Niagara

by Pierre Berton

  Soon others were clamouring – and paying a fee – for a chance to experience this most novel of Niagara’s thrills. Ellet’s contract did not allow him to collect tolls, but he got around that problem by charging a dollar to anyone who would like to “observe at first hand the engineering wonder of bridging the Niagara.” As many as 125 people a day took up the offer, three-quarters of them women. One man, so the story went, took one look at Ellet’s iron basket and opted for the little rowboat then used as a ferry. Then he walked back to the bridge site to meet his wife, who was coolly descending from the iron basket.

  Ellet’s spectacular bridge machinery was not the only new tourist attraction at the Falls. The crowds were increasing and entrepreneurs were taking full advantage of the influx. A water-powered inclined railway, completed in 1846, brought sightseers to the base of the American Falls, while the little steamer Maid of the Mist, launched the same year, took its passengers directly into the spray of the Horseshoe.

  Ellet, meanwhile, was constructing a preliminary bridge to act as a scaffolding from which to build the platform of the subsequent railway span. Actually, he was building two suspension bridges, side by side, and planning to lash them together. He built four massive towers, two on each side of the gorge, to support four cables. Two sets of walkways, each four feet wide and each suspended from two cables, were by now projecting over the gorge on both sides of the river. The sections of the downriver platform had been joined, but the neighbouring walkway was still under construction, projecting one hundred feet from the Canadian bank and two hundred from the American, when a furious gale struck.

  The force of the wind instantly wrecked the unfinished portion of the southern section, throwing the floor across the cable that carried Ellet’s iron basket. Two men working on the Canadian side managed to reach safety, but three on the American side were stranded. Marooned on the unsteady platform, clinging helplessly to the suspending cables with the floor swaying alarmingly under their feet, they were forced to stay put until the wind dropped. Then, as a twelve-foot ladder was lashed to the iron basket, Theodore Hulett called for a volunteer to try to rescue the trio.

  A young workman, Charles Ellis, stepped forward. “I’m your man!” he said. Hulett warned him not to take more than one man at a time into the basket. The basket cable was already under strain because the full weight of the Canadian side of the bridge lay across it. Could it even sustain the additional weight of two men before snapping? Moved by the pleas of the stranded workmen, Ellis gambled that it could. Ignoring Hulett’s warning, he allowed all three to climb into the basket. All were brought safely to the American side.

  Meanwhile, an extraordinary and totally unexpected event occurred. It had no effect on the bridge construction, but it was so unbelievable it defied common sense. Indeed, it was not credited by those who did not witness it and not understood by those who did. On the night of March 28, 1848, Niagara Falls went dry.

  The rapids above the cataract dwindled to a trickle. The twin cascades shrank until they consisted of little more than a few thin streams of water, dripping over the exposed cliff. And the silence! People long used to the roar of Niagara were actually awakened by the unaccustomed quiet. They lined the cliffside and in the torchlight saw long stretches of mud and naked boulders between scattered pools of water.

  The following day almost everyone in the neighbourhood was able to explore the recesses and crannies that had never before been exposed to mortal eyes. People walked from shore to shore picking up souvenirs – bayonets, swords, gun barrels, and tomahawks from the War of 1812. A detachment of cavalry trotted up the riverbed. A party of enthusiasts danced a quadrille on a flat rock near the middle of the stream.

  On the American side, George W. Holley drove out more than three hundred yards from the Goat Island shore, stood on the lip of the Horseshoe, and with the aid of a team of horses began salvaging huge pieces of timber hanging over the naked precipice.

  On the Canadian side, Thomas Street and his daughter rode for three-quarters of a mile down the dry riverbed above the Falls. From Table Rock they walked to the edge of the precipice about one-third of the way to Goat Island, stuck a pole into a crevice, and tied a handkerchief to it. Street looked over at the river below and saw the water so shallow that immense jagged rocks previously hidden by the swirling waters stood out starkly. He shuddered when he thought of how frequently he had passed over these hazards in the Maid of the Mist. That same day the rocks were blasted to fragments and removed.

  In the evening, the churches were crammed with people who talked fearfully about the end of the world. But before a real panic could set in, a new sound broke the unaccustomed silence – a low growl that caused the earth to vibrate and the air to tremble. A few minutes later, a wall of water crashed over the lip of the Falls and Niagara was in business again.

  The explanation for this curious and frightening episode was fascinating. Heavy westerly winds blowing across Erie, the shallowest of the Great Lakes, had driven the bulk of its water over the Falls. Then the winds changed. Much of the water that was left was forced back far to the west. The wind also broke up the ice, which formed a jam in the river near Buffalo, effectively damming it until only a trickle ran between the banks. When the ice jam broke and the wind dropped, the Falls returned to their former glory.

  Ellet, having repaired his damaged platforms, completed his service bridge in July 1848. Now it was possible to make a trip from bank to bank as easily as the one the astonished populace had enjoyed so briefly the night the Falls went dry. Ellet was so captivated with the idea that he could not wait for safety railings to be erected on both sides of the span. He called for a horse and buggy and, standing with the reins in his hand “like a Roman charioteer” in one account, drove himself across the flimsy structure to the cheers of the spectators. Women fainted at the sight, so it was said, while strong men gasped; but then, women were forever fainting and strong men gasping in the records of that century.

