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

by David McCullough

A number of other Brooklyn men were sent by Smith to the Brooklyn City Hospital, where, interestingly, the cases became the special fascination of a young intern there, Dr. Walter Reed, later to be one of the best-known physicians in the world as a result of his research on yellow fever.

Smith never used the term “bends.” He called it the caisson disease, a name he was the first to employ and that is still used as the formal designation.

This, he knew, jibed with what the French mining engineer M. B. Pol had concluded in 1845 and later expanded on in a most interesting memoir published in 1854. “Experience teaches,” Pol wrote, “that the ill effects are in proportion to the rapidity with which the transition is made from the compressed air to the normal atmosphere.” In

were caused by the liberation of nitrogen bubbles from solution in the blood stream and in the tissues of the body upon the sharp reduction of atmospheric pressure.

Under pressure the normal nitrogen gas in the blood dissolves to a high degree, then returns to a gaseous state—in the form of bubbles—when and if the pressure is suddenly relieved. Set free in the body fluids such bubbles can cause great damage.

If liberated in the spinal cord, for example, they can cause total paralysis. But if pressure is relieved gradually, the gas comes out of solu...

The savage pains of the bends are caused by a stoppage of the oxygen supply in the blood stream. The nitrogen bubbles released by too rapid decompression create blocks in the blood stream—the same as mechanical blocks—that keep the oxygen in the red blood cells from reaching the tissue. The red cells fai...

This denial of oxygen-bearing blood—called ischemia—is much the same as what happens in a heart attack. So an attack of the bends might be likened to a heart attack in different pa...

Fat men are also more prone to attacks, as Smith surmised, since the nitrogen bubbles tend to collect and dissolve in fat tissue.

One of the children to grow up on South Street in the 1870’s was Al Smith, who would one day be almost as much a symbol of New York as the bridge itself. In later years he would describe his mother talking in tones of awe about the many workers who had died while struggling to sink the great caissons. “Perhaps if they had known,” she had said, “they would never have built it.”

By noon or thereabouts the Bridge Company had agreed to $2.75, but the men turned that down angrily and a man who tried to break through their lines was badly beaten. Negotiations dragged on for another three days. But then William Kingsley announced that if the men did not all go back to work immediately he would fire every last one of them and with that the strike ended.

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 of cholera. The incident made an enormous impression on the gentleman who witnessed it and on everyone back in Trenton when the story was told there. Now it seems Washington Roebling too had “determined not to have it.” Other men might resign themselves to their fate, he could not.

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

In addition, to guard against the corrosive salt air over the East River, the wire would be galvanized—coated with zinc—something that had not been done before and that a few later-day suspension-bridge builders would neglect to do to their regret.2

Years later, at Quebec, a huge bridge partly designed by Cooper, by then an engineer of national prominence, would collapse during construction, killing seventy-five men. On hearing the news Roebling would write scathingly of engineers who design bridges but do not give the actual construction their personal attention. “It is one thing to sit in your office and split hairs,” he would write, “but a different thing to get out and command men and meet the realities of great construction.” Ironically, Roebling was unaware, it seems, that Cooper had not been at Quebec because of his health.

He had had a natural desire to be the first man over, he said, but his real objective had been to demonstrate to his workmen, who would be doing the same thing under more hazardous conditions, his own complete confidence in the safety of the rope. He would ask no man to do anything he would not do himself.

until the father of the bride-to-be did a little checking into Haigh and found the man already had a wife and two children living “in rural retirement.”

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.

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.

McNulty had told Roebling he did not know why he had removed the centering. “Ambitious natures are apt to be overconfident and to shrink from asking counsel of more experienced persons for fear their infallibility might be impugned,” Roebling wrote Murphy. “Time and age cures all this.” But then he added that the real explanation might be simply that McNulty was overworked.

20 Wire Fraud

And young Chris Magee, Republican Boss of Pittsburgh, made a special trip to New York to spend several months studying the reasons for Tweed’s downfall and returned home to tell his associates that a ring could be made as safe as a bank, and he would do just that.

