The Great Bridge Read online

  Davis had become a clairvoyant, healer, and overnight sensation in 1844, at age seventeen, when he took his first “psychic flight through space” while under hypnosis in Poughkeepsie, New York. For the next several years he traveled up and down the East delivering hundreds of lectures, taking his own attendant hypnotist along with him—to “magnetize” him for each performance—as well as a New Haven preacher who took down everything he uttered while under the spell, all of which was turned into books. (One such book ran to thirty-four editions.) His preachments were a strange mixture of occult mystery, science, or what passed for science, progressive social reform, intellectual skepticism, and a vaulting imagination. For Roebling the impact of all this was momentous. It was as though he had been struck by divine revelation. He wrote at length to Horace Greeley, proposing the establishment of an orphanage in which a thousand children would be “perfectly educated, physically and mentally” according to the Davis vision of the good life. An “earthly paradise” was still possible after all.

  The hereafter as pictured by Davis was a complicated hierarchy of life spheres, successive states of consciousness, all worked out geometrically, that existed above, and concentric with, the earth’s surface. Apparently, in terms of what Roebling knew of physics and astronomy, this made more sense than anything else he had heard of, and besides, there was the rich mystical language of Davis, which for Roebling seems to have reached farther even than reason could take him.

  For the benefit of his family Roebling would expound on such things endlessly at the dinner table, using Davis or some philosophical discourse he had read as his text, his voice gaining strength as he went on and on, with no concern whatever that his small, respectful audience understood almost nothing he was saying, but just sat there, blinking like young owls in the sunshine, as Washington Roebling would say. Washington was old enough to remember when that “life force” his father liked to talk of had surged through the man with such vitality and there were scenes that would live on with the young man as long as he would: father at his drawing table at Saxonburg, before he needed spectacles to read, working long into the night, his books and things all about him; father in Pittsburgh before the war livid over some latest piece of political news and vowing to go straight home and fire every Democrat in the mill; father up and out of the house before breakfast, an old fur cap on his head, walking the fields with a stick and a dog, getting up an appetite as he said; father with strap in hand about to lay on terrible retribution for some childish misdeed, a burning, unforgettable fury in his eyes.

  But in the years since Johanna’s death he had seemed ever more engrossed in the spirit world and talk of sickness and death. His back bothered him. He suffered from indigestion. For those of his children still living at home it had been a disturbing, unpleasant time, and particularly for Edmund, the youngest, who had been his mother’s favorite. When she was gone, his father, as always, had been too busy to give him any time. When his father married again, in 1867, the boy had been packed off to a boarding school, where, Washington would write, “he was subjected to evil influences of so galling and insidious a nature that he ran away—was caught, brought back, and nearly beaten to death by a brutal father, and sent back.” The boy escaped a second time and vanished. For nearly a year the family agonized over his whereabouts. But then he was found, quite by accident, by a Trenton man who happened to be inspecting a prison in Philadelphia. “He had had himself entered as a common vagrant,” Washington would explain, “to get away from his father, and was enjoying life for the first time.”

  The whole affair was kept very quiet. None of the family would ever speak of it. There was nothing said in the papers. Except for a private memorandum written by Washington years later, there would be no record of the incident. But in his philosophical notes, under the heading “Man. Conscience,” John A. Roebling wrote the following at about the time Edmund was back home again.

  A man may be content with the success of an enterprise; he may have succeeded in overcoming obstacles; in vanquishing his adversaries and enemies; in achieving a great task; solving a great mental problem, or accomplishing work, which was previously pronounced impossible and impracticable. The hero is admired and proclaimed a public benefaction; observed of all observers, he feels himself elated, and in his own estimation a great man. Retiring for one calm moment within the recesses of his own inner self, he reviews his past deeds, his thoughts and motives of action. And before the stern judgment of his own conscience, he stands condemned, an untruth, a lie to himself. But nobody knows! Does he himself now know? Who can hide me from myself?…

  Had their mother lived, Washington believed, none of this would have happened. And then one night she returned.

