The Great Bridge

by David McCullough

  Henry Murphy was quoted as saying that Roebling had nearly died when the earlier contract was awarded to Haigh and that he, Murphy, had no wish to see that happen again. “All of which is bosh,” responded the Brooklyn Union and Argus. “We have as much sympathy for Mr. Roebling as other people…But, we submit, that this work is entirely superior to any man or all of the men concerned in its construction, and it cannot, nor any part of it, be subordinated to the whims, fancies, or caprices of a sick man.”

  The paper refused to let the matter drop, writing scornfully of Roebling’s power and of the stupidity of the “stupendous enterprise being wholly committed to a single brain, which is extremely liable at any moment to be stilled forever.”

  The sick man, meanwhile, had had a powerful telescope mounted at his window and trained on the bridge. As for the things being said about him in the papers, he had no comment. He would not see reporters.

  Late one Saturday afternoon, shortly before Christmas, there was a bad accident behind the Brooklyn anchorage. Masons were finishing up a series of arches, set on big, square brick piers, that would support the roadway of the approach inland from the anchorage. The foreman noticed a great crack in one arch, about twenty-five feet above the street, and immediately ordered the men down off the work. But one man standing below never heard the warning and when the arch gave way he was buried.

  The men started digging frantically through the rubble and in about ten minutes they found him, so badly crushed that he would have been difficult to identify had they not known who it was. The body was covered with a sheet of canvas and carried to a tool house. A big crowd had gathered around by then. The area was one of seeming chaos even under normal conditions, with heaps of brick and stone all about, swinging derricks, and their countless ropes, cement machines, scaffolds, great half-dug pits, and sixty or seventy men busy at one task or another. But now things were out of hand. Somebody began saying the other arches were coming down. There was a panic and the crowd went surging in every different direction and nobody seemed to know what was happening. Then somebody was saying something about one more man trapped under the debris. So half a dozen volunteers started digging again and the crowd rushed back to watch, fully expecting to see the rescue workers buried next.

  By this time, too, the news had spread over to Fulton Street that a lot of men had been killed and a crowd coming from that direction was so big that the police had trouble holding them back.

  No more arches fell and no other bodies were found, but an investigation was immediately called for and there was great public sympathy for the victim and his family. He was Neil Mullen, a Brooklyn man and a widower with six children.

  A coroner’s inquest established that the centering, the temporary wooden supports used under the arches, had been removed before the mortar had set properly. The Brooklyn approach was McNulty’s domain and McNulty, who testified at the inquest, looked to be pretty much at fault. Roebling was infuriated by the whole affair. It was exactly the sort of thing he might have prevented had he been on the job. “The brick arch fell because it had a right to fall,” he wrote bitterly to Henry Murphy, who felt, understandably enough, that he ought to have an explanation on hand from the Chief Engineer. “Every arch, be it round or flat, must fall if its thrust is not met by an adequate lateral support,” Roebling lectured. “…The real accident was not so much that this arch fell, as that the other one stood.”

  As to the matter of responsibility I am primarily responsible because it is my business to see that everything goes along right. Mr. McNulty is secondarily responsible because he was the engineer directly in charge of the construction and because he did not sufficiently heed the special warning I gave him about this very thing some weeks before its occurrence.

  McNulty had told Roebling he did not know why he had removed the centering. “Ambitious natures are apt to be overconfident and to shrink from asking counsel of more experienced persons for fear their infallibility might be impugned,” Roebling wrote Murphy. “Time and age cures all this.” But then he added that the real explanation might be simply that McNulty was overworked.

  Roebling could appreciate the problem. He himself was doing more now than he had since the long, difficult winter before the Centennial. For a great many people it might have appeared that his real work was nearly done. The engineering involved, the planning, and the decision making ought to be all but over, it would seem, now that the towers were up and the wire was going across. But it was not that way. Nor did Roebling by any means have everything all figured out.

  In the public mind he had become a thorough mystery, the tragic victim of his own wondrous creation, cursed perhaps, like his father before him, remote, hidden, maybe a little mad, seeing everything and yet never seen. It was said he was so crippled that his wife had to feed him, which was true partly. It was said the disease had affected his mind, which was not true. And still, from a chair behind a distant window he could raise towers of granite and spin steel through the sky.

  But for the man himself every detail was a personal concern and no answers came easily, despite the things said about his genius. Nothing could be taken for granted, especially now after the accident. Nobody could be trusted, completely. Anybody might let him down, including his father.

  At the moment he was wrestling with the design of the enormous truss that would stiffen the roadway and wondering whether to make it of steel, instead of iron as his father had specified. He was not sure either if his father had made the truss big enough. He delegated Paine to find out all he could on the latest advances in steel-making. He wrote to Hildenbrand, day after day, pouring out his own thoughts, his doubts and questions, for pages.