  Such stunts, so typical of Ellet, not only enhanced his own reputation but also focused public attention on his project. And therein lay the seeds of his downfall. The service bridge was so popular that when Ellet opened it in midsummer, everybody wanted to use it. Within a year it would accumulate a five-thousand-dollar profit in tolls – but for whom? This question added to the nasty wrangle that was developing between Ellet and the bridge companies.

  Indeed, Ellet’s relationship with the two companies had been testy from the beginning. The international nature of the Niagara gorge did not help. Matters were complicated because the companies were operating under two legal systems. Moreover, there was jealousy between the two presidents, and arguments arose about which company was responsible for paying the contractors. Just as construction was getting under way, a depression struck that delayed shipments of masonry. The companies tried to insist that Ellet act as a salesman to push stock in the venture, something he had not contemplated. They suggested he postpone the project or settle for a lesser structure that would be suitable for wagons and teams only. It did not help matters that Ellet was also at work on the Wheeling bridge and absent from Niagara for days at a time.

  Ellet was infuriated by these wrangles. “I have worked hard,” he wrote to Lot Clark of the New York company in May, “–expended a great deal to come here – broken up my home – abandoned important interests – deserted my business – have paid away my money, received nothing, and been stripped of all the profits.”

  Two months later the controversy reached a climax over the service bridge tolls that Ellet was keeping for himself. The bridge companies fired him and, with the help of an obliging Canadian sheriff, seized the bridge. The courts issued an injunction giving temporary control and possession of the structure to the companies. When the injunction was lifted in October, a wild confrontation followed in which Ellet’s agents took control of the American side of the bridge with the help of a cannon loaded with buckshot.

  Ellet soon gave up the legal st
ruggle that followed. A compromise of sorts was reached: it was said that he was paid off with ten thousand dollars. At the end of December, Ellet, to his considerable relief, relinquished all connection with the Niagara bridge and got on with the job at Wheeling. Niagara Falls now had a bridge suitable for the carriage trade only. Ellet’s successor would be his one-time rival, the methodical John Roebling. It was he who would build the world’s first railway suspension bridge across the forbidding gorge.

  4

  John Roebling’s bridge

  Roebling was a far different creature from Ellet. Apart from their engineering expertise, they were as dissimilar as steel and silk.

  The deliberate and generally humourless Roebling was as inflexible as the bridges he built. Compared with the impulsive and irrepressible Ellet, he was rocklike. He was the Ironmaster of Trenton – a man of iron with all the virtues of iron, as his eulogist would eventually declaim. “Iron was in his blood and sometimes entered his very soul.” Roebling’s will was so strong that he used it to ward off seasickness on the immigrant ship that brought him to America in 1831. He determined not to yield to the malady, striding about the deck all night, refusing to give in.

  Unlike Ellet, who was all sizzle and froth and quick to take umbrage, Roebling was slow to arouse and tenacious in his ambitions. When he built a bridge he supervised every detail, left nothing to chance, prepared himself for every contingency. These Teutonic qualities were apparent when he decided to settle in the United States at the age of twenty-five. Long before he sailed he had carefully surveyed the prospect, state by state, so that he knew exactly where to put down his roots.

  He came from the walled town of Mühlhausen in Thuringia, the son of an easy-going tobacconist and a ferociously ambitious mother who channelled all her energies into John, her fifth and youngest child. She entered him in the Royal Polytechnic Institute in Berlin where, according to family legend, he was the favourite disciple of the philosopher Hegel. But it was as an engineer and architect that he graduated, and it was as a farmer that he came to America. With several other countrymen he purchased seven thousand acres of land in Pennsylvania and formed a German-American village that would be called Saxonburg.

  Seventeen years later, in 1848, when Ellet parted with the bridge companies, John Augustus Roebling was forty-two, a tall, lean engineer, his long, sombre face lined with deep furrows, his steel-blue eyes unblinking beneath a heavy brow, his beard giving him the appearance of a Biblical prophet.

  He had long since given up farming to become the founder of the American wire rope industry. He had come to America while the canal still reigned, when the major communities were linked by a network of manmade waterways. Moonlighting in the winter months as a surveyor and dam builder, he had noticed deficiencies in the Kentucky hemp ropes used to haul canal boats across the Allegheny Mountains on the portage railroad that linked the eastern and western sections of the Pennsylvania Canal. The boats were hoisted into wheeled cradles and dragged by rope hawsers up the inclines, then dropped down on the far side to rejoin the waterway. Under the strain of this system, the thick hemp quickly wore out and had to be replaced.

  Why not make the rope out of twisted wire? Roebling asked himself. It would be stronger, lighter, more durable. He fiddled with the idea, built a wire ropewalk on his farm, and eventually taught his fellow Germans his own technique of winding and weaving the strands. But when he approached the canal company, he met a wall of resistance.

