The Great Bridge Read online

  Down the center of the bridge Roebling planned to run a double pair of tracks to carry specially built trains pulled by an endless cable, which would be powered by a giant stationary steam engine housed out of sight on the Brooklyn side. In time these trains would connect with a system of elevated railroads in both cities and become a lucrative source of revenue. He had worked it all out. His bridge trains would travel at speeds up to forty miles an hour. A one-way trip would take no more than five minutes. It was certain, he said, that forty million passengers a year could be accommodated by such a system, “without confusion and without crowding.”

  Carriages, riders on horseback, drays, farm wagons, commercial traffic of every kind, would cross on either side of the bridge trains, while directly overhead, eighteen feet above the tracks, he would build an elevated boardwalk for pedestrians, providing an uninterrupted view in every direction. This unique feature, he said, would become one of New York’s most popular attractions. “This part I call the elevated promenade, because its principal use will be to allow people of leisure, and old and young invalids, to promenade over the bridge on fine days, in order to enjoy the beautiful views and the pure air.” There was no bridge in the world with anything like it. And he added, “I need not state that in a crowded commercial city, such a promenade will be of incalculable value.”

  So the roadways and tracks at one level were for the everyday traffic of life, while the walkway above was for the spirit. The bridge, he had promised, was to serve the interests of the community as well as those of the New York Bridge Company. Receipts on all tolls and train fares would, he asserted, pay for the entire bridge in less than three years. To build such a bridge, he said, would take five years.

  Horatio Allen and William McAlpine asked the most questions during the sessions Roebling held with the consultants. The length of the central span and the tower foundations were the chief concerns.

  It had been said repeatedly by critics of the plan that a single span of such length was impossible, that the bridge trains would shake the structure to pieces and, more frequently, that no amount of calculations on paper could guarantee how it might hold up in heavy winds, but the odds were that the great river span would thrash and twist until it snapped in two and fell, the way the Wheeling Bridge had done (a spectacle some of his critics hoped to be on hand for, to judge by the tone of their attacks).

  Roebling told his consultants that a span of sixteen hundred feet was not only possible with a suspension bridge, but if engineered properly, it could be double that. A big span was not a question of practicability, but cost. It was quite correct that wind could play havoc with suspension bridges of “ordinary design.” But he had solved that problem long since, he assured them, in his earlier bridges, and this bridge, big as it was, would be quite as stable as the others. Like his earlier works, this was to be no “ordinary” bridge. For one thing it would be built six times as strong as it need be. The inclined stays, for example, would have a total strength of fifteen thousand tons, enough to hold up the floor by themselves. If all four cables were to fail, he said, the main span would not collapse. It would sag at the center, but it would not fall. His listeners were very much impressed.

  There were questions about his intended use of steel and about the extraordinary weight of the bridge. Then at one long session they had discussed the foundations.

  Roebling planned to sink two tremendous timber caissons deep into the riverbed and to construct his towers upon these. It was a technique with which he had had no previous experience, but the engineering had been worked out quite thoroughly, he said, in conjunction with his son, Colonel Roebling, who had spent nearly a year in Europe studying the successful use of similar foundations. McAlpine could vouch for the basic concept, since he had used it himself successfully, although on a vastly smaller scale, to sink one of the piers and the abutment for a drawbridge across the Harlem River. His caisson for the pier had been of iron and just six feet in diameter. Those Roebling was talking about would be of pine timbers and each one would cover an area of some seventeen thousand square feet, or an area big enough to accommodate four tennis courts with lots of room to spare. Nothing of the kind had ever been attempted before.

  How deep did he think he would have to go to reach a firm footing, the engineers wished to know. Would he go to bedrock? And did he have any idea how far down that might be?

  During the test borings on the Brooklyn side, the material encountered had been composed chiefly of compact sand and gravel, mixed with clay and interspersed with boulders of traprock, the latter of which, he allowed, had “detained this operation considerably.” Gneiss had been struck at ninety-six feet. But below a depth of fifty to sixty feet, the material had been so very compact that the borehole had remained open for weeks without the customary tubing. So it was his judgment that there would be no need to go all the way to rock. A depth of fifty feet on the Brooklyn side ought to suffice and the whole operation would probably take a year.

  About the prospects on the New York side, he was rather vague—but it looked, he said, as though bedrock was at 106 feet and there was a great deal of sand on the way down. Still there was a chance that rock might be found closer to the surface. An old well near Trinity Church showed gneiss at twenty-six feet, he noted, and in the well at City Hall the same rock was found at ninety feet. “The whole of Manhattan Island appears to rest upon a gneiss and granite formation,” he said. The greatest depth to which similar caissons had been sunk before this was eighty-five feet. But he was willing to take his to a depth of 110 feet if that was what had to be done. His consultants said they did not think he would find that necessary.