  There are so many points to be considered, so many conflicting interests to be reconciled on the parts of the truss that it is perfectly bewildering to pick out the best thing. For example, I want to reduce the aggregate weight so as to keep down the pressure on the masonry. I want to simplify the superstructure so as to make work in the shop easy and erection easy and safe and I also want to keep down the wind surface as much as possible. On the other hand I want the truss sufficiently strong to resist a reasonable amount of bending, and this goes against the other points. But the only possible way in which I can reduce pressure on masonry and wind surface is by reducing the height and weight of the trusses and increasing the strain per square inch on the iron. I do not see that any reduction of weight is possible in any other parts of the structure. By making the truss rods as far as possible of steel we make some reduction in weight but it is only in the low truss that the rod section is great enough to enable us to attain any appreciable advantage by the substitution of steel for iron. In the high truss with rods through two panels the section is hardly sufficient to make it worth while to change. This therefore would be one argument in favor of again reducing the weight of the intermediate truss and leaving the rods in all the trusses within one panel. This includes the two central trusses even if they are arranged with a square bar in the middle of two flat ones outside.

  He was working toward another momentous decision. And he was feeling his way. But days like this were what he enjoyed most.

  His concern for incidentals was perhaps the most extraordinary thing of all. For him there were no incidentals. Everything counted. Nothing could be left to chance or for someone else to decide. Hildenbrand, Martin, Paine, Farrington, all heard from him daily now. It seemed he wanted them to know his every thought.

  The following is only an excerpt of just one of the letters Roebling wrote to his assistants during this time. It was to Farrington.

  I want you to help me get out a specification for all the timber planking for our bridge floor, and it must be done by the first of April or sooner. There is a tremendous quantity of it to be got out, and most of it has to be planed, all of which takes time. It should also season for a while. You know we cannot hang up any of the ironwork unless we have planking to follow right along, so there is no time to lose.

/>   The bulk of it is yellow pine. First: There is the planking for the promenade; next, the planking on the wagon tracks; then the longitudinal stringpieces under the tramway, and also under the regular rails on the Rail Road track. Then a lot of short pieces of bridgings of yellow pine between the floor beams and lastly short oak planking laid crossways where the horses walk, of different thickness, and also some spreaders between the safety rails on the railroad track. Our flooring here differs from the Cincinnati flooring in having only one thickness of plank. I don’t propose to treat or preserve or tar this lumber in any way, because I am pretty well convinced, judging from past attempts on previous bridges have cost more than they are worth and have often done positive harm. And as our planking is of but one thickness it can season from above and below. By the introduction of the light intermediate floor beam I have been able to reduce the thickness of the floor beam such that is from 6 to 5 inches.

  First of all I want you to go down to the back office and consult with Hildenbrand and Paine about the best means of fastening down this planking and securing the ends to the floor beams. As there is but one thickness generally it is more difficult to do. The track stringers should all be spliced by halving them at the ends. They can be [illegible] down to the top chord of the floor beam by either one or two light bolts and a cross plate underneath. I want your opinion as to whether it will pay to splice the 5” planks or only butt them. The promenade plank will be too thin for splicing. I think the Cincinnati plan of fastening will answer best. That is a little round-headed bolt having on one side a square washer underneath which catches under the flange of the 6” channel. The head of the bolt can be sunk in pretty well and the hole filled with hard cement. This will answer very well on the wagon tracks where much is covered. But it will make a nasty-looking promenade. Yet I hardly see how I can help it. You know we have on the promenade alternately a double channel and an I beam for floor beams. Now it occurs to me that we could fill in between the double channels with a pine filling piece and fasten the planking into that with wooden nails. To the I beam we fasten with little bolts.

  I believe yellow pine won’t warp as badly as oak. The promenade planking must be very long and very narrow—nothing over 4” wide. The other planking can be 5 x 5 or 5 x 6 as the space demands. (Would it pay to caulk it? Hardly I guess?) The ends must butt over the center of the floor beam. Shall we therefore order them exact lengths or make allowances and saw the butts here? How much allowance for waste? Must everything be planed? These stringers could be let in 3/8” on the floor beams. The bridging can be ordered in long lengths and then cut to suit. The promenade suspenders run through the floor. Here we must have two 5” streaks of plank because 4” would be too narrow.

  In regard to length of planking, stringers and so on, it must run from 3 panels to 5 panels in length…The timber must be good sound clear stock free from sap, cracks, splits, shakes, wind shakes, slivers and wavy edges, knots, black-knots, work holes. No bush timber or dry-rotted timber or dead timber, etc., etc. The timber must be planed up true, full and square with sharp edges…

  And the letter continues on in the same fashion for pages. Twice Emily, who was taking it down, had to sharpen or change her pencil. The letter must have taken a good hour to dictate, perhaps longer considering his condition. Only three words in the whole thing were crossed out. The rest was put down with total certainty and no second thoughts.