  Nobody had ever made wire rope in America. The Pennsylvania politicians who controlled the canal wanted no part of the idea; nor, understandably, did the hemp manufacturers. Roebling finally managed to wangle permission to try his scheme on one of the canal’s ten inclined railways. But he no sooner had his wire rope in place than his enemies chopped it in two.

  The stubborn engineer went to the top – to the president of the state’s canal commission – and in a few bold sentences talked himself into a superintendent’s job. Soon all ten inclines were equipped with Roebling’s wire rope. “God is good!” said Roebling.

  But the canal era was nearing its end, snuffed out by the new railroads. Undaunted, Roebling turned his inventive mind to another use for wire rope. He remembered that in his university days he had been impressed by a bridge suspended by chains over a small stream. Indeed, he had written a thesis on the subject. Now it occurred to him that the same principle could be used for a cross-river aqueduct but using wire rope, which was stronger than any chain.

  He worked out his plans and calculations in the greatest detail and laid them before the canal company that was about to build an aqueduct across the Allegheny River at Pittsburgh. The idea was unprecedented. In Germany it would probably have been rejected. But Roebling, counting on New World daring, convinced the engineers that his scheme should be tried. If he failed, he faced ruin. But he did not fail, nor did he expect to. In fact, the success made his reputation.

  If aqueduct pipes could be carried suspended over a broad river, Roebling pondered, why not a bridge? By 1846 he had built his first suspension bridge over the Monongahela River at Pittsburgh. It lasted thirty-five years.

  By 1850, when after a two-year hiatus he was finally awarded the Niagara contract, Roebling had four more suspension aqueducts to his credit. He had also moved his wire rope business to Trenton, New Jersey. There he designed everything himself – not only the new plant but every piece of machinery he installed. His confidence in his abilities was absolute; he trusted no one else. Years went by before he could be persuaded to hire an assistant engineer or draughtsman.

  Few others had his certitude. To the engineering profession he was a daring experimenter, possibly a madman. Five chain suspension bridges had already collapsed in Europe. Then in 1850, a wire suspension bridge twisted and crumpled under the tread of marching troops. Why was Roebling tempting disaster?

  Robert Stephenson, son of the inventor of the locomotive and one of the best-known bridge builders in England, put no trust in the Roebling concept. He was convinced no suspension bridge could support a heavy train lumbering across its unsubstantial arch. Stephenson’s cumbersome and expensive bridges were constructed of tubular steel. “If your bridge succeeds,” he told Roebling, “then mine have been magnificent blunders.”

  Roebling moved implacably forward. Using Ellet’s original span as a service bridge, he started construction in 1851. Again he oversaw every detail, planned every step, arranged for any contingency, left nothing to others. Since each Roebling bridge was different from every other, designed for the particular site and circumstance, he was like an artist who puts his own stamp or signature on canvas or sculpture.

  Unlike the flamboyant Ellet, he worked without fanfare, often in the bitter cold, without a break. He rarely left the site. A town known, aptly, as Suspension Bridge was springing up on the American side, and from there, by mail, he ran his factory in Trenton, again following every detail himself – from the installation of new machinery to the collection of debts.

  He worked as a man obsessed, oblivious to family and friends, shunning holidays, forgetting anniversaries. When the intricate work of cable spinning began in December 1853, he abandoned any thought of Christmas because he trusted no one but himself to oversee the job. “Mrs. Roebling wishes me to come home,” he had written to one of his staff. He concluded bluntly, “I cannot.”

  When, on New Year’s Day, 1854, she bore him his fourth son, Roebling heard about it from Charles Swan, his factory superintendent, in a business letter, of all things. He seemed baffled and bewildered. “You say in your last, that Mrs. Roebling & the child are pretty well. This takes me by surprise, not having been informed at all … what do you mean? Please answer by return of mail. I myself was a little doubtful about the sufficiency of a 3-inch shaft – must try it now …” And thus, in spite of his puzzlement, he went on with the pressing business of the day.

  He had no patience with the conventional thinking that a suspension bridge should be flexible. In these �
�loose fabrics swung up in the air for the very purposes of swinging” he foresaw future trouble. In Roebling’s view, the bridge itself should be as stiff as the wooden aqueducts he had previously designed.

  Roebling’s two-tiered bridge resembled nothing so much as a gigantic iron girder, stretched across the gorge suspended by cables. It was 820 feet long, 24 feet wide, and 20 feet deep, an oblong metal box, slightly convex at the centre. The railway tracks and pedestrian walk ran along the upper level – the top of the box. Common traffic used the plank roadway at the bottom. In between was a massive nest of trusses, girders, and cables designed to keep the entire structure rigid. Roebling had, in effect, fashioned a single hollow beam as protection against cumulative undulations.

  Roebling had made it impossible for his bridge to sway or twist in the wind. A heavy team of horses, Roebling declared, would cause a much greater jar or trembling than a train crossing at five miles an hour. The concept was Roebling’s own; it had never been tried before. This was the first time stiffening trusses had been used in bridge building, a radical innovation that would in the future become standard for all suspension bridges.