The Great Bridge (19 page)

The idea had occurred to him some ten years before. New Yorkers needed a better way to get about their city he was convinced. To go from his office near City Hall to his house on East 20th Street, for instance, took more than an hour during the evening rush hour. His solution was a whole system of high-speed, air-propelled trains underground.

Tweed, however, had already made public his intention of bestowing upon the city an elevated railroad, a grand, costly affair to be built on a great viaduct of stone. So any alternative means of rapid transportation was bound to be either killed off by Tweed or cost its proponents dearly in Tammany blackmail. Beach recognized all this and decided therefore to do what he wanted secretly.

In 1868 he managed to get past Tweed an inconsequential-appearing bill permitting him to establish an experimental pneumatic tube for moving mail. Then, toward the end of the year, with no more legal right than that, he went to work. He had rented Devlin’s clothing store at Broadway and Murray, and there, in the cellar, he began digging a tunnel, nine feet in diameter, that was to run a block uptown, to Warren Street, directly beneath Broadway. The digging went on within a special device he had invented for the purpose, the Beach shield, as it would become known, which was shaped like a huge hogshead, open at both ends, and powered by hydraulic rams. The men doing the digging stood inside the shield, and as they progressed, the rams shoved the shield forward, like a gigantic cooky cutter. This way the workers were completely safe from cave-ins and there was no need to disturb any of the surface above ground. The only excavation necessary was for the tunnel itself. The dirt Beach had smuggled out in sacks after dark.

It was all quite ingenious and slightly fantastic, as was the vehicle he intended to put inside the tunnel. It would be a cylindrical car, large enough to carry twenty-two people, and it would be sent plummeting back and forth along its track by an enormous, reversible fan mounted at one end of the tunnel.

Beach put his son in charge of the actual construction, and the work proceeded with little difficulty, despite all the time and care taken to avoid any discovery or suspicion of what they were up to. The Broadway crowds that hurried by overhead had no notion of such industry beneath their feet. Nor did any of Tweed’s people find Beach out until he intended them to. The complete project, which Beach considered nothing more than a demonstration model, would take a little more than a year to finish, largely because Beach took such pains with refinements. The one way to overcome Tweed’s certain wrath, Beach reasoned, was to win instant popular acclaim. So his pneumatic tunnel would have to be more than just an engineering success. The car itself would have to be plushly upholstered, as elegant as a drawing room, and he made up plans for an elaborate entranceway and platform, with frescoed walls, a fountain, a tankful of goldfish, and a grand piano. In all he would spend $350,000, which was more even than William Kingsley did for his bridge.

When the time came to unveil it, in February of 1870, the tunnel would be an immediate sensation, but Tweed, in a towering rage over the deception, would have his governor, John T. Hoffman, veto Beach’s charter and thereby bring down the curtain on the famous pneumatic tunnel, the first New York subway.

But if Beach had gotten as far as he had with his dream undetected and consequently unimpeded by pacts with Tweed, there was obviously no possibility of doing any such thing with a bridge over the East River.

The fall of 1869, when the real work on the bridge began, was an unsettling time. Much in American life was turning out to be something other than what it seemed and that left a lot of people wondering just what to believe in.

In early September, at Avondale, Pennsylvania, fire and explosions ripped through a coal mine killing more than a hundred men. Accounts of the suffering and the obvious deficiencies in the engineering of the mine shocked the entire country. “It is impossible to censure too severely the culpable carelessness of the mining company,” wrote
Harper’s Weekly.

Then on the 24th of September, in New York, something close to a national disaster occurred when two notorious young stock gamblers, Jay Gould and Jim Fisk, both frequent companions of Boss Tweed, brought on a sudden financial panic, Wall Street’s first “Black Friday.”

Gould was rumored to have White House connections. He had assured Fisk that Grant would not sell government gold, so if the two of them were to work together, they could squeeze up the price of gold. They began buying that summer, nearly all on margin. By September 22 gold had risen to 137. On the morning of Friday the 24th, at ten o’clock, when trading opened, the price was 150. Word swept through the financial district that Gould and Fisk, with Grant somehow in league, had nearly succeeded in organizing a corner on gold and could thereby fix whatever price they wished.

The frenzy on the floor of the exchange was of a kind never seen before. In Brooklyn a National Guard detachment received orders to stand by ready “to quell the riot in Wall Street.” About eleven the price was 155, then 160. Scores of brokers were being ruined. One man went home and shot himself. When the government decided to do something at last and dumped four million dollars in gold on the market, it was early afternoon and the quotation was nearing 165. Within half an hour the price fell to 135.