Harry Supple, the one who had performed such heroic high-wire feats two summers before, never regained consciousness and died in less than twenty-four hours. Several papers immediately charged that the rope that failed was made of Bessemer steel and that it had been manufactured by the Roeblings. Both claims were true.

Perhaps in his quiet room overlooking the river, Washington Roebling recalled something his father had written when the same issue was raised at Cincinnati. “I have no fears of those who honestly believe the bridge to be injurious to the navigation,” John Roebling had said, “the opposition of cavilers I most dread.”

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.”

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.

“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.”

First a powerful iron clamp would be used to bring the strands into an exactly cylindrical shape. This was composed of two semicircles 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.

It would be said of him later, by numerous people who knew him, that he was notably gentle and kindhearted for a soldier. The distressing thing about Indian fighting, he had said, was that quite often one shot women and children and when it came time to tend to their wounds one found them to be not at all unlike other women and children. In the West he had been known as “the good Lieutenant.”

Only a few months after she was married, Gouverneur K. Warren’s brilliant career had run into a puzzling, tragic snag at Five Forks, the last decisive battle of the Civil War.

For Emily it was a heartbreaking thing to see the men who mattered most in her life victims of such dreadful misfortune. It must have seemed as though the two of them, with their pride and decency, their old-fashioned sense of duty, were somehow out of step with the times and paying an awful price for it. Everywhere about her, lesser men, witless, vulgar, corrupt, men of narrow ambition and the cheapest of values, were prospering as never before, grabbing up power, money, or just about anything else they hungered for. This Gilded Age, as Mark Twain had named it, seemed to be tailor-made for that sort. It was the grand and glorious heyday of the political bribe, the crooked contract, the double standard at every level. It seemed the old verities simply were not negotiable any longer. Good and brave men who had a legitimate claim to honor, respect, position—at least according to every standard she had been raised by—were somehow in the way now and so got swept aside.

Her services as his “amanuensis,” as he called her, were enormously important, as he said later. She kept all his records, answered much of his mail, delivered various messages or requests to the bridge offices, went to the bridge itself to check on things for him, and was his representative at occasional social functions. She was quite literally his eyes, his legs, his good right arm. And the more she did, the more the gossips talked.

Murphy had hired William M. Evarts as counsel for the Bridge Company. He was the celebrated and expensive New York attorney who defended Andrew Johnson in the impeachment trial and Beecher in the adultery case and who had just been made Secretary of State.

Ferdinand Roebling, for his part, said he thought the time had come for him to put the matter in the hands of a lawyer and begin suit against “somebody” for libel. He said the end had been reached so far as the abuse the Roebling company was willing to endure. His family’s connection with the bridge had been anything but advantageous, he reminded the trustees. His father had lost his life, his brother had sacrificed his health, the family reputation had been assailed. And so far as making money from their contracts was concerned, his company would be perfectly satisfied to produce the rest of the wire at cost.

One tiny item, a clipping not much bigger than a postage stamp, reports that J. Lloyd Haigh of Brooklyn was breaking rocks at Sing Sing. He had been convicted of passing bad checks.

Stranahan, obviously angry, was resorting to a defense he seldom used. His customary method was to assume his opponent was perhaps half right, well intentioned beyond question, but still, on the whole, altogether mistaken in the premises from which he started. He was always willing to rely upon “the more mature judgment” of his opponent, and to give him opportunity for maturing his judgment, he was generally willing to accept a delay. But there was no easy way to delay the direct question and so the usually amiable Stranahan, who reminded people of an English statesman and who was looking more dignified than ever now that he was in his seventies, had been filled with great righteous indignation, basing his case, as it were, on the excellence of his personal character and past services.

Had it not been so near the end of the work, had there been less talk in the papers about the ever-mounting cost of the bridge, the change would probably not have mattered a great deal. But in October of 1881 when Roebling submitted his request for an additional one thousand tons of steel to put into the trusses to make the floor rigid enough to carry heavy locomotives and cars, several individuals saw it as the moment they had been waiting for. Why the sudden concern about the strength of the bridge, they wanted to know. Who decided on railroad trains? How was such an immensely important decision arrived at and why was there no explanation of this in the record? And always, between the lines, was the larger question: Did the Chief Engineer know what he was doing?