  “The latest sensation we have had here are spiritual communications from Mother,” Ferdinand Roebling, John Roebling’s second son, wrote on November 12, 1867, to his brother Washington, then in Europe. A cousin, Edward Riedel, was the medium. He and Roebling’s draftsman, young Wilhelm Hildenbrand, had been sitting in their room on a Saturday night when they heard three knocks under Riedel’s chair. “He did not know what to make of it,” Ferdinand said, “so they examined the room and the next room and porch and all around, the knocks still followed Ed, always under him, they then asked some questions.” Was it a bad spirit? No answer. Was it a good spirit? Three knocks. After repeating these same two questions several times, they asked if perhaps they ought to give up and go to bed, and the response was three sharp knocks.

  Roebling was told the next morning. That night they formed up in a circle in his office but got no response until Riedel, having lost hope apparently, went to his room and pulled off his boots. Suddenly he heard the knocks, coming from the kitchen. Roebling was called and they all quickly gathered there. “They then used the Alphabet and found out whose spirit it was. No answer could be given to anyone but Ed.” Everyone was extremely excited, it seems, and Roebling especially, one would imagine. He suggested a few questions, but “none of any account,” according to Ferdinand, and about the only important piece of information communicated by the spirit was that she would return two weeks hence—which she did, and this time Roebling was ready with a long list of questions carefully thought out in advance. If this was to be his first real chance to converse with “the other side,” he would come to it as he had tried to come to every turning point in life, thoroughly prepared.

  Having determined at the start of the séance that the spirit was indeed that of his wife, Roebling asked for Willie and Mary, their two dead children, for his own mother and father, and for Frederick Overman, a renowned German metallurgist from Philadelphia who appears to have been the one real friend he had ever had time for since leaving Saxonburg. Overman, dead for fifteen years by this time, once told Roebling that life was a result of movement and death only a change of movement and it had made a lasting impression on the bridgebuilder.

  Then Roebling started down his prepared list.

  “Do you remember, my dearest, the conversations I have had with you about the Spirit Land and Spheres? You remember the opinions and view taught by Andrew Davis on the subject?” Having been convinced he could talk again to his beloved wife after three years, his whole line of questioning was designed strictly to verify his own set of beliefs. Was Davis correct on the whole, he wanted to know. Yes. In detail? Yes. And so it went, through the rest of that session and in the eleven others that were to follow. On the night of January 25, 1868, for instance, the conversation had run this way:

  “After your spiritual birth, did you feel like a new being, young, energetic and full of life?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you find that all disease had left you, and that your new spiritual body was free from pains, rejoicing in youth and vigor?”

  No answer.

  “Do you attend public lectures?”

  “Yes.”

  “Who is your favorite lecturer? Will you spell out his name?”

  “C-H-A-N-N-I-N-G.”
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br />   “Are you taught religion?”

  “No.”

  “Have you got a Bible there?”

  “No.”

  “You are taught without books?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is it taught by your teachers that inspired truth and the truth of nature cannot be at variance?”

  “Yes.”

  “The Christian Bible, the Jewish Scriptures, the Turkish Koran, and all the other books, which lay claim to divine origin and divine inspiration, are all human compositions, therefore liable to error. Is this view correct?”

  “Yes.”

  “Every man has a spark of divine principle within himself, which alone can save him and elevate him, is this so?”

  “Yes.”

  He was getting all the answers he wanted. On the night of March 22, he had a total of sixty-one questions prepared for her. Their discourse should always be “serious,” he said at the start; he should not waste time on trivial talk. Yes, she answered. It was truth he should be in search of, he said. Yes, she answered again.

