was a difference of about fifteen inches between the first strands, say, and those in the top tier), the length of the strands therefore had to vary. “Each must hang in its own peculiar length and curve to a mathematical nicety,” as one magazine article explained; “for if left but half an inch too long or too short for its true position, it will be too slack or too taut for its fellows, and it will be impossible to bind them solidly in one mass, and make them pull equally together.”

  In the abstract this was simply a matter of mathematics. But in practice there were a number of variables to contend with, just as there had been when stringing the individual wires. Temperature was again a prime factor. Even ordinary temperature changes during a day were such that the length of a strand was seldom the same from one hour to another. And to further complicate the problem, one span could be affected more than another, depending on how the sun was striking it. One strand might be in shadow, while another was taking the full glare; one might be exposed vertically to the sun, while the other was at a more oblique angle. So periods of strong sunshine, like days when the wind was up, were not the easiest times to regulate strands. The best progress was made when the weather was calm and a little overcast or between the first light of day and sunrise.

  Studies made by the engineers showed that the deflection of the cable strands from the towers at a temperature of 50 degrees was 127.64 feet, while at 90 degrees it was 128.64 feet—which was a variation of nearly a third of an inch for every degree of temperature. So it was not uncommon to find the cable strands varying as much as half a foot in height in the course of a single day.

  The way things were going, the two downstream cables would be laid up several weeks before the other two in order to give the men some practice with the wrapping machinery. To bind the strands of each cable into one compact unit required that the cable be tightly wrapped from end to end with iron wire. The work would begin at the towers, with wrapping machines proceeding down the cables toward the center of the river span and toward each anchorage. So ultimately there would be sixteen machines in operation.

  First a powerful iron clamp would be used to bring the strands into an exactly cylindrical shape. This was composed of two semi-circles that placed together formed a ring the prescribed diameter of the cable. The clamp would be screwed up tightly to compress the strands and directly behind it would come the wrapping machine, an iron cylinder—about sixteen inches long and cast in halves that were bolted together about the cable—encircled by a reel of wire that wound off the drum through a hole in the rear end of the cylinder where it passed with one turn around a small roller attached to a disk and then to the cable. The reel had handles around it, like a ship’s wheel. Men riding on a “buggy,” a small platform hung to the cable by big trolley wheels, would turn these handles, thereby revolving the reel and winding the wire onto the cable as tight and close as thread on a spool. Once the wrapping machine reached the clamp, the clamp was moved forward and the machine then advanced again, and the process would be repeated until the entire cable was clamped and wrapped. After that the cables would be oiled and a coat of white paint would be applied.

  The system worked well and without mishap except for one close call when the captain of an outward-bound full-rigged ship neglected to trim his top masts. The men in one of the buggies, working over the center of the river, did not see the ship until she was nearly upon them. Then they scrambled out onto the great cable above them and the ship clipped the buggy an instant later, sending it spinning and knocking a shower of tools into the air.

  Now there was a great push on to get the cables finished and wrapped before winter. It was expected that the job would take three months. The next step would be to hang the suspender cables from which the roadway was to be hung.

  In September, as directed by Henry Murphy, the contract for the wrapping wi
re, awarded to J. Lloyd Haigh at the start of the summer, was quietly changed and awarded to John A. Roebling’s Sons. No explanation was given for the change. No voices were raised about the Chief Engineer having a conflict of interest. The Eagle remained silent. Abram Hewitt remained silent.

  On October 5, 1878, at 4:45 P.M. by the clock on City Hall, the last wire went over, one year and about four months after the cable spinning had begun, or eight months sooner than Roebling had expected. “This desirable event,” wrote E. F. Farrington, “was marked by no demonstrations, save the sounding of a steam whistle, and the raising of a United States flag on the Brooklyn tower.” The greatest length of wire laid up in one day had been eighty-eight miles. The white carrier wheel, which had crossed the river some twenty-three thousand times, would be crossing no more. “The end, then, is near at hand,” announced the Eagle. But a month later, the cable wrapping not half finished, Henry Murphy declared that the work would have to be shut down entirely. “Honest John” Kelly was still holding out on New York’s quota and the money was all gone.

  21

  Emily

  At first I thought I would succumb, but I had a strong tower to lean upon, my wife, a woman of infinite tact and wisest counsel.

  —WASHINGTON ROEBLING

  SHE HAD been born and raised in a house much like this one and her whole life, until she married, had been spent in the upper Hudson Valley, where the river was not only a major event in the landscape, but a central part of everyone’s way of life. Talk of tides, of winter freeze-overs and the spring breakup, had been part of ordinary conversation for as long as she could remember.