The original plan for a cable-drawn bridge train had not been abandoned. It was just that the bridge would now have enough added strength to accommodate the future, which, it was quite naturally presumed, would involve some sort of railroad. The presumption was mistaken; but for different reasons nobody could have guessed at then—the advent of the internal combustion engine and the automobile, mainly—the decision would turn out to be the right one. As a result, the bridge would remain in service for another fifty years before any major alterations in the superstructure became necessary.

The papers made much of what Roosevelt had to say. Henry Murphy immediately called in the reporters to present the other side of the story. If Roosevelt felt in the dark on bridge matters, the elderly lawyer said, it might be because he had attended less than half the meetings there had been in the time since he became a trustee. Nor had he ever once taken his technical questions to the assistant engineers, who were always available for just that purpose. As for Roebling, his place could not be filled by any twenty engineers.

But at this late date he did not propose “to dance attendance on the Trustees,” as he said in the private notes he dictated to his wife. “I never did it when I was well and I can only do my work by maintaining my independence.”

Roebling refused to be “dragged into the board and put on exhibition,” as he said, simply to serve the purposes of political ambition. He had had his fill of politicians. “I am not a politician and I have never tried to conceal the contempt I have always felt for men who devoted their lives to politics,” he wrote privately.

The core of the issue was the change in the plans and that had not been Roebling’s doing and they all knew it. “I

In the time he had spent on the bridge, the telephone and the electric light had been introduced. (What a difference they would have made during the work inside the caissons.) Now at night he could see hundreds of electric lights burning over in New York, directly across the river, in the blocks Edison had first lit the summer before, when Roebling was at Newport.

Mayors Low and Grace, with the approval of the trustees, appointed two accountants to examine fully all receipts, vouchers, papers, payrolls, and all other documents connected with the bridge, “and especially to investigate the books and papers of the Bridge as they bear upon the charges made by the New York World and others against the Trustees.” It would be a year before their findings would be made public, and they would cause no stir whatever. There were vouchers on file, the accountants reported, for total expenditures of $15,211,982.92. Due to certain clerical errors overpayments to contractors came to $9,578.67 and those were the only discrepancies found in the company’s books, all of which had been “honestly and neatly kept.”

But there were no more specifications to get up, no more contracts to sign, and everything was being handled with the greatest dispatch by Roebling’s immensely capable assistants. Amazingly, they were all still on the job, after fourteen years, even Collingwood, who had signed up originally for a month only. Except for Farrington, not one, in all that time, had quit out of discouragement or frustration or to take a better-paying position, several of which had been offered. Not one had been relieved of his job. Roebling’s own sense of duty and determination had been matched in kind. Every man he had hired had proved up to the work. For some, such as McNulty, it was the only work they had ever known.

To the New Yorker who lived within its shadow, it was not just a bridge to Brooklyn—few New Yorkers had any special desire to go to Brooklyn—it was a highway into the open air.

It was as though the monstrous bridge was about to be jolted to life by a sudden massive charge from this eerie laboratory, like the creature in Mrs. Shelley’s story of Dr. Frankenstein. The lamps themselves were being mounted on posts set on top of the steel trusswork, beside the promenade, at intervals of about one hundred feet. When the night came to turn them on, it would mark the first use of electric light over a river.

As before, Emily was serving as her husband’s principal contact with the work. She was still going to the bridge regularly, and some days two and three times. There were the usual messages to deliver, answers to bring back, and things he had asked her to keep an eye out for. Once when a manufacturer had been puzzled as to how a particular part of the superstructure should be formed and had come to the Roebling house to get some questions answered, she had made a drawing to show how it could be done, carefully explaining each step. Now she could see to its proper installation as well, and any doubts there may have been among the men about her ability to pass judgment on such matters had long since vanished.

She had taken a live rooster along with her, as a symbol of victory,

His name is not known, but he wrote later that this was the first time he had seen Roebling in eleven years.