The Great Bridge

by David McCullough

  The Union calls for a consulting engineer who will “endure great hardship” and practically “live in the saddle.” If the writer understood whereof he wrote, he never would have used those expressions in that connection.

  Consulting engineers seldom seat themselves in any other saddle than a cushioned office chair, or expose themselves to any greater hardships than a few hours’ quiet office chat, per day, and the labor of signing a monthly receipt for their salary.

  The hardships of a campaign usually fall on the subordinate officers, as they have in the construction of the Bridge, since the illness of Colonel Roebling commenced. If Colonel Roebling had thrown more of the details of the work on his subordinates, in its earlier stages, he would not now be taunted by the Union, with breathing the air of a sick room, nor insulted by comparison with a superannuated general of armies.

  Neither would the present Assistant Engineers, who under the immediate direction of the “invalid,” have successfully brought this great work thus far on its way toward completion, with unsurpassed skill, fidelity and endurance, be told that they were of no account, and that they must give way to a consulting engineer whose “natural fitness, training and endurance” qualify him to lead “in the saddle.”

  Will the Union kindly tell me where such a one is to be found? Can it point to any living engineer outside of the “sick room” who has had sufficient training in this specialty of suspension bridge work to guarantee to the trustees and the taxpayers that he could do the work as well as the “invalid” assisted by those who may be said to have grown up with the work, under Colonel Roebling’s own eye, who are familiar with his plans, and devoted to their success?

  …The fact is, there is no better talent in the country in this specialty than is now engaged in the construction of the New York and Brooklyn Bridge. It is ample for all its needs, present and to come. And if chronic grumblers and those who have private “axes to grind” would let the work alone, they might wake up some morning and find it completed, and be ready to take part in the opening ceremonies.

  If the letter was indeed from Roebling, then it is the one and only time his feelings ever appeared in print. But by then there were people in Brooklyn talking about more than just a consulting engineer. The move had begun to get rid of Roebling entirely. On January 18 another editorial appeared in the Union.

  THE CHIEF ENGINEER

  It has become the deepest of mysteries in the Board of Bridge Trustees, too solemn for the keenest reporter to penetrate, and far too solemn for gossip, where the chief engineer is, and what is his condition. For aught any public act or appearance of his may indicate, he may have been dead or buried for six months. He is surrounded by clouds impenetrable…. We declare the great East River Bridge in peril, because it has no head, because its wires of control run into somebody’s closely guarded sickroom, because it is certain that a sick depressed tone runs through all its engineering discussions, from this cause…. The sooner we have a live, active chief engineer in full powers on the bridge work, the better the public of two cities will be pleased with the prospect.

  When Henry Murphy read this, he must have figured, knowing Roebling’s sensitivity to such charges, that another letter of resignation would be in his hands the next day. But no such letter arrived and there would be no more talk of resignation from Roebling. He had decided he would stay with the job, and fight for it, if need be.

  Some time in 1877, when things had quieted down a bit, Washington Roebling made some extraordinary private notes in his letter book.

  The whole maneuver to take the wire contract away from the Roeblings and give it to J. Lloyd Haigh had been the work of Abram Hewitt, he said, just as he had warned Murphy. Haigh, a known scoundrel, was in fact Hewitt’s man. Hewitt, Roebling noted, held a mortgage on Haigh’s wireworks and he had made a deal with Haigh not to foreclose so long as Haigh turned over 10 per cent of what he made from the bridge contract. When his first attempt at exempting the Roeblings from the bidding had failed (because Roebling sold his stock), Hewitt had then manufactured the crucible steel issue. Roebling never said Albert Hill was working for Hewitt or for Haigh, but that would seem to be the case and what is implied by “the power behind the throne” reference in the letter signed “Tripod.” Hill did not interest Roebling much, but Hewitt did: “In laying this plan, he [Hewitt] well took the calibre of the men in the board, for when a demagogue wants to effect an object he always raises the cup of public virtue—and under cover of the smoke he raises, slips in himself. It is on such low and crafty tricks that the honor of a Hewitt rests,” wrote the engineer.

