The Great Bridge: The Epic Story of the Building of the Brooklyn Bridge

by David McCullough

These were the days of Boss Tweed and the gaudy extravagances of the steel and oil and railroad barons, so conspicuously on display virtually side by side with the appalling squalor of the poor. Never

Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute when I unlocked a large storage closet to see for the first time shelf after shelf of his notebooks, scrapbooks, photographs, letters, blueprints, old newspapers he had saved,

The contents of the collection, plus those in another large collection at Rutgers University, both of which are described in the Bibliography,

so happens that the work which is likely to be our most durable monument, and to convey some knowledge of us to the most remote posterity, is a work of bare utility; not a shrine, not a fortress, not a palace, but a bridge. —MONTGOMERY SCHUYLER IN HARPER’S WEEKLY, MAY 24, 1883

The Times, for example, described the bridge as a sort of grand long-needed pressure valve that would do much to alleviate New York’s two most serious problems, crime and overcrowding.

they would be about the largest, most massive things ever built on the entire North American continent. On the New York skyline only the slim spire of Trinity Church at the head of Wall Street reached higher.

The suspended roadway’s great “river span” was to be held between the towers by the four immense cables, two outer ones and two near the middle of the bridge floor. These cables would be as much as fifteen inches in diameter and each would hang over the river in what is known as a catenary curve, that perfect natural form taken by any rope or cable suspended from two points, which in this case were the summits of the two stone towers. At the bottom of the curve each cable would join with the river span, at the center of the span. But all along the cables, vertical “suspenders,” wire ropes about as thick as a pick handle, would be strung like harp strings down to the bridge floor. And across those would run a pattern of diagonal, or inclined, stays, hundreds of heavy wire ropes that would radiate down from the towers and secure at various points along the bridge floor, both in the direction of the land and toward the center of the river span.

perfect catenary curve bridge building and orchid breeding are each both an art and a science, they need to function well and look good

The wire rope for the suspenders and stays was to be of the kind manufactured by Roebling at his Trenton works. It was to be made in the same way as ordinary hemp rope, that is, with hundreds of fine wires twisted to form a rope. The cables, however, would be made of wire about as thick as a lead pencil, with thousands of wires to a cable, all “laid up” straight, parallel to one another, and then wrapped with an outer skin of soft wire, the way the base strings of a piano are wrapped.

Roebling was talking about making the cables of steel, “the m...

grand harmony of opposite forces—the steel of the cables in tension, the granite of the towers in compression.

Scientific American.

it would be built six times as strong as it need be.

On occasion the two of them, father and son, would be seen walking on Hicks Street, talking intently, or down by the slate-gray river pacing about the spot where the tower was to rise, the father pointing this way and that with his good hand. They resembled each other in height and build, even trimmed their whiskers the same way. But while the son was quite handsome in the conventional sense, with strong regular features, the father’s face was a composite of hard angles and deep creases,

Charles, younger still by seven years, was a strangely silent, thoughtful young man, whose chief interest was flower gardening and who was home for the summer from Troy, where he was a student at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, like his oldest brother before him, and not particularly happy about it.

For it was common knowledge that the foremost manufacturer of steel wire was John A. Roebling’s Sons of Trenton.

His brother Charles, who had come into the business in 1871, after finishing at Troy, had grown into a fastidious, intelligent-looking young man who wore a stovepipe hat and whose primary interest now was his work, which was the production side of the business.

Roebling thought highly of Charles. He admired his unfailing industry and his technical competence. “He was his father over again, to a far greater degree than any of the other children,” Roebling wrote. “He inherited his temperament, his constitution, the concentrated energy which drives one to work and be doing something all the time.” Charles, at twenty-seven, was still a bachelor. When Charles had returned from college in 1871, everything had been prepared for him to take his place in the mill, and since Ferdinand knew comparatively little engineering, Charles had been more or less his own master from the start and old Charles Swan, his guardian, had turned over to him something like $300,000 “in good securities.” “Charles had one very strong point,” his oldest brother would write admiringly, “he never copied; [he] tried to solve every problem according to the best of his ability. Every task was an education to him.”

His brothers, both in perfect health, had had everything handed to them, as he saw it; they were getting rich speedily and effortlessly in a business that had been all set up for them in advance and that he felt he understood better than either one of them.

The mill was then producing something like 450 miles of wire a day.

William Dean Howells, who wrote: “The engineer sits reading his newspaper, as in a peaceful bower. Now and then he lays down his paper and clambers up one of the stairways . . . and touches some irritated spot on the giant’s body with a drop of oil, and goes down again and takes up his newspaper; he is like some potent enchanter there . . .”

Charles probably considered the Corliss engine overly large for its purpose and inefficient, which it was,

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 President meanwhile gave all the appearance of having a splendid time. He tapped his foot to the band music, admired the flowers, went out into the garden, shook a great many hands, and stayed perhaps an hour in all. Once he was gone, Roebling excused himself and there was a burst of applause as he went slowly back up the stairs.

In 1903 the Williamsburg Bridge was completed upstream from the Navy Yard, from designs by an RPI man with the old Brooklyn name of Leffert Lefferts Buck. Heavy, ungainly-looking, built entirely of steel with a stiffening truss no less than forty feet deep, it was four and a half feet longer than the Brooklyn Bridge, which meant it was now the world’s largest suspension bridge. One of the assistant engineers was C. C. Martin’s son, Kingsley Martin, and the cables were of Roebling wire. Wilhelm Hildenbrand and Charles Roebling were in charge of the cable making.

The wire business in this time became the biggest in the world. The demand seemed unending—for telegraph wire, baling wire, electrical wire, for wire cloth, for bridge cable wire, for the construction of the Panama Canal, for wire rope for cable roads, coal mines, ships, oil rigs, logging machinery, tramways, elevators. The Otis Elevator Company was buying nearly all its cable from the Roeblings. The sons of John A. Roebling had become millionaires many times over. Washington Roebling’s own estate would be approximately $29 million.

On fall afternoons in 1904, in Kinkora, New Jersey, a tiny village on the Delaware ten miles below Trenton, he watched the building of a new mill complex and an entire town of brick houses and broad streets that was to become known eventually as Roebling. His brothers had announced that the town was being built only out of “plain business necessity” and that there was to be nothing utopian about it. But to the surprise of very few, it turned out to be one of the best-planned industrial towns ever built in America, a model in every respect, as company towns went. In the view of many old admirers of the family, it was a fitting extension of ideas that had spurred John Roebling on at Saxonburg so many years before.

In April 1912 his nephew and namesake, Washington A. Roebling, III, Charles Roebling’s son, went down on the Titanic and the family was news again.

Ferdinand Roebling died in 1917 and Charles the year after.

“It might be argued if a man inherits everything”: WAR’s obituary for his brother Charles, October 1918, RUL; also in Schuyler, The Roeblings, pp. 324–325.

WAR on his brother Charles: WAR, “Memorial to Charles Roebling,” October 1918, RUL; also quoted in Schuyler, The Roeblings, pp. 324–326.

Wire: Specifications for Steel Cable Wire, for the East River Suspension Bridge—1876, original copy, RPI; also LER.

Starting of the Corliss engine: Scientific American, May 20, 1876.

“The engineer sits reading his newspaper”: The Atlantic Monthly, July 1876.

Twain, Mark, and Warner, Charles Dudley, The Gilded Age. American Publishing Company, Hartford, 1873.

Roebling, Charles (son of John Roebling), 93, 515 Brooklyn Bridge inauguration and, 480, 495 son of, 513 in wire business, 326 cable making for Williamsburg Bridge, 508 display for Machinery Hall, 330