The Great Bridge (4 page)

So the roadways and tracks at one level were for the everyday traffic of life, while the walkway above was for the spirit. The bridge, he had promised, was to serve the interests of the community as well as those of the New York Bridge Company. Receipts on all tolls and train fares would, he asserted, pay for the entire bridge in less than three years. To build such a bridge, he said, would take five years.

Horatio Allen and William McAlpine asked the most questions during the sessions Roebling held with the consultants. The length of the central span and the tower foundations were the chief concerns.

It had been said repeatedly by critics of the plan that a single span of such length was impossible, that the bridge trains would shake the structure to pieces and, more frequently, that no amount of calculations on paper could guarantee how it might hold up in heavy winds, but the odds were that the great river span would thrash and twist until it snapped in two and fell, the way the Wheeling Bridge had done (a spectacle some of his critics hoped to be on hand for, to judge by the tone of their attacks).

Roebling told his consultants that a span of sixteen hundred feet was not only possible with a suspension bridge, but if engineered properly, it could be double that. A big span was not a question of practicability, but cost. It was quite correct that wind could play havoc with suspension bridges of “ordinary design.” But he had solved that problem long since, he assured them, in his earlier bridges, and this bridge, big as it was, would be quite as stable as the others. Like his earlier works, this was to be no “ordinary” bridge. For one thing it would be built
six times
as strong as it need be. The inclined stays, for example, would have a total strength of fifteen thousand tons, enough to hold up the floor by themselves. If all four cables were to fail, he said, the main span would not collapse. It would sag at the center, but it would not fall. His listeners were very much impressed.

There were questions about his intended use of steel and about the extraordinary weight of the bridge. Then at one long session they had discussed the foundations.

Roebling planned to sink two tremendous timber caissons deep into the riverbed and to construct his towers upon these. It was a technique with which he had had no previous experience, but the engineering had been worked out quite thoroughly, he said, in conjunction with his son, Colonel Roebling, who had spent nearly a year in Europe studying the successful use of similar foundations. McAlpine could vouch for the basic concept, since he had used it himself successfully, although on a vastly smaller scale, to sink one of the piers and the abutment for a drawbridge across the Harlem River. His caisson for the pier had been of iron and just six feet in diameter. Those Roebling was talking about would be of pine timbers and each one would cover an area of some seventeen thousand square feet, or an area big enough to accommodate four tennis courts with lots of room to spare. Nothing of the kind had ever been attempted before.

How deep did he think he would have to go to reach a firm footing, the engineers wished to know. Would he go to bedrock? And did he have any idea how far down that might be?

During the test borings on the Brooklyn side, the material encountered had been composed chiefly of compact sand and gravel, mixed with clay and interspersed with boulders of traprock, the latter of which, he allowed, had “detained this operation considerably.” Gneiss had been struck at ninety-six feet. But below a depth of fifty to sixty feet, the material had been so very compact that the borehole had remained open for weeks without the customary tubing. So it was his judgment that there would be no need to go all the way to rock. A depth of fifty feet on the Brooklyn side ought to suffice and the whole operation would probably take a year.

About the prospects on the New York side, he was rather vague—but it looked, he said, as though bedrock was at 106 feet and there was a great deal of sand on the way down. Still there was a chance that rock might be found closer to the surface. An old well near Trinity Church showed gneiss at twenty-six feet, he noted, and in the well at City Hall the same rock was found at ninety feet. “The whole of Manhattan Island appears to rest upon a gneiss and granite formation,” he said. The greatest depth to which similar caissons had been sunk before this was eighty-five feet. But he was willing to take his to a depth of 110 feet if that was what had to be done. His consultants said they did not think he would find that necessary.

Presently they took up the question of the timber foundations and their fate, once he left them buried forever beneath the towers, beneath the river, the rock, sand and muck of the riverbed. In his report, Roebling had explained at some length how the caissons would be packed with concrete once they were sunk to the desired position, and why, in their final resting place, well below the level where water or sea worms could reach them, they would last forever. But there were some among the consultants who wished to hear more on the subject and who had a number of questions.

That particular session on the foundations had taken place on March 9. Two days later, on the 11th, it was announced that the renowned engineers had approved the Roebling plan, “in every important particular.” Their official report would come later, but in the meantime the public could rest assured that the plan was “entirely practicable.”