  Presently they took up the question of the timber foundations and their fate, once he left them buried forever beneath the towers, beneath the river, the rock, sand and muck of the riverbed. In his report, Roebling had explained at some length how the caissons would be packed with concrete once they were sunk to the desired position, and why, in their final resting place, well below the level where water or sea worms could reach them, they would last forever. But there were some among the consultants who wished to hear more on the subject and who had a number of questions.

  That particular session on the foundations had taken place on March 9. Two days later, on the 11th, it was announced that the renowned engineers had approved the Roebling plan, “in every important particular.” Their official report would come later, but in the meantime the public could rest assured that the plan was “entirely practicable.”

  Only Congressional authorization was needed now, since Congress had jurisdiction over all navigable waters and the bridge was to be a post road. Unlike the government in Albany, or those in either city, the government in Washington had some regulations it wished to see adhered to. Congressional legislation already drawn up stipulated that the bridge must in no way “obstruct, impair, or injuriously modify” navigation on the river. In particular, there was concern in Washington that it might interfere with traffic to and from the Navy Yard, and to be certain that every detail of the plan was fully understood, General A. A. Humphreys, Chief of the Army Engineers, decided to appoint his own review panel to give an opinion on it, irrespective of the conclusions reached by Roebling’s consultants (This was to be the only public scrutiny of the design or the location.) So at about that point it had seemed the most sensible next step would be for everyone to go take a look at some of Roebling’s existing works to see how he had previously handled somewhat analogous situations. Let his work speak for itself, he had decided.

  The tour was arranged almost overnight and if there was any initial intention to restrict it to a relatively small body of professionals that idea was speedily overruled. A total of twenty-one gentlemen and one lady made up the “Bridge Party,” as it was referred to in subsequent accounts. In addition to the two Roeblings, the seven consultants, and three Army engineers—General Horatio Wright, General John Newton, and Major W. R. King—several prominent Brooklyn businessmen wer
e invited, most of whom were or were about to become stockholders in the New York Bridge Company. A Brooklyn Congressman named Slocum—General Henry W. Slocum—was included, as were Hugh McLaughlin, the Democratic “Boss” of Brooklyn, and William C. Kingsley, Brooklyn’s leading contractor, who was known to be the driving political force behind the bridge and the largest individual stockholder. How many of the party were aware that the tall, powerful Kingsley would also be personally covering all expenses for the tour, in addition to the seven thousand dollars in consultants’ fees, is not known.

  Two young engineers, C. C. Martin and Samuel Probasco, both of whom had worked for Kingsley on different Brooklyn projects, were also to go, 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.

  Nor is there anything in the record to indicate who determined the make-up of the group. Presumably it was taken to be a representative body, having an even balance of engineering talent, business acumen, and public spirit. In any event, the editor of the Brooklyn Eagle, Thomas Kinsella, was also included, so that in Brooklyn at least the expedition would receive proper notice, and young Colonel Roebling appears to have been the one delegated to make the necessary arrangements.

  There were, however, two very important public figures who did not make the trip, both of whom had done much to bring the project along as far as it had come and who ought to be mentioned at this point in the story.

  The first was State Senator Henry Cruse Murphy, lawyer, scholar, the most respected and respectable Democrat in Brooklyn, and in Albany the leading spokesman for Brooklyn’s interests. Murphy had worked harder for the bridge than anyone in Brooklyn except Kingsley, the contractor. He was the one who had written the charter for the New York Bridge Company. He had seen it through the legislature and was currently serving as the company’s president. Why he failed to make the trip is not known and probably not important. But he would have added a certain tone to the group certainly and John A. Roebling, in particular, would doubtless have enjoyed his company. (The idea of Roebling keeping company with the likes of Boss McLaughlin must have raised many an eyebrow on Brooklyn Heights.)

  But the absence of the second missing party was quite intentional, one can be sure; it raised no questions and required no explanation, since there had been no mention as yet, scarcely even a whisper, that he had had anything whatever to do with the bridge. He was William Marcy Tweed of New York.

  The itinerary called for stops at Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, and Niagara Falls, and the announced official purpose of the expedition was to inspect four of Roebling’s bridges, each of which, in one way or other, illustrated how he intended to span the East River. But a week of traveling together was also supposed to give everybody a chance to get to know one another—nothing could so cement friendships as a long train ride, Thomas Kinsella would write—and particularly, it was presumed, everyone would get to know the key man in all this, John A. Roebling.