The effect on the country was terrible, apart even from the financial misery brought on. For it appeared that a couple of cheap New York gamblers could very nearly bring the whole financial system to its knees, and that the President himself had been mixed up in it, which was not the case, but which a great many people believed to be the case all the same. And even if Grant had not been involved, he had certainly been made to look a fool, the dupe of the most transparent kind of crooked maneuvering. The whole affair was a mystery, even to people who understood how such things worked.

Back in March, when Grant took office, the editors of
Harper’s Weekly,
the first in their trade to see the Tweed Ring for what it was and to say so in print, were pointing to Grant as the towering symbol of political virtue. Now, only a little more than six months later, Grant’s character was in question and that did not sit well with anyone.

Then in mid-October occurred one of those curious half-comic, slightly unbelievable and unexplainable little episodes that sometimes characterize an age as much as or more than the usual events of conventional history. A ten-and-a-half-foot stone giant had been unearthed on a farm outside the village of Cardiff, in upstate New York. It was described immediately as one of the major scientific discoveries of all time, but soon turned out to be one of the great hoaxes.

The Cardiff Giant, so called, was the creation of a Binghamton cigar manufacturer named Hull, who had gone to Iowa some time before, purchased a twelve-foot block of gypsum, shipped it to Chicago, and there, with the help of some hired sculptors, carved out what he hoped would be taken for the petrified remains of an earlier race of supermen. He had gone about his business with exceptional care. To achieve something that looked like the pores of human skin, he hammered the figure all over with darning needles. To get the aged skin tone he wanted, he drenched the whole thing in sulfuric acid.

The figure was shipped east in a crate marked “Unfinished Marble” and buried behind Stub Newell’s barn in November 1868. But not until the following October, and exactly according to plan, was the giant “discovered” by men hired to dig a well. A tent was quickly erected over the site and a ticket booth was set up. The admission charge was fifty cents. People came by the hundreds at first, then by the thousands.

Some Syracuse businessmen soon paid Hull thirty thousand dollars for part interest in the giant and moved it to their city, where popular interest showed no decline even after the giant had been examined by scientists and declared “of very recent origin and a decided humbug.” The scientists could say what they wanted. In New York, humbug capital of the world, P. T. Barnum, who had tried without success to buy the giant, had a copy made up and put on display with great success. Later on, when the “real” giant was brought to town and exhibited only a few blocks from Barnum’s museum, both of them drew enormous crowds.

The giant also played a part in the elections that November. It was a small part, but not without interest to those amused by or gravely concerned over the extent to which sham and nonsense were taking over in American life. It was said the giant was causing such a fuss upstate that people were not taking the elections seriously, or that so much talk of giants and of hills haunted by “lost” races had clouded popular judgment in some counties.

In any event, when the votes were all in, the beefy colossus of Tammany Hall was bestriding the state as never before. The Democrats gained control of both branches of the state legislature for the first time in more than twenty years. Tweed was having things all his way.

Commenting on the mood of the American people at this time, Henry Adams wrote, “all were disgusted; but they had to content themselves by turning their backs and going to work harder than ever on their railroads and foundries.” He might have added, their bridges.

HE HAD KNOWN
times like this during the war, when nothing much appeared to be happening, but every day counted, when a dozen plans had to be gotten up and decided on without delay, contingencies considered, countless little details seen to and orders given, any one of which might determine the whole course of events to follow. “There must be someone at hand to say ‘yes’ or ‘no,’” he liked to comment, “and it often makes a great difference which word they use.”

Until the first of the year, when the site for the Brooklyn tower would finally become the legal property of the Bridge Company, no work could be started of the sort the public had been anticipating. But behind the scenes innumerable matters had to be settled. And from early August, when he was named Chief Engineer, until March of 1870, when he would launch the first of the great caissons, Washington Roebling was an exceedingly busy young man.

Specifications had to be drawn up and agreed on—for such basic supplies as piling, lumber, cement, coal tar, blasting powder. All kinds of special equipment and machinery had to be ordered—air compressors, hoisting engines, stone derricks, clamshell scoops, rock drills, air locks for the caissons—most of which had to be designed from scratch and custom-built. The production capacities and workmanship of various manufacturers had to be evaluated, usually by personal inspection. Job applicants had to be interviewed, the beginnings of a labor force assembled.

Roebling had had a good deal of experience in this sort of planning, working with his father and in the Army, and the business of organizing big construction projects was William Kingsley’s specialty. At a meeting of the Executive Committee on October 14, Kingsley would be appointed General Superintendent. Kingsley also, along with the Executive Committee, was to decide on the awarding of contracts. Roebling had been instructed by Henry Murphy that he was to have nothing to do with that. How Kingsley was to be reimbursed for his services was something of a mystery.