Only Congressional authorization was needed now, since Congress had jurisdiction over all navigable waters and the bridge was to be a post road. Unlike the government in Albany, or those in either city, the government in Washington had some regulations it wished to see adhered to. Congressional legislation already drawn up stipulated that the bridge must in no way “obstruct, impair, or injuriously modify” navigation on the river. In particular, there was concern in Washington that it might interfere with traffic to and from the Navy Yard, and to be certain that every detail of the plan was fully understood, General A. A. Humphreys, Chief of the Army Engineers, decided to appoint his own review panel to give an opinion on it, irrespective of the conclusions reached by Roebling’s consultants (This was to be the only public scrutiny of the design or the location.) So at about that point it had seemed the most sensible next step would be for everyone to go take a look at some of Roebling’s existing works to see how he had previously handled somewhat analogous situations. Let his work speak for itself, he had decided.

The tour was arranged almost overnight and if there was any initial intention to restrict it to a relatively small body of professionals that idea was speedily overruled. A total of twenty-one gentlemen and one lady made up the “Bridge Party,” as it was referred to in subsequent accounts. In addition to the two Roeblings, the seven consultants, and three Army engineers—General Horatio Wright, General John Newton, and Major W. R. King—several prominent Brooklyn businessmen were invited, most of whom were or were about to become stockholders in the New York Bridge Company. A Brooklyn Congressman named Slocum—General Henry W. Slocum—was included, as were Hugh McLaughlin, the Democratic “Boss” of Brooklyn, and William C. Kingsley, Brooklyn’s leading contractor, who was known to be the driving political force behind the bridge and the largest individual stockholder. How many of the party were aware that the tall, powerful Kingsley would also be personally covering all expenses for the tour, in addition to the seven thousand dollars in consultants’ fees, is not known.

Two young engineers, C. C. Martin and Samuel Probasco, both of whom had worked for Kingsley on different Brooklyn projects, were also to go, as was the wife of one of the consultants, Mrs. Julius Adams, who is described only as an “amiable lady” in existing accounts. Why she consented to join the group, or why she was invited in the first place, no one ever explained.

Nor is there anything in the record to indicate who determined the make-up of the group. Presumably it was taken to be a representative body, having an even balance of engineering talent, business acumen, and public spirit. In any event, the editor of the Brooklyn
Eagle,
Thomas Kinsella, was also included, so that in Brooklyn at least the expedition would receive proper notice, and young Colonel Roebling appears to have been the one delegated to make the necessary arrangements.

There were, however, two very important public figures who did not make the trip, both of whom had done much to bring the project along as far as it had come and who ought to be mentioned at this point in the story.

The first was State Senator Henry Cruse Murphy, lawyer, scholar, the most respected and respectable Democrat in Brooklyn, and in Albany the leading spokesman for Brooklyn’s interests. Murphy had worked harder for the bridge than anyone in Brooklyn except Kingsley, the contractor. He was the one who had written the charter for the New York Bridge Company. He had seen it through the legislature and was currently serving as the company’s president. Why he failed to make the trip is not known and probably not important. But he would have added a certain tone to the group certainly and John A. Roebling, in particular, would doubtless have enjoyed his company. (The idea of Roebling keeping company with the likes of Boss McLaughlin must have raised many an eyebrow on Brooklyn Heights.)

But the absence of the second missing party was quite intentional, one can be sure; it raised no questions and required no explanation, since there had been no mention as yet, scarcely even a whisper, that he had had anything whatever to do with the bridge. He was William Marcy Tweed of New York.

The itinerary called for stops at Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, and Niagara Falls, and the announced official purpose of the expedition was to inspect four of Roebling’s bridges, each of which, in one way or other, illustrated how he intended to span the East River. But a week of traveling together was also supposed to give everybody a chance to get to know one another—nothing could so cement friendships as a long train ride, Thomas Kinsella would write—and particularly, it was presumed, everyone would get to know the key man in all this, John A. Roebling.

The great engineer was still largely a mystery to the people who had hired him. Except for the times when he had expounded on his plan at the meeting in 1867, his Brooklyn clients had seen very little of him. Their ordinary day-to-day dealings had been with his son. It had been young Roebling, not his father, who had set up the makings of an office and who had taken a house on the Heights. He had been the one on hand to answer their questions and keep things moving.

The father had wanted it that way. He had remained in Trenton, showing up in Brooklyn only now and then, and staying no longer than necessary. His time was always short it seemed and even when meeting with his board of consultants he had