  Soon she was bringing a number of other spirits along with her, at his request. On the night of June 14, Willie and Mary, Grandmother Herting, Overman, Roebling’s brother Karl, another brother, and three others besides Mrs. Roebling were present, making ten in all. Still Roebling took no time for personal exchanges with any of them, the line of questioning continued exactly as before. But the atmosphere in the dark room remained highly charged. At one point young Edmund exclaimed that he could see Grandmother Herting’s face and that she was reaching out to touch him. Whether or not the new flesh-and-blood Mrs. Roebling was invited to sit in on any of these sessions is not known.

  Had it not been for the bridge, such gatherings with the dead might have gotten to everyone in the household. But by this time the bridge had become the overriding passion of Roebling’s life. It was the summer of 1867, the summer before the séances began, that he had drawn up his plans. In just three months, working at a fever pitch, he had produced the drawings, location plans, preliminary surveys, taken soundings, worked out his cost estimates, and written his proposal, nearly fourteen thousand words in all. Some would say later that it had been as though he knew how little time he had left, which seems unlikely, even though the subject of death, his own included, remained very much on his mind, as his oldest son would disclose.

  Washington had been the one member of the family ever to go off and work with John Roebling at bridgebuilding. He knew the different man his father became then, out in the open air, a hundred men or more at his command, his bridge the talk of everyone who came to watch. More than anyone he could appreciate how long a shadow the old man cast. Moreover, he appears to have been the one person Roebling confided in, telling him things he had not said to anyone. He had unlimited confidence and pride in the young man and had agreed to begin the new bridge only with the understanding that the two of them would be working together.

  And it would be Washington, later, in things he said and wrote, who would describe another change that had come over his father, something more than his remoteness or the ill temper of advancing age or his forays into the spirit world. It was a deep melancholic disillusionment growing out of what John Roebling thought he saw happening to the country since the war. The great dynamic of America, he had always said, was that every man had the opportunity to better himself, to fulfill himself. Now the great dynamic seemed more like common greed. It was not so much contempt for Germany that had brought him to America, he had told his children, but that in this new country a man was free to make the most of his abilities. If he had “personal energy and power of will,” there were few limits to what a man might attain. Moreover, like numerous others of his day he had long equated works of monumental engineering—and his own work especially—with national grandeur. “The idea of an epoch always finds its appropriate and adequate form,” his teacher Hegel had written. The steamboats, canals, highways, railroads, and bridges he himself had seen on first arriving in America were, he had written, the direct result of the “concerted action of an enlightened, self-governing people.”

  But now he had his doubts. Now he had seen men making the most of abilities he had no stomach for and self-government made a mockery. And lately he had seen his own work contribute to that kind of degradation. It had troubled him so deeply that he had talked seriously with his son of washing his hands of the entire affair in Brooklyn.

  But now, dressed in a light topcoat and a soft felt hat, he stood waiting to join the Bridge Party. Whether any of his other sons, his wife, or perhaps the faithful Charles Swan had come to the depot with him, to keep him company or to listen to any last-minute instructions, is not known. Washington, however, had left Brooklyn with the others and would be at the door of the parlor car to greet him when the train stopped.

  3

  The Genuine Language of America

  He spoke our language imperfectly, because he had not the advantage of being born on our soil, but he spoke the genuine language of America at Cincinnati, Pittsburgh, and Niagara…

  —THOMAS KINSELLA, in

  The Brooklyn Eagle

  CHAMPAGNE and sandwiches were served soon after Roebling came aboard. How late the little celebration lasted after that nobody said later. But at five the next morning, when he roused them all, there was no little grumbling. He was anxious, Roebling said, that nobody miss the sunrise over the Alleghenies.

  By breakfast they were passing through Johnstown and he had everyone peering out at the steep, thickly wooded sides of Conemaugh Gap, a deep cleft in Laurel Hill that he and his railroad surveying party had first seen from a distant hill thirty years before. “There was our course!” he had written enthusiastically at the time.