  Roebling never bothered to speculate in his notes on why Kinsella turned on him and worked so hard in Haigh’s behalf. Maybe the editor was sincerely convinced crucible steel was the superior product. He also very much favored the idea of the contract going to a Brooklyn firm, as he said. But there is a further point to consider. No paper in the East had so strongly supported Samuel Tilden for President that fall as had the Brooklyn Eagle. Kinsella’s efforts in behalf of Abram Hewitt’s candidate had been extremely helpful and much valued by Abram Hewitt. And that January of 1877, with Tilden very likely about to become President, the times were ripe with possibilities for a brilliant, politically ambitious and cooperative editor.

  19

  The Gigantic Spinning Machine

  I never saw better days for bridge work.

  —C. C. Martin

  THERE was now one continuous path from Brooklyn to New York. The temporary footbridge, finished in early February 1877, was a sort of hanging catwalk strung from city to city, draped above the river at an elevation sixty feet higher than the actual roadway would be. Farrington had been in charge of the work and it was carried out with the greatest dispatch, even during days of extremely cold weather. No sooner was the footbridge in operation than the newspapers sent reporters to make the crossing, which a few of them managed to do, with Farrington going along each time as an escort. His own men were never bothered by great heights, he was quoted as saying. “No sir, no man can be a bridgebuilder who must educate his nerves. It must be a constitutional gift. He cannot when 200 feet in the air, use his brain to keep his hand steady. He needs it all to make his delicate and difficult work secure. They must plant their feet by instinct…and be able to look sheer down hundreds of feet without a muscle trembling. It is a rare thing for a man to lose his life in our business for loss of nerve.”

  But few of Farrington’s first visitors were so constituted. One reporter described proceeding along, step by step, nearly frozen with terror, as though his feet were fixed to the slat floor by Peter Cooper’s glue, as he put it. Another wrote, “The undulating of the bridge caused by the wind, which was blowing a gale, the gradually increasing distance between the apparently frail support and the ground, the houses beneath bristling all over with chimneys, looking small enough to impale a falling man, the necessity of holding securely to the handrail, to prevent being blown off, produced sensations in the reporter’s head—and stomach—never experienced before. In vain he glanced furtively into his companion’s face to detect any signs of flinching on his part. Stolidly the master mechanic kept on, and the reporter fancied once that he caught a backward glance of enjoyment at his discomposure.”

  The customary visitor’s entrance to the footbridge was from the top of the Brooklyn anchorage. Beside the short flight of steps leading up to the footbridge, a big sign had been posted.

  SAFE ONLY 25 MEN AT ONE TIME.

  DO NOT WALK CLOSE TOGETHER. NOR RUN, JUMP, OR TROT. BREAK STEP!

  W. A. Roebling, Engr. in Chief

  From there the footbridge swept upward to the tower, at an angle of about thirty-five degrees. The width of the bridge was just four feet. There were wire rope handrails on either side, at hip level, but there was nothing to prevent a person from tripping and falling under the handrail and there were spaces between the slats, big enough to look through, put there intentionally to give the wind less hold. Actually
with its guy wires and storm cables, the bridge was amazingly solid. Though men walking on it experienced a slight rocking motion, in ordinary weather there was very little horizontal swing. Still Thomas Kinsella was telling people that old John Roebling had said the thing would probably be blown down a dozen times and to judge by the looks of it nobody found that hard to believe.

  Halfway up the walk, between the anchorage and the tower, was the first cradle, a narrow platform, a hundred feet long, with wooden handrails, that was hung on cables, like a slender scaffold, at right angles to the cables. Five such cradles had been put up, one between each anchorage and its companion tower and three over the river, at equal distances. By all reports they were a good deal more stable underfoot than the sensitive” footpath, the main purpose of which was, in fact, to provide access to the cradles, where men would be stationed to see that the wires were hung precisely right and to bind them into strands.

