The Great Bridge Page 7

  Thomas Kinsella, the editor of the Eagle, would report in an article written afterward that the floor trembled very little as trolleys to and from Allegheny went clattering by and everyone in the party thought Roebling’s ornamental ironwork a feast for the eye. The remainder of the day was spent touring the ironworks of the young Carnegie brothers, where the manufacture and virtues of Bessemer steel were explained. Whether or not the wire in the new bridge would be of steel had still to be decided.

  The itinerary called for a stay of several days in Pittsburgh, but so unpleasant was the air, in the opinion of several in the group, and so unsatisfactory the accommodations at the Monongahela House, that a decision was made to leave the next day. “If you ever visit Pittsburgh,” wrote Thomas Kinsella for his Brooklyn readers, “and desire to stop at the best hotel…don’t.”

  On the morning of April 16 they were again settled in their private car, “leaving Pittsburgh like a great sooty blotch behind.” The sun out, they “swept across into Ohio” at the grand speed of fifty-four miles per hour, an experience everyone would have enjoyed had not the parlor car started rocking so that it greatly interfered with a poker game. At Cincinnati some time after dark they checked into the Burnet House, where they enjoyed a “very fair supper,” after which, over cigars, the next morning’s schedule was discussed. “Slocum, never lacking pluck, had the courage,” Kinsella wrote, “to suggest that nine o’clock was, under the circumstances, a barbarous hour. He quickly won the majority over to his way of thinking, and the Untiring Old Man, Roebling, yielded an hour’s grace, and it was tacitly accepted that no one would be greatly disappointed if the party should not leave the hotel before ten o’clock. As we retired the blessed spring rain was falling against the windowpanes, and after the day’s fatigue sleep came as gentle as the dew.” (All this still being written for home consumption, in the pages of the Brooklyn Eagle.)

  The following morning one of the party, a man named Cary, reported sick. He had made the mistake, he said, of drinking some of the local water, a glass of which was described as eating and drinking combined. But the rest were in excellent spirits and the day was spectacular. It was Saturday and the streets were already crowded with people enjoying the sunshine as Roebling led his group out of the hotel.

  The first view of the bridge proved to be a far more stirring experience than anyone from Brooklyn had been prepared for. It was built on a line running due south, reaching over the Ohio to Covington, Kentucky. But because of the way the streets were laid out along the river front, there was no way to see the bridge until nearly upon it. “It then broke upon us all at once,” Kinsella wrote, “the stateliest and most splendid evidence of genius, enterprise and skill it has ever been my lot to see.”

  Eleven thousand people a day were crossing it, he and the others were told, as they stood gazing at the long, graceful arc of its river span (“…it was indeed a work to excite amazement and wonder.”). For the next hour or more they walked back and forth from one end to the other (“…it seemed as solid and as stable beneath our feet as the earth on either side of the river.”).

  This, they realized, was the nearest thing in existence to what Roebling planned to build over the East River. And if any of them was having trouble picturing the new bridge, he had now only to imagine something very like this one—only much bigger. * Here were the twin towers of stone standing foursquare and solid, a slender line of roadway stretched between them, slung on great cables and arcing the river with a single span. Here, as on the Pittsburgh bridges, were the inclined stays, slanting down from the towers like iron rays, angling across the suspenders that connected the cables to the roadway. The stays were the mark of a Roebling bridge, the traveling delegation had come to realize. But here the scale of the bridge was such that the combination of stays and suspenders looked like a gigantic web, or net, and the same effect at Brooklyn, it was understood, would be even greater.

  Every diagonal stay, Roebling explained, formed the hypotenuse of a right triangle (the bridge floor and the tower forming the shorter sides) and thus provided tremendous stability, since, as he said, “The triangle is the only unchangeable figure known in geometry…” Altogether, cables, suspenders, stays, and bridge floor formed a kind of truss. The great horizontal stability of the bridge was due in large measure, he said, to such “bracing” of the cables. This was a proposition “readily comprehended by sailors, who are accustomed to stays on board ships.”

  The “Biggest Bridge in the World” had been opened to the public on December 1, 1866, to the tune of a thundering cannonade. By sundown 46,000 people had crossed it, with no ill effects to the bridge or to any of them. But the following day, an uncommonly mild winter Sunday, 120,000 people had turned out to personally examine the wondrous work. Then, on New Year’s Day, 1867, the official opening, a big parade had marched over from the Covington side, led by Roebling and Amos Shinkle, the Cincinnati coal dealer who had been the principal organizer of the project, and who that sparkling spring morning in 1869 had come down to the bridge to greet Roebling and his new clients, some of whom had matters other than engineering on their minds. “Does the bridge pay, sir?” he was asked. “Yes, sir,” answered Shinkle, “handsomely.”

  Roebling had first come to Cincinnati with plans for a bridge more than twenty years before, in 1846, and had felt very much at home in the brick city on the river, with its German theaters, its beer gardens and German newspapers. The Ohio was still the great dividing line between North and South then, between plantation slavery on the Kentucky side and in Cincinnati some of the strongest abolitionist sentiment in the country. (It was in Cincinnati then that stories told by slaves who had escaped over the river were making a deep impression on Harriet Beecher Stowe, the young wife of a local professor.) So there were reasons other than the mighty Ohio or the strenuous opposition of the steamboat interests for not building a bridge and it was nearly a decade later, and only when Amos Shinkle came on the scene, that anything began to happen.

