John Augustus Roebling

Roebling Family
The Brooklyn Bridge was perhaps the greatest work since the aqueducts of the Roman Empire. In every category, it defied comparison and over-awed the spectator. It was far the longest suspension bridge in the World, as well as the tallest. In order for its center span to rise 119 feet above the river at high tide - 10 feet above the tallest masts of the day - the supporting towers would have to reach 273 feet in the air.

Few people at the time believed it was possible, but they did believe in the abilities of one man - America's premier bridge engineer: John Augustus Roebling. Roebling had begun building suspension bridges in the 1840's, after patenting twisted wire cables used to suspend them. In 1846, he built a suspension bridge over the Monongahela River at Pittsburgh. In 1848, he built a series of suspended aqueducts for the Delaware Canal. Then in 1855, he completed the Niagara Railway Suspension Bridge, which to this day, is a marvel of engineering and beauty.

 

Washington Roebling

After the winter of 1867, during which the East River froze over and prevented transit across it, the cities of New York and Brooklyn decided that they needed a bridge. Roebling, now a resident of Brooklyn, was the unanimous choice. He designed the Bridge down to the last cable and girder, specified the weight and dimensions of the towers and span, the means of digging the foundation via caissons, etc.. But he did not live to oversee it himself. In 1869, just as his life's work was about to begin, Roebling misplaced his foot while stepping off the Fulton Ferry. His foot was crushed against the dock, and he would die of Tetanus just seven days later.

His son Washington Roebling, an engineering officer in the Union army during the Civil War, took over in his place. Yet tragedy struck again when in 1872, Washington Roebling emerged from one of the caissons stricken with 'The Bends,' then called caisson disease. He would remain paralyzed from the waist down, and became reliant on his wife Emily to relay his orders to the foremen while he observed the bridge's progress from his townhouse on Brooklyn Heights. To fill his shoes, she would study civil engineering, and many suspected, even at the time, that many of the orders came from her. The Brooklyn Bridge was truly a family production.

The Bridge Opens
24 May 1883: 14 years, 20 fatalities and 15 million dollars - 9 million over budget the Great Bridge was finally finished. It soared above the city like a giant in a cornfield. Only the spire of Trinity Church, rising to 284 feet, could match its height; no other building in New York or Brooklyn was even half that height.

Currier & Ives 1885

Even before it opened, the Brooklyn Bridge had become a symbol of not only of the greatness of New York, but of the Nation as a whole. Nowhere else in the World could there be found a similar feat of engineering. An editor from Scientific American wrote at the time:

"The bridge is a marvel of beauty viewed from the level of the river. In looking at its vast stretch, not only over the river between the towers, but also over the inhabited, busy city shore, it appears to have a character of its own far above the drudgeries of the lower business levels."

 

Cut-away Diagram of a Caisson rising out of the East River

The towers were completed some five years before the span, and after so much time just admiring these colossi sitting in the River, people had eagerly awaited the bridge's completion. The day it opened, 150,000 pedestrians would pay the one-cent toll to walk across it. But no one knew what to expect - a sixteen hundred foot span suspended by wires more than 100 feet above the river.

A few weeks after its opening, crowds were walking across the bridge when someone screamed that the bridge was collapsing. Panic ensued, and fifteen people were trampled to death. A few weeks later, in order to show the strength of the bridge, P. T. Barnum marched a string of elephants back and forth across the Brooklyn Bridge to convince the public that it was safe.