  Once when Farrington and a reporter from the Tribune reached the top of the Brooklyn tower, the reporter sat down to rest and to take in the view. But it was then his troubles began.

  Trinity Church steeple was fencing with Grace Church, the City Hall was bumping into the [Central] Park lake, Governor’s Island, guns and all, was playing shuttlecock and battledore with Harlem, Beecher’s Church shook its windows on the top of St. Paul’s, the top of the Tribune tower had fastened itself somewhere and was swinging the building pendulum fashion, and the reporter leaned against the solid tower in dread lest his weight would push it over. *

  On Washington’s Birthday, about nine in the morning, passengers leaving from Brooklyn on the Fulton Ferry suddenly spotted two young ladies out on the footbridge. “There was no hesitation or misgiving in the demeanor of the ladies,” according to one account. “On the contrary, they stepped out boldly…without the use of the handrail.” Everyone on the boat began waving and calling, as the girls, accompanied by a man and two boys, headed for New York. As was learned later, the girls were the daughters of C. C. Martin, who was the man seen accompanying them (the boys were his sons). They were, as the papers all noted, the first women to make the crossing, but the fact that they had been allowed to do so struck many people as utter lunacy.

  “While Revs. Drs. Storrs and Buddington and several excellent ladies are moving in the matter of providing a new insane asylum for this city,” wrote the Eagle, “a considerable number of our people are providing the necessity for such an institution and their own fitness to be life occupants of it…by crossing the footbridge…without call, without necessity, out of no business or artistic impulse, and from sheer foolhardy and peripatetic ‘cussedness.’”

  Something like a hundred people crossed the footbridge that same day. They were able to go right up onto the anchorage and out onto the footbridge. There were no gates to stop them, no guards on duty. But Martin’s daughters were the only ones to cause any kind of popular stir, “BEAUTY ON THE BRIDGE” ran one headline the next morning and the New York Illustrated Times published a panoramic engraving of the two, their silk scarves and heavy skirts whipping in the wind, stepping nimbly out from the tower, as high as the clouds, a gentleman in a derby showing them the way.

  Enough of a fuss was made over the incident that Henry Murphy decided all visitors would henceforth be required to apply for a pass. This was supposed to put a stop to the traffic, and it did, temporarily.

  For now there was too much going on in preparation for the cable spinning for there to be room for anyone on the catwalk who did not belong there. Outside the Brooklyn anchorage yard, in the vicinity of James and Front Streets, workmen were tearing down old houses to make room for an expanded storage yard for the wire. The air was filled with dust and noise. Rubble was piled in immense heaps, enough brick it seemed to build twice the number of houses being torn down. Old women in shawls and street urchins came daily to gather whatever firewood they were able to carry off.

  Inside the anchorage yard, both back and front, every foot of space was taken up with heavy timber frames, about six feet high, where the wire coils were hung out to dry after being coated with oil. The wire came from the factory galvanized but not oiled. This was done inside a low shed on the Front Street side of the yard. The coils were simply dipped into a trough of linseed oil—a two-man job.

  On top of the anchorage, inside an enormous covered shed, was a wilderness of big wooden drums mounted upright in vertical timber frames, like a convention of water wheels, as someone remarked. Each drum was about two feet in width and eight feet in diameter, but mounted as they were, clear of the floor, they stood nearly twice as high as a man and they had handles all around their outer rims, exactly like a ship’s wheel. Also, standing to the rear of the drums, on the floor, in a horizontal position, were a number of smaller reels, built along the same lines, but only half the diameter.

  Once a coil of wire had been dried out sufficiently in the yard, it would be hoisted to the top of the anchorage, where it would be wound first onto one of the small horizontal reels, then onto one of the big upright drums, the wire going on as smoothly as thread around a spool. It was from the big drums that the wire would play out over the bridge, in much the way a fishing line goes from the reel at the handle out along the rod.

