Today, a family gives us 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.
Perhaps you've seen the
Brooklyn Bridge with its graceful proportions and
beautiful tracery of suspension cables. It's a
wonderful thing and the crowning glory of the
Roebling family.
The father, John Roebling, was born in Prussia in
1806, and he graduated from the Berlin Polytechnic
school. Then it happened that the philosopher Hegel
told him America was "a land of hope for all who
are wearied of the historic armory of old Europe."
Roebling liked the sound of that. He moved here in
1831.
First he worked on canal equipment. Soon he'd
invented wire cable to replace the hemp towropes.
By now, the first small suspension bridges were
just appearing, and it struck Roebling that, held
up by wrought iron cable instead of rope,
suspension bridges could be made very large. He won
a contract to bridge the Monongahela River with an
8-span, 1500-foot bridge. He finished it in 1846.
But the bridge that first made Roebling's name was
the one over Niagara Falls. He followed it with the
Cincinnati Bridge -- a single span, over a thousand
feet long. He finished it in 1866, and it's still
in use today.
By then Roebling was just convincing backers he
could build a great 1600-foot, single-span
suspension bridge from Manhattan to Brooklyn.
The Brooklyn Bridge
was hotly opposed by ferryboat operators who stood
to lose money and by citizens who didn't believe it
could be done. Roebling was not shy. He said,
[It] will not only be the greatest bridge in
existence,
but it will be the greatest engineering work of the
... age.
Then, while he was surveying the site, his foot got
crushed under a loose piling. He died of tetanus,
and his son, Washington Roebling, took up the work.
It was a terrible task -- plagued by accidents,
deaths, and the paralyzing caisson disease, also called
the bends. Nitrogen bubbles came out of the
workers' blood when they were depressurized after
laboring in caissons under the East River. The
bends almost killed Washington Roebling.
No longer able to walk, or even to talk, he
supervised the work from the window of a house in
Brooklyn Heights. It was actually his wife, Emily
Roebling, who did the on-site supervision. Finally,
in 1883, Washington Roebling watched from his
window while President Chester Arthur,
President-to-be Grover Cleveland, and the citizens
of New York opened the longest suspension bridge in
the world.
So the creative impulse of three
Roeblings made the Brooklyn Bridge, and it cost
them dearly. The graceful, familiar, fan-like
cross-bracing is a pure John Roebling touch. That
sweeping use of cable makes the bridge into a
powerful icon. And it is what moved Hart Crane to
write to the bridge,
O Sleepless as the river under thee, ... sweep,
descend
And of the curveship lend a myth to God.
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 greatful to listener Chris Elhardt for
providing this url which describes a Roebling
suspension bridge here in Texas:
http://www.wacocvb.com/waco-suspension-bridge.html
This is a revised version of Episode 87.
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
The Engines of Our Ingenuity is
Copyright © 1988-1999 by John H.
Lienhard.
