More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
November 6 - December 31, 2023
in his case, with New York’s Novelty Iron Works—and forty years before he had made some history driving the first locomotive in America, the Stourbridge Lion, all alone and before a big crowd, on a test run at Honesdale, Pennsylvania.
he was the one man in the group, the two Roeblings included, who had had any firsthand experience working with compressed-air foundations, or caissons, as they were called, which, in this particular case, was regarded as an attribute of major proportions.
Henry Latrobe of Baltimore, who had the face of a bank clerk, but whose endorsement alone would perhaps have been enough to settle the whole issue. He was the son and namesake of the famous English-born architect picked by Jefferson to design or remodel much of Washington, and who rebuilt the Capitol after it was burned by the British during the War of 1812.
In April 1867 a charter authorizing a private company to build and operate an East River bridge had been voted through at Albany.
It was also to be completed by January 1, 1870.
alternative to the East River ferries.
They would each take up the better part of a city block and would be heavy enough to offset the immense pull of the cables, but hollow inside, to provide, Roebling suggested, room for cavernous treasury vaults, which he claimed would be the safest in America and ample enough to house three-quarters of all the investments and securities in the country.
But most important of all, Roebling was talking about making the cables of steel, “the metal of the future,” instead of using iron wire, as had always been done before. There was not a bridge in the country then, not a building in New York or in any city as yet, built of steel, but Roebling was seriously considering its use and the idea was regarded by many engineers as among the most revolutionary and therefore questionable features of his entire plan.
Only Congressional authorization was needed now, since Congress had jurisdiction over all navigable waters and the bridge was to be a post road.
as was the wife of one of the consultants, Mrs. Julius Adams, who is described only as an “amiable lady” in existing accounts. Why she consented to join the group, or why she was invited in the first place, no one ever explained.
John Roebling was a believer in hydropathy, the therapeutic use of water. Come headaches, constipation, the ague, he would sit in a scalding-hot tub for hours at a time, then jump out and wrap up in ice-cold, slopping-wet bed sheets and stay that way for another hour or two. He took Turkish baths, mineral baths. He drank vile concoctions of raw egg, charcoal, warm water, and turpentine, and there were dozens of people along Canal Street who had seen him come striding through his front gate, cross the canal bridge, and drink water “copiously”—gallons it seemed—from the old fountain beside the
...more
Time was something never to be squandered. If a man was five minutes late for an appointment with him, the appointment was canceled.
Someone hired by the hemp rope interests had secretly cut it at a splice, with the result that it broke during the test. But the sabotage was discovered, Roebling was given a second chance, and his rope worked with such success that it was soon adopted for the entire Portage system.
When Lincoln called for volunteers after the attack on Sumter, Roebling had sat gravely silent at his end of the dinner table, then turned abruptly to his son Washington. “Don’t you think you have stretched your legs under my mahogany long enough?” And the young man had enlisted the very next morning.
Weight should be simply an attending element to a still more important condition, viz: stiffness.”
General Henry Slocum was asked to give a toast, which he did, saying to great applause that he would gladly forfeit his war record for the bridge at Niagara—“to have been the engineer of that bridge.” The general, whose political ambition was very large, sometimes said things he did not quite mean, but his toast would be repeated widely in Brooklyn,
In Egypt the French had nearly finished the Suez Canal.
With the yards on the New York side taken into account, the shores of the East River represented one of the greatest concentrations of shipbuilding anywhere on earth.
More ships tied up in Brooklyn now than in New York and Hoboken combined.
Sunday-morning ferries to Brooklyn were known as “Beecher boats.” The easiest way to find Plymouth Church from the ferry landing was to follow the crowd.
There was more to be said for Brooklyn. Gas rates were reasonable. Taxes were still lower than in New York. The schools were far superior. Local government was reputed to be honest, which it was not, but in contrast to the way things were done on the other side of the river, it looked pretty good. Streets were reasonably well lighted after dark and for a city of its size there was little crime. The drinking water was delicious.
He was, in fact, the first political manipulator to be called “Boss,” a name he never cared for.
For example, several years prior to the time Tweed developed an interest in bridgebuilding, he had commenced a new County Courthouse on Chambers Street, just across the park from City Hall, or almost directly in line with where the New York entrance to the bridge was to be. The architect’s plans called for a three-story building, of iron and marble, in the style of a Palladian country house, and it was to cost, according to law, no more than a quarter of a million dollars. At the outset it had looked like a straightforward, relatively modest piece of business. But by 1868 it was still being
...more
Three chairs and forty tables for the Chambers Street courthouse had been bought by the City of New York for $179,792. Windows had cost $8,000 apiece. One friend of the Ring, a man named Garvey who would become known as “The Prince of Plasterers,” had been paid by 1869 half a million dollars for his plastering work inside the courthouse, plus a million more to repair what he had done. (That July Garvey’s bill for plastering came to $153,755, and his total bill, for work that should have cost about $20,000, would be nearly three million.) Among the many checks made out for “articles required”
...more
In 1868 he managed to get past Tweed an inconsequential-appearing bill permitting him to establish an experimental pneumatic tube for moving mail. Then, toward the end of the year, with no more legal right than that, he went to work. He had rented Devlin’s clothing store at Broadway and Murray, and there, in the cellar, he began digging a tunnel, nine feet in diameter, that was to run a block uptown, to Warren Street, directly beneath Broadway.
“There must be someone at hand to say ‘yes’ or ‘no,’” he liked to comment, “and it often makes a great difference which word they use.”
He had put down Brooklyn’s new water main and was head engineer in charge of building Prospect Park. (The actual design of the park had been worked out by the noted landscape architects Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux, who had done Central Park, which they considered the lesser work of the two.)
Roebling is a character . . . He is a light-haired, blue-eyed man, with a countenance as if all the world were an empty show.
after he had been “building bridges and swearing all day.”
He enlisted on April 16, 1861, as a private in the New Jersey State Militia. Two months later, fed up with garrison duty, he resigned to enlist in New York, again as a private. In January of 1865, the war nearly over, he resigned from the Army, a lieutenant colonel, age twenty-seven, and a veteran of Second Bull Run, South Mountain, Antietam, Chancellorsville, Gettysburg, the Wilderness, Spotsylvania, and the Crater at Petersburg.
He was assigned next to a cavalry expedition, spent some ten days on the move, scarcely ever out of the saddle, and once, at about five in the morning, surprised Jeb Stuart at his breakfast and very nearly captured him.
In the weeks after Chancellorsville, Roebling began going up in a reconnaissance balloon every morning at daybreak to see what the enemy might be up to and it was he, on one such flight, who first discovered that Lee had started to move again, toward Pennsylvania and Gettysburg.
The safeguarding of Little Round Top would be viewed by many historians as the turning point of the war. Warren, understandably enough, got nearly all the credit and would be remembered as one of the heroes of Gettysburg. But later on, speaking generally of his young
The only one who could handle such an order, it was decided, was a shipbuilder, and on October 25, 1869, the contract was awarded to the firm of Webb & Bell, whose yards were up the river at Greenpoint. And if a date were to be picked to mark the beginning of the building of the bridge, it probably ought to be that one.
Roebling kept careful track of the rock uncovered. Nine-tenths of it, he found, was of Hudson River Palisades origin, transported, like all of Long Island, millions of years before by the glaciers.
When it was time to go down to take a look at the damage, Roebling led the way. “The first entry into the caisson was made with considerable misgiving,” he wrote.
With a little figuring Roebling concluded that once all the settling had stopped and before the compressed air was built up again inside the chambers, the caisson was carrying a total weight of twenty-three tons per square foot. This was an astonishing revelation. As nerve-racking as the whole episode had been, it had demonstrated just how large a margin of safety Roebling had built into the structure, since its ultimate load, once the bridge was built, would be only five tons per square foot. So he had built the caisson at least four times as strong as it needed to be.
The problem was that the weight of the columns of water in the shafts was not always the same. Particles of rock and earth were constantly washing out of the clamshell buckets as they were hauled up through the water shafts, and as a result a fine silt was held in suspension and this, in a column of water seven feet square by, say, thirty-five feet high, could and did increase the specific gravity of that column to a remarkable degree. But when that shaft was not in use for some reason or other, the silt would settle, the water would become less thick and would weigh less. So great would be
...more
On the Sunday of the blowout, apparently the sediment in one shaft had settled to such an extent that the water no longer weighed enough to contain the pressure inside. The normal precaution had been to keep a small stream of water playing into the shafts to make up for just such a likelihood during days when the work was halted and no dredging was going on. But this time that had not been done. Sounding very much like his father, Roebling said, “To say that this occurrence was an accident would certainly be wrong, because not one accident in a hundred deserves the name. In this case it was
...more
It was about this same time, during construction of the Big Bend Tunnel, in West Virginia, that a Negro railroad worker named John Henry drove just such steel drills faster, it was said, than any man, for which he would be immortalized in what has been called America’s greatest ballad. Henry supposedly met his death competing with a steam drill about 1870. No such steam drills were used in the bridge caissons.
Apparently the sharp night air revived him some at first, but then suddenly he felt the beginnings of paralysis. In a matter of minutes he was unable to stand or walk. Nearby, Charles Young, the foreman, who had also been carried up through the lock about the same time, was in an equally bad state. Roebling was driven directly home in a carriage just as it was turning light. For the next three hours he was rubbed vigorously all over with a solution of salt and whiskey.
Incredibly, the World implied the fire had been an act of sabotage, that directly or indirectly, it had been the doing of someone connected with the ferry company.
Had any one of them had the least presence of mind, he could have closed the shaft instantly and had everything locked up tight quite simply by just reaching over and pulling at the rope connected to the upper door. It would have taken no effort whatever. The explosion of air from below would have slammed the door shut. But nobody did that.
Roebling had kept his head under the most nightmarish conditions, and when nobody else had. He had analyzed the situation in an instant and moved swiftly to put a stop to it. In the eyes of many, it was as commendable a demonstration of cool command as anything he had done on a Civil War battlefield.
But just to be sure, he had a great hole, six feet across, cut into the roof through five layers of timber, directly over the spot where the fire had originated. And by opening up the roof this way they discovered that they had been exceedingly proficient in their work and that it had been a great mistake. The cement had indeed filled every crack and crevice, but most of the timber beneath the cement was covered with a layer of soft, brittle charcoal, anywhere from one to three inches thick. It was a crushing revelation. It meant that every last bit of the cement put in so laboriously would
...more
And in his final report he stated, “From the faithful manner in which the work was done it is certain that the burnt district is fully as strong, if not stronger than the rest of the caisson.” Most people believed him.
But the accident also left a lot of people wondering how well things were being managed by the Bridge Company and at a time when what the Bridge Company needed most was public confidence. The guy wire on the derrick broke because of a defective weld in one socket, as would be learned. The accident had not been caused by mismanagement or the use of shoddy equipment, but a great many people did not know that, or believe it if they did. An investigation
One paper would list it as one of the “seven fraudulent wonders of the New World,” along with Tweed’s courthouse and the Northern Pacific Railroad.
It was as neat and uncomplicated as could be, and the deeper the caisson went—the greater the pressure in the chamber became—the better the system worked. When the caisson was down about sixty feet, for example, the air was blasting out of the sand pipes with such force that fourteen men could stand in a circle around one pipe and shovel sand under it with all their strength and the sand would disappear as fast as they could shovel.
special chilled iron