  Since a coil from the factory constituted only a few hundred feet of wire, innumerable splices had to be made before the wire was wound onto the drums. It was essential, of course, that every splice be as strong and weather-tight as the wire itself. It had taken two years of experimenting and testing to develop the system settled on. A galvanized steel ferrule two inches long and about as thick as a lead pencil was double-threaded inside, at both ends, one thread to the right, the other to the left, and corresponding threads were cut on the ends of the wires to be joined so that the same turn of the ferrule would screw both ends at once. The ends of the wires were also mitered, so that once the wires had been screwed tightly they could not twist. With the help of a small viselike apparatus, the wires were held together and the ferrule was put on, great care taken to screw it straight. The sharp edges of the ferrule were then beveled, the joint was cleaned of dirt and oil and dunked into a small ladle full of melted zinc to give it an all-over galvanizing. That done, the joint was coated with red paint.

  In this way coil after coil was spliced and run onto the big drums as a single continuous wire. On each drum there were fifty-two coils, or nearly ten miles of wire. Once things really got going, it was expected that the cable-making machinery would consume some forty miles of wire a day, or about four drums a day. So for months the work crews were kept constantly busy “drumming up” wire.

  On Tuesday, May 29, things were far enough along to send a first experimental wire across the river. (Just to see that everything was in proper order, and that the wire was strung at exactly the right deflection, Farrington, for one, crossed over the footbridge a total of fourteen times in that one day.) On June 11, 1877, the spinning of the great cables was begun. The way the system worked, two cables, those on the downstream side, were built simultaneously.

  The impression among most people was that the wires were to be twisted, like the fibers in an ordinary rope or like the wires in the different steel ropes already in use on the bridge. But this, of course, was not the case.

  In the first place it would have been impossible to twist such a mass of steel over such a distance, and even had it been possible, twisted strands would have less strength than those laid up parallel, all in line, as these were, like a bundle of rods, and compacted into what would, in the end, be essentially a great curved bar of solid steel.

  The traveler rope was now working back and forth across the river day in, day out, the big horizontal wheel upon which it revolved turning overhead on the Brooklyn anchorage, first this way, then that, and all the other smaller pulleys and belts and innumerable cogs keeping up a low, steady rumble.

  The wires were taken across the river by what was known as a “carrier,” a big iron wheel that looked like an oversize
bicycle wheel with six spokes. Its axle was fastened to the working rope by an iron arm, or gooseneck, and was weighted to make it stand out perpendicular from the rope so as to clear the cradles and supports on the towers. At the Brooklyn anchorage, the end of a wire would be drawn off one of the big drums and a loop of it slipped over the carrier wheel; the end of the wire would be drawn back taut and secured around a hefty iron brace, or “shoe,” that was shaped roughly like a horseshoe magnet, about two feet long and little more than a foot across with a groove around the periphery for the wire to ride in—as a skein of yarn is held on one’s thumbs. The shoe was secured flat on the back end of the anchor bars, or at the end opposite from where the strands would be finally attached. The engineer would then start up the working rope and away would go the carrier, trundling off toward the Brooklyn tower, then over the tower and out across the water, towing the loop of wire behind, which meant that two wires were being strung at once.

  In the meantime another carrier wheel would be coming back from New York, riding on the other half of the endless working rope. So by the time the first carrier was approaching New York with its load of wire, the empty carrier would be arriving in Brooklyn to pick up another loop in exactly the way the first one had. When the outgoing carrier reached the New York anchorage, the engine would be stopped at a signal from flagmen and the loop would be slipped off and drawn taut around a shoe there. Then the engine would be reversed, the empty carrier would start its return trip, while the other one would be starting out from Brooklyn with two more wires. And so it went, always with one carrier going out as the other came back, the two of them in turn constantly towing over big loops of the same unbroken wire that kept playing off an enormous upright drum, until a whole strand was built up—hundreds of wires in unbroken continuity, with uniform tension and with exact parallelism between all of them.