Today, we meet the father and son who built the
Brooklyn Bridge. The University of Houston's
College of Engineering presents this series about
the machines that make our civilization run, and
the people whose ingenuity created them.
For me, the story of John
Roebling begins in Kentucky, not far from where I
used to live. On Sunday afternoons my wife and I
would take our kids to see Old High Bridge over the
Kentucky River. A plaque credits John Roebling with
having started this old bridge in 1853. Actually,
the bridge there today has been entirely
reconceived. Still, the glorious spider web of
steel emerging out of the quiet hilly isolation
around it powerfully evokes Roebling's sense of
design.
Roebling was born in Prussia in 1806. He studied
engineering in Berlin, where the philosopher Hegel
told him that America was "a land of hope for all
who are wearied of the historic armory of old
Europe." Roebling liked the sound of that, and he
moved here in 1831.
First he worked on canal equipment. That led him to
invent wire cable to replace the hemp used for
tow-ropes. Small suspension bridges were gaining in
popularity, and Roebling saw that his cables could
be used to transform them into something very
grand. His first contract was to bridge the
Monongahela River with an 8-span, 1500-foot-long
bridge. It was finished in 1846.
But the bridge that really established Roebling was
a suspension bridge over Niagara Falls, finished in
1855. He followed this with the Cincinnati Bridge
over the Ohio River. It was a single span, more
than a thousand feet long, that he finished in
1866. It's still in use today.
While the Cincinnati bridge was just getting under
way, Roebling embarked on his greatest feat -- a
single-span suspension bridge, 1600 feet long --
from Manhattan to Brooklyn. He was hotly opposed --
by ferryboat operators who stood to lose money and
by citizens who thought it couldn't be done.
He had backing by 1869; but then, while he was
surveying the site, his foot was crushed by a loose
piling and he soon died of tetanus. His son,
Washington, took up the work. And a terrible task
it was -- plagued by accidents, deaths, and the
paralyzing caisson disease. Caisson disease was
caused by the pressure variations in the huge
caisson piers in the East River. In 1876 it caught
up with Washington Roebling. No longer able to
walk, or even to talk, he kept on supervising the
work from the window of a house in Brooklyn
Heights. Finally, in 1883, he watched from his
window while Grover Cleveland, Chester Arthur, and
the citizens of New York opened the longest
suspension bridge in the world.
It took the vision and drive of two generations of
Roeblings to make the Brooklyn Bridge -- and it
cost them their lives. The bridge, by the way, has
a graceful fan-like cross-bracing that we all
recognize. That cross-bracing is a pure Roebling
touch. And it's what identifies the Brooklyn Bridge
as a symbol of New York City today.
I'm John Lienhard, at the University of Houston,
where we're interested in the way inventive minds
work.
(Theme music)
Vogel, R.M., Building Brooklyn Bridge: The
Design and Construction, 1873-1883.
Washington, D.C.: The National Museum of American
History, Smithsonian Institution, 1983.
Vogel, R. M., Roebling's Delaware & Hudson
Canal Aqueducts. Washington, DC: Smithsonian
Institution Press, 1971.
Vogel, R. M., Designing Brooklyn Bridge. Annals
of the New York Academy of Sciences, Vol. 421,
1983, 3-39.
I am grateful to John Cashion for providing the
following website with more information about the
Kentucky High Bridge:
http://www.uky.edu/KentuckyAtlas/ky-high-bridge.html
This episode has been greatly revised as Episode 1488.
From the Vogel reference
above
Bust of John Roebling The bust belongs to
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute)
From the Vogel reference
above
Washington Roebling
From the Vogel reference
above
Emily Roebling
From the Vogel reference
above
The Brooklyn Bridge under construction in 1881
Photo by John Lienhard
Old High Bridge in Kentucky, as it exists today
The Engines of Our Ingenuity is
Copyright © 1988-2018 by John H.
Lienhard.
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