  The next town of any size was Greensburg, where the very first suspension bridge there is a record of was built over Jacobs Creek by a Scotch-Irish preacher, a Presbyterian named James Finley, in the year 1801, or before John Roebling was born. Finley had been a versatile and ingenious man. His “chain bridge” had a seventy-foot span, cost about six hundred dollars, and in the next ten years he built some forty more of them, including one over the Potomac above Washington. Perhaps Roebling told his traveling companions something about this, thereby getting a head start on their instructions in the history and theory of suspension bridges.

  When the train pulled into Pittsburgh less than an hour later, he took them directly to their quarters at the Monongahela House, which stood at the end of his Smithfield Street Bridge. From the front door of the hotel, or possibly from their rooms, if they were on the river side, they had a perfect view of the pioneering work, now nearly twenty-five years old, that had started Roebling on his way. It had been built at a time when every floor beam had to be cut with a hand-pulled whipsaw, when screws were still turned on a lathe by hand, and steel, practically speaking, even in Pittsburgh, was regarded as a semiprecious metal. One of the Pittsburgh papers in 1846, the year the bridge was finished, had claimed “this admirable species” was “destined to supersede all others.” For Roebling, from then on, it had been the only type he would care anything about building, and in its rather antique fashion, the bridge still illustrated several fundamental points about his own particular manner of building—all of which he no doubt explained as he and his entourage went out for a first look.

  Here again, as at the aqueduct, he had fixed his cables to a chain of iron eyebars buried in masonry anchorages. Here, for the first time, he had used his system of inclined stays to add strength and rigidity. Only here, he explained, he had used iron rods rather than the iron rope used on all his later bridges. The bridge was fifteen hundred feet long (or not quite as long as the river span alone of the bridge he had drawn up for Brooklyn). It had eight spans of about 188 feet each and short cast-iron towers. The wind had no effect on it, he said, and the vibrations produced by seven-ton coal wagons and their teams were no greater than on a wooden truss bridge with spans the same length. The total cost had been $55,00
0—“a very small sum indeed for such an extensive work,” according to the engineer.

  But the real Roebling showpiece in Pittsburgh was across town at Sixth Street and there they all went first thing that afternoon. He had built the Smithfield Street Bridge largely to prove his engineering skill and the soundness of the suspension technique. He had been concerned with building an efficient structure at the least possible cost. But his Allegheny River Bridge, begun eleven years later, had been built with an ample budget. It had been his first real opportunity to display his gift for architectural design and he had had a splendid time with it. Among people who knew bridges, it was considered one of the handsomest in the country.

  It stood downstream from where his aqueduct had been and connected Pittsburgh with the small neighboring city of Allegheny. Its total length (1,030 feet) was less than the bridge over the Monongahela. It had four spans and was supported by four cables hung from six highly ornamental iron towers, each with iron latticework for bracing and iron spires for decoration on top. “The bridge will be beautiful,” he had written when the towers were nearly finished. In truth it looked a little as though it had been designed to satisfy the aesthetic tastes of a Turkish sultan. This was also the first bridge he and his son had built together. “I am getting along well here,” he had written home to Trenton in the spring of 1858. “Washington is about the work.” As a matter of fact it was Washington who supervised most of the job thereafter and for whom numerous Pittsburghers had the most affectionate memories.

  Once finished the Allegheny River Bridge was so sound that the owners—a private company—had not even bothered to take out insurance on it, and as a toll road, it had made money from the start—both points that must have been noted with interest by the delegation from the East. For about an hour they examined the bridge. There is no record of what was discussed during this time, but probably the cables were the main topic. These had been laid up, or “spun,” in place, unlike those on the bridge just visited, where the cables were smaller and the spans between towers were much shorter. There the iron wires had been spun on land first, to form individual cable sections that were then hoisted into position. But here, one can picture him explaining, the cables had been spun on the bridge itself by a traveling wheel that went back and forth, stringing the wire over the towers, from shore to shore, making fourteen hundred trips in all, and this was the way that he meant to build his cables over the East River.