  On January 8 the Executive Committee held its first meeting of the new year, during which a request from J. Lloyd Haigh was considered. According to the record of the meeting, “Mr. Haigh, the contractor for furnishing the steel wire for the cables, applied to be allowed to substitute the personal obligation of Messrs. Cooper and Hewitt in place of the percentage retained under his contract, amounting now to $29,277, in order to save himself interest upon it.” Mr. Haigh’s proposition was declined. This bit of information appeared in several newspapers the next day, along with a report on various other items taken up at the meeting.

  If any of the bridge officials or trustees had been ignorant of Abram Hewitt’s interests in the fortunes of J. Lloyd Haigh and his wireworks, they were no longer. But yet there is nothing in the record to indicate that any of them thought this the least bit out of the ordinary, nor did the papers in either city make any editorial comment on it. Nothing was said either of Haigh’s generally unsavory personal reputation. Abram Hewitt made no comment.

  The Union and Argus did, however, pick up another item concerning certain legal fees authorized by the committee. “Of course more or less legal information is required by the bridge trustees,” wrote the paper, “It does seem as if there might be something more than coincidence in the twin facts that law costs the bridge $7,500 a month, and that the cheapest establishments at which the article is purveyed are those of E. M. Cullen and H. C. and G. I. Murphy. Inasmuch as H. C. Murphy is the President of the Board, the effect of the figures is an impression that the gentleman in question is overduly given to taking counsel of himself and pays a little highly for his soliloquies.”

  H. C. and G. I. Murphy were Henry Murphy’s sons. They were doing as competent a job as could be done and were charging no more for their services than would any other reputable firm, or so said Henry Murphy by way of explanation.

  20

  Wire Fraud

  Yet the existence of evil in human life is a fact too patent to be ignored or to be denied. There is evil and plenty of it, the world over…

  —JOHN A. ROEBLING

  FROM his window the Chief Engineer watched the wind gather force through the early morning, driving snow almost horizontally and whipping up whitecaps on the river. New York was barely visible. By ten a regular gale was blowing and the effect on the bridge was tremendous. The wind, as he noted in a subsequent report, was up to sixty-five miles per hour. He could see the half-finished cables tossing about wildly, like a child’s skipping rope.

  Roebling could pick out tiny dark figures moving up the footbridge from the Brooklyn anchorage and he knew what they were setting out to do, but from where he was he could not hear the sharp clashing of the strands striking against one another or the eerie moaning and whistling of the wires. Down by the bridge the noise was loud enough to be heard for blocks, and the cradle inland from the tower was slamming about so violently that people in houses below were terrified it might snap its lashing and come plunging down on them.

  Farrington had detailed a force of men to go out and secure the wires as best as possible. “It was not a pleasant thing for them to contemplate,” according to one account, “and yet there was not a murmur of dissatisfaction.” Carrying the little boatswain’s chairs, they started up the footbridge, moving very slowly, almost bent double against the wind and snow. The bridge was swinging like a pendulum and the slats were sheathed in ice. But by hanging on to the handrail, they were able to keep their feet and eventually reached the tower.

  For the next two hours they worked their way up and down the cable strands, lashing them together every fifty feet or so. The wind never let up during that time, and when two or three of them reached the middle of the river span, and caught the full brunt of the wind, it looked as though they might be carried off at any instant, their frail swings tossing about even more than the cable strands.

  But they all came back and none of them complained. “Our men deserve credit for the way they do their duty on such occasions as this,” Farrington told a reporter. The bridge itself, he also pointed out, had held up just fine. The footbridge had not lost a single slat.

  The storm struck on the last day of January and for the rest of the winter and on into spring the work proceeded without a hitch. The wire spinning was going faster than it had at Cincinnati, as Henry Murphy announced with pleasure, predicting the entire bridge would be finished by 1880.

  In February Roebling reported to the trustees on plans for the bridge trains. Everything would be as his father had described it he said. The trains would be hauled by an endless c
able, powered by a gigantic steam engine located on the Brooklyn side. “These two tracks, therefore, will be treated exactly like an inclined plane, an operation perfectly simple and perfectly well understood,” his father had written. “There is no novel feature and no experiment involved in its arrangement.” The elder Roebling had proposed an effective running speed of twenty miles per hour, but said that could be stepped up to thirty in the center of the bridge, or even forty, with absolute safety. Each train could have as many as ten cars, with each car fifty feet long and having seats enough for a hundred people. There were to be suspended sliding doors on opposite sides of the cars, one for coming in, the other for going out. These would be worked by conductors. As one train went over to New York, the other would be coming back, just as the carrier wheels worked.

  It was possible too that the rope might revolve constantly, and to start or stop, the cars would simply catch on or let go of the rope. “An ingenious arrangement for attaching cars to a moving rope, devised by Col. W. H. Paine, has been successfully at work for more than a year on the Sutter Street Railways in San Francisco,” Roebling informed the trustees. The great virtue of Paine’s grip was that it took hold of the cable in such a way that the car did not start off with a violent jerk. The San Francisco cable car operated with perfect ease, and certainly, as Roebling said, the grades were considerably steeper than those of the East River bridge.