  The great engineer was still largely a mystery to the people who had hired him. Except for the times when he had expounded on his plan at the meeting in 1867, his Brooklyn clients had seen very little of him. Their ordinary day-to-day dealings had been with his son. It had been young Roebling, not his father, who had set up the makings of an office and who had taken a house on the Heights. He had been the one on hand to answer their questions and keep things moving.

  The father had wanted it that way. He had remained in Trenton, showing up in Brooklyn only now and then, and staying no longer than necessary. His time was always short it seemed and even when meeting with his board of consultants he had kept each session quite formal and to the point. He had no time for anything but business, and no small talk whatever.

  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, of large ears and nose and deep-sunken eyes, all of which gave the appearance of having been hewn from some substance of greater durability than mortal flesh.

  Most people, later, would talk about his eyes, his fierce pale-blue eyes. But just what sort of human being there might be behind them was a puzzle. He was a man of enormous dignity, plainly enough, full of purpose and iron determination, but accustomed to deference just as plainly, somebody to be admired from a distance. His look was all-knowing and not in the least friendly. Among those who were about to stake so very much on him and his bridge, or who already had, there was not one who could honestly say he knew the man.

  And so on the evening of April 14, 1869, when General Grant and his Julia were just taking up residence in the White House and the dogwood were beginning to bloom across the lowlands of New Jersey, the Bridge Party boarded a private palace car in Jersey City and started west. The only one missing from the group was the elder Roebling, who was to get on at Trenton.

  2

  Man of Iron

  We may affirm absolutely that nothing great in the world has been accomplished without passion.

  —G. W. F. HEGEL

  ANYONE from Trenton who happened to be standing nearby on the depot platform that lovely April evening would have known who he was, and very possibly why he was waiting there. Trenton was still a small town, for all the changes there had been, and Old Man Roebling, as the men at the mill called him, was Trenton’s first citizen. The whole town looked up to him and took pride in his accomplishments.

  It was commonly said that he had done more in one life than any ten men. The town had seen him build the wire business from nothing, raise seven children, bury two others and one wife, then marry again when he was past sixty. He had survived hard times, fires, cholera epidemics, the hazards of bridgebuilding, accidents at the mill, and his own particular notions about maintaining good health, which to some may have seemed the surest sign of all that the man was indestructible.

  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 state prison. (“This water I relish much…” he would write in his notebook.) “A wet bandage around the neck every night, for years, will prevent colds he preached to his family. “A full cold bath every day is indispensable…” Illness he regarded as a moral offense and he fought it with the same severe intensity he directed to everything else he did in life.

  The town knew all about him, or thought so. It was common knowledge, for example, that he was an inventor as well as an engineer, that he had designed every piece of machinery in the mill, that he was an artist, that he wrote prolifically for scientific periodicals, that he read Emerson and Channing and other freethinkers. At home he was writing his own “Theory of the Universe.”

  When he first came to Trenton, he had played both the piano and the flute, but then he caught his left hand in a rope machine and was left with three immovable fingers. Not long after his first wife died, he had taken up spiritualism. There had been talk ever since of after-dark gatherings, of table rappings and the like, inside the big Roebling house. The old man, on top of his other achievements, was now said to be on speaking terms with the dead.

  The bridges were what he was best known for, of co
urse, but only a few people in Trenton had actually seen any of them, except perhaps for a view in Harper’s Weekly or one of the other picture magazines. Roebling the industrialist was the man Trenton people knew.

  He was called a man of iron. Poised…confident…unyielding…imperious…severe…proud…are other words that would be used in Trenton to describe him. There had always been something distant about him; he kept apart and had no real friends in Trenton, but he had also been accepted on those terms long since and he in turn was always extremely courteous to everyone. “He was always the first to say good morning,” a man from the mill would tell a reporter after Roebling’s death. When he spoke they listened.

  Roebling was sixty-three in 1869, but even when he was years younger, he had a special hold on men, it seems, with his commanding stares and wintry scowls, like an Old Testament prophet. His success in everything he turned his hand to was generally attributed to an inflexible will and extraordinary resourcefulness. “He was never known to give in or own himself beaten,” one of his employees would recall and another would quote a saying of his they all knew by heart, “If one plan won’t do, then another must.” Charles B. Stuart, an engineer and author who knew Roebling, would later write: “One of his strongest moral traits was his power of will, not a will that was stubborn, but a certain spirit, tenacity of purpose, and confident reliance upon self instinctive faith in the resources of his art that no force of circumstance could divert him from carrying into effect a project once matured in his mind….” It was a quality he had worked hard to instill in his children as well.