  But after Roebling had the work under way, he was hit by one of the worst winters on record in Ohio, the winter of 1856-57. In spring, when the ice broke up, the river flooded his foundations so badly that little could be accomplished for another six months. Roebling kept coming from Trenton to look things over, then headed home again. But it was a time of great productivity for him.

  The year before, he had done a sketch for a bridge to Brooklyn, a multispan bridge to cross by way of Blackwell’s Island, where the prison and poor asylum stood. In March of 1857 he wrote to Horace Greeley to propose “a wire suspension bridge crossing the East River by one single span at such an elevation as will not impede the navigation.” His Cincinnati Bridge, scarcely even under way, was only a preliminary work, as he saw it. This East River bridge would be “without rival,” its towers three hundred feet high. The letter appeared in the New York Tribune on March 27, 1857, and was Roebling’s first public declaration of his plan.

  That same March, in his Trenton study, he produced drawings for three different kinds of towers for the East River bridge—one an elaborate Egyptian doorway with a spread-eagle gargoyle for a corbel; another a notably plain Roman arch; the third, again a Roman arch but drawn with a bolder, heavier pediment and then a Gothic arch, a second thought apparently, sketched in tentatively in pencil, very lightly, like a ghost of things to come. None of these suited him, but still enormously excited about the idea, he wrote to Abram Hewitt, head of Peter Cooper’s Trenton Iron Works. It was Peter Cooper who had first urged Roebling to locate in Trenton and helped him pick a site for his wire mill, probably figuring the engineer to be a fine prospective customer. In the time since, Hewitt had become Cooper’s son-in-law as well as his business partner. An energetic, self-assured young man, he was said to have a great future. Hewitt had Roebling’s letter printed in the Journal of Commerce, but did no more than that, which must have been disappointing to Roebling. Indeed Hewitt’s response would be barely worth mentioning were it not for the part h
e was subsequently to play.

  The terrible Panic of 1857 burst upon the country that summer and Roebling had all he could do managing things in Trenton and at Cincinnati, where work on the bridge was shut down altogether, not to begin again until the early part of the Civil War, when a Confederate force under Kirby Smith, advancing into the Blue Grass Country to the south, threw all Cincinnati into a state of panic. Soldiers and citizens alike rushed to fortify the hills on the Covington side, discovering in the process how very advantageous a bridge would be, had there only been one. And beside the pontoon affair that was hastily assembled stood Roebling’s half-finished towers to remind everyone what might have been.

  There never was a siege of Cincinnati, but once the threat of one had passed, the fortunes of Roebling’s troubled Cincinnati Bridge took an immediate turn for the better. Subscriptions to new stock poured into Amos Shinkle’s office, the work commenced once more and with no opposition. For Roebling the bridge was a symbol of confidence rising above the “general national gloom.” It proved, he said, that there were still men about “with unshaken moral courage and implicit trust in the future political integrity of the nation.” When his Irish laborers, who shared no such feelings for the bridge or for the Union cause, walked off the job demanding higher pay, Roebling fired every man and hired only Germans as replacements. “The Germans about here are mostly loyal, the Irish alone are disloyal,” he wrote. “No Democrat can be trusted, they are all disloyal and treacherous, more or less.”

  Two years later, the war nearly over, Washington Roebling was released from the Army and went almost directly to Cincinnati, where, by then, there was no longer any question about the relative importance of his father’s bridge. “The size and magnitude of this work far surpass any expectations I had formed of it,” the young man wrote to the rest of the family back in Trenton. “It is the highest thing in this country; the towers are so high a person’s neck aches looking up at them. It will take me a week to get used to the dimensions of everything around here.” From that point on, though his official title was Assistant Engineer, he had been in complete charge of the work. All the cable spinning, the most exciting, difficult part of the work, was done under his direction, his father having concluded that he would henceforth “leave bridgebuilding to younger folks.”

  The Cincinnati Bridge wound up taking a total of ten years to build and it cost just about twice what John Roebling had said it would. But no one had any complaints. It was unquestionably the finest as well as the largest bridge of its kind built until that time. Both structurally and architecturally it was a triumph.

  Talking in retrospect, Amos Shinkle had nothing but praise for the manner in which it had been built. From an engineering standpoint everything had gone very smoothly. Only two lives had been lost during the entire time of its construction, a remarkable safety record, as the gentlemen from the East agreed. For the Roeblings, he had only the highest admiration, and especially for the redoubtable father, about whom, apparently, a few of the Brooklyn men had expressed some uneasiness. Getting along with him should prove no problem, Shinkle assured them. His advice was simple: “He is an extraordinary man and if you people in Brooklyn are wise you will interfere with his views just as little as possible. Give the old man his way and trust him.”