Roebling’s own staff, as of the end of August, consisted of six: Colonel Paine; C. C. Martin, who had been Kingsley’s choice; Sam Probasco, another Kingsley man; and three new men, all quite young, whom Roebling had hired soon after his father’s death. They were Francis Collingwood, Jr., George McNulty, and Wilhelm Hildenbrand.

Collingwood had been a friend at Troy. He had been two years ahead of Roebling and finished first in his class, but in the time since, he had been working in the family jewelry business in Elmira and had not had much engineering experience. Had it been up to John A. Roebling, Collingwood probably would not have been hired, but the new Chief Engineer knew his man, he thought, and had written to Elmira to ask Collingwood to join him in Brooklyn. Collingwood agreed, on the condition that he would serve one month only (the jewelry business was prospering it seems). When he arrived in Brooklyn in mid-August, Roebling put him to work helping Paine with plans for the Brooklyn caisson.

McNulty, the youngest of them, was barely twenty, a New Yorker and a graduate of the University of Virginia. He had done a little surveying, but that was about the sum of his experience and he had been turned down when he first applied for a position. Then he offered to serve without pay and Roebling had been so impressed by his manner that he took him on, with pay, as an assistant to Martin.

Of the three new men, Hildenbrand was the only proved quantity. A strapping, smooth-faced young German who had arrived in the United States only a few years before, he was a draftsman of exceptional talent. Earlier he had done a number of finished drawings of the bridge for John A. Roebling, including a big panoramic rendering with clouds sweeping above the towers, which was the one three-dimensional view the engineers had to show how the finished bridge would look. More recently he had worked for Vanderbilt’s architects on the new Grand Central Depot and was in fact the man who had designed, at age twenty-two, the great arched roof over the train shed. Hildenbrand would spend most of his time in the office, computing stresses in various parts of the bridge, and producing the finished drawings. But he would also go to Maine to supervise the cutting of the granite and his primary responsibility would be to keep the plans well in advance of the work. He was to be a most valuable man.

Charles Cyril Martin, C. C. Martin as he was known, was second-in-command after Roebling, with a salary of five thousand dollars a year. Older than Roebling by six years, he had a big, plain, manly face, handsome except for the ears, which were extremely large, and he wore his whiskers clipped trim, in the manner made popular by Grant—as Roebling would too now, after his father’s death. Martin was another Rensselaer graduate. He had been a class ahead of Roebling, but already twenty-three when he first arrived at Troy, he had been regarded as an old-timer even then. By this time he had been married ten years, was the father of four children, and had worked for William Kingsley on three different reservoirs. He had put down Brooklyn’s new water main and was head engineer in charge of building Prospect Park. (The actual design of the park had been worked out by the noted landscape architects Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux, who had done Central Park, which they considered the lesser work of the two.) Martin had even named one of his sons Kingsley Martin. So if experience dealing with Kingsley or a knowledge of Brooklyn politics were to count for anything, Martin had added qualifications.

Martin was to concentrate on supplies and the hiring of the work force, Kingsley’s chief interests. He was, for all practical purposes, to be the executive officer for the bridge. For help he had Probasco and young McNulty.

The average age of the engineering staff, Roebling included, was about thirty-one. Paine, who was forty-one, was the senior member.

The men were all new to the job and to one another. The job itself, they all recognized, was going to be unlike anything attempted before. A little later, a salty and resourceful character named E. F. Farrington, who had worked on the Cincinnati Bridge, would be named master mechanic. But for now the only one who had had any previous experience building a Roebling bridge—or a suspension bridge of any kind—was the Chief Engineer and not even he had had working experience with some of the problems presented by this particular bridge.

Still he would be the one with the final say. And however much staff help he got, every important decision would be his in the end, and at this stage there was seldom any sure way to know which decisions, of all that had to be made, might turn out to be the important ones in the long run. Roebling, too, would be the one to deal with the Board of Directors and the all-powerful Executive Committee, with public officials from both cities, with old Horatio Allen, the high-paid consultant who had never built a suspension bridge, who knew little about the subject, but who had a reputation to throw about if he chose to.

Roebling would be the one to answer the sort of criticism from other overnight experts that the newspapers and a few of the professional journals liked to give space to. His father had been dead only a short time when a crackpot named Samuel Barnes B. Nolan was crying out in the pages of
Scientific American
that the grade of the bridge was too steep for wagons in slippery weather, that the central span was going to sag, that the whole work would be a “dead failure.” The claims were absurd, Roebling knew, but one such article could mean hours lost explaining why to some influential politician or overly conscientious board member.

