Once when he was seventeen, his father had been faced with a cholera epidemic at Niagara Falls. More than sixty people had died in the first week and the doctors seemed incapable of doing anything to help. “The great secret,” his father had written to Charles Swan, was to “keep off fear.” His father, too, would have succumbed with the rest, according to one man who was there, had it not been for his uncommon powers of concentration. “He determined not to have it,” the man wrote. John Roebling had spent one whole night walking up and down his room, fighting to rid his mind of the very thought
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