  At eight that evening the Bridge Party departed for Niagara Falls, by way of Cleveland, where they stopped for the night and where several of them decided things could be livened up a bit if the word was spread that they were a group of wealthy lunatics being conducted on an outing. The joke worked quite well, it seems, causing a considerable stir in the hotel dining room. But when Thomas Kinsella’s account of such goings on appeared in the paper back in Brooklyn, it served mainly to substantiate what a number of people there had been saying right along, that the bridge was the scheme of madmen.

  Spring was late arriving at Niagara Falls. The snowbanks had nearly all disappeared but the weather was sharp still and gigantic slabs of ice could be seen plunging down the river as Roebling led his group out to inspect what was generally conceded to be his masterpiece, a two-level suspension bridge over the great gorge.

  This tour could have been arranged in the reverse order just as easily, with Niagara the first stop instead of the last, which would have made better sense in some ways, in that the Niagara Bridge was an earlier work than either the Cincinnati or Allegheny River bridges. But Roebling had saved Niagara for the last for good reasons.

  At Pittsburgh he had been able to show as solid, dependable, and handsome a piece of workmanship as he had ever built. The Allegheny River Bridge was a bridge everyone liked. It had caused nobody any headaches when it was being put up or in the time since. At Cincinnati, the unprecedented length of the single river span was the most important thing on display, from the technical point of view. But the bridge had also a grandeur of a kind rarely seen and his new clients had come away from it with a keener appreciation of monumental scale as well as engineering genius.

  But the Niagara Bridge, or International Suspension Bridge, or just Suspension Bridge as it was called locally, was neither terribly solid-appearing nor especially large. Indeed, every bridge they had inspected so far was longer. Also, unlike any of the others, it had been built with two levels—carriages and pedestrians traveled the lower level, while the Great Western Canada Railroad crossed on the one above—and the whole thing trembled quite noticeably when traffic was heavy. For some people the experience of crossing by carriage was positively terrifying. “You drive over to Suspension Bridge,” wrote Mark Twain, “and divide your misery between the chances of smashing down two hundred feet into the river below, and the chances of having a railway-train overhead smashing down onto you. Either possibility is discomforting taken by itself, but, mixed together, they amount in the aggregate to positive unhappiness.”

  Its single span was 825 feet, which was nothing exceptional any longer. Its four stone towers stood only about half as high as those at Cincinnati. It had not been the first suspension bridge over the gorge and it did not stand alone, unrivaled, the way the Cincinnati Bridge did.

  The first bridge had been built downstream at Lewiston, New York, in 1851, by Edward Serrell, brother of the Serrell traveling with the Bridge Party. It had been a very light suspension bridge and was badly shaken by a storm in 1855, after which, at Roebling’s suggestion, it had been refitted with guy wires. But later when these wires were loosened by an ice jam, somebody neglected to tighten them. A spring storm tore the bridge floor to pieces and left the cables and suspenders dangling uselessly in mid-air. And there they were still, about as dramatic an example of what could happen to a poorly engineered suspension bridge as could be seen, short of an actual collapse.

  The other bridge over the gorge was very much in view from where they stood, about two miles upstream, near the falls. It was a brand-new suspension span designed by a Canadian, Samuel Keefer. It had been opened just that January and was already an extremely popular attraction, being near the best hotels. But since it was only ten feet wide, or too narrow for carriages to pass one another, traffic had to cross it in turns, first one way, then the other, and long waiting lines built up. In years to come it would be remodeled extensively and become famous as the Honeymoon Bridge. But at this stage it was being publicized only as a greater span than the one at Cincinnati, which indeed it was in terms of length. It was more than two hundred feet longer, which meant it now held the world’s record.

  It would appear then that the gentlemen from Brooklyn might have been somewhat disappointed with this, the final Roebling bridge on the tour. But not so. Like nearly everyone who ever stood there at the brink of the gorge, with the bridge before them, they looked upon it with nothing less than awe.

  The site alone was enough to take a person’s breath away. Upstream were the falls, while directly beneath the bridge, deep in the abyss, was the first of a series of savage rapids that swept on downstream for a mile or better, ending in a tremendous whirlpool he
ld in a looming rock basin. Past there the current veered to the right and disappeared through a narrow channel overhung by sharp cliffs and trees. It was an absolute no man’s land below, but here above it had been conquered, bridged, beautifully.

  Once, not many years before, an excursion boat, the Maid of the Mist, had gone shooting by below to the utter astonishment of those who happened to be on the bridge at the time. The boat had been built upstream, between the rapids and the falls, to take sight-seers for a rather terrifying close-up view of the falls. But the boat had never been a financial success. The owner, a Captain Joel Robinson, got into debt and when he heard that the sheriff was on his way to confiscate the boat, he decided his only chance was to escape down the rapids, something nobody had ever done before and lived to tell the story. Two men volunteered to go with him. The people on the bridge saw the boat make one long leap down the rapids. Her funnel was knocked flat by the blow, the whole boat was underwater from stem to stern. Then she was up again and skimming into the whirlpool, where “she rode with comparative ease upon the water, and took the sharp turn around into the river below without a struggle.” Captain Robinson’s wife later said her husband looked approximately twenty years older when he came in the door that evening.