To get what he wanted, and particularly if it was a departure from the original plan—or seemed to be—he would have to present his recommendations formally, in writing. As the work progressed, he would have to account for each and every step along the way, explaining his every decision in lengthy reports addressed to the Executive Committee. These would have to be quite explicate, thorough, candid, yet in language his nontechnical peers could understand. Every report would also become a public document, he knew, and so, come what may, each would also have to be convincing enough to maintain public confidence not only in the work itself but in the man in charge of it. If things went wrong, if materials proved shoddy, if equipment broke down, if the work fell behind schedule, if some part of the structure itself failed, if accounts were juggled or costs got out of hand, if there were mistakes in judgment by any of his subordinates, if there were accidents, he would be the one held accountable. In time, there would be nearly a thousand men under his command.

Most important of all, the plans he had to work with at this point were only of the most general sort, “the details not having been considered” by his father.

It was a responsibility of monumental proportions and there were older men in the profession, men with proved abilities, who might not have felt up to it. But there is nothing to indicate that Washington Roebling had even a moment’s hesitation. He had never had the full charge of a bridge before, the absolute final say, that is, except for two military bridges.

As yet he had done nothing to earn the confidence of his subordinates or any of the private parties connected with the enterprise. He was where he was strictly on his father’s say-so and because the men who wanted the bridge built had been left with no other choice. Moreover, as he doubtless sensed from the start, anything he did would be measured against what his father might have done. He would be forever compared to the old man and held accountable for things said or promised by him. And however well he might succeed, however much of himself he might put into the work, the odds were it would always be John A. Roebling’s bridge. If there were failures, they would be all his.

The great question now, of course, was whether he would prove to be the man his father had been.

Washington Augustus Roebling, at age thirty-two, was much like his father in a great many ways, but also quite different. John Roebling was a European, a European intellectual to be more exact, a perfectionist at heart and by training, and an aristocrat if one accepts his own belief in an aristocracy of ability. He was painfully proper, vile-tempered, and widely regarded a genius.

His eldest son was an even-mannered, informal, kindly man and, as he himself would say, just a little lazy by his father’s standards. Others in the family would say he was more like his mother. He had her patience with people, her calm, as they said. He was extremely bright, but not brilliant. He was not a genius. Nor did he have his father’s creative vision, which was among the main differences between them. Still, as his wife, Emily, would write, he was a man of “very versatile attainments.” He was a first-rate classical scholar, a good linguist, and a fine musician. He was also quite articulate when need be and a great deal more open-minded than his father had been. He was considerably more interested in his fellow man, in the flesh rather than the abstract, and though he never managed his father’s commanding presence, he was really far better at working with people. He was, everything considered, much more of a human being.

Professionally, he was as good as they came. Quick at mathematics, a superb draftsman, extremely thorough about details, he had his father’s passion for perfection and, like his father, he had a very great deal of physical courage. But he never considered himself a creative genius and nowhere along the line did he have any airs that might have given anyone that impression. His wife called him “rather indifferent to matters of courtesy.” And while he had the Roebling pride, he had inherited almost none of his father’s vanity, and this, in his view, greatly reduced his chances of ever attaining comparable fame. “History,” he would write, “teaches us that no man can be great unless a certain amount of vanity enters into his composition…For a man to be important it is also necessary to have a good opinion of one’s self, even if for no other purpose than to impress others.”

At first glance he seemed a rather silent but pleasant person, relaxed, unassuming, attractively modest. Indeed, apart from his name, there appeared, on first meeting, to be nothing much out of the ordinary about him. He was not impressive, the way his father had been. His father, on top of everything else,
looked
like a great man.

But in this they were quite the same: they had an absolute, total confidence in their ability to do the job at hand.

Washington Roebling was a great believer in heredity and the part it played in determining one’s “composition.” He would write of what he called “a peculiarity of the Roebling mind,” which he saw as a fixed determination to do things as one thought they ought to be done, no other way, asking little advice of anybody, and generally refusing it when offered. This “overweening self-reliance” was a family streak, he held, something much more serious than ordinary “Dutch” stubbornness and as much a handicap as a virtue. But he also wrote, “It might be argued if a man inherits everything he deserves no credit for it. That would be so in a life of universal monotony, but with each generation in turn totally different conditions and environments arise. These have to be met by the new individual who must develop his powers to adapt himself to them; to overcome them and use them as his tools.”

As a “new individual,” starting, say, from about age six on, he had neither grown up in an ancient walled city nor filled himself with philosophy nor dreamed of future liberation in some distant utopia. He had grown up an American and perhaps the most obvious, important difference between Washington Roebling and his famous father was just that. Furthermore, he had been through those two most characteristic and influential experiences for American men of his generation: he had spent his boyhood in the rural backwaters, where the frontier was recent history and there were still comparable privations; and he had been through the war. Unlike his father he had been both an American farm boy and a soldier and those two experiences had played a profound part in determining his own “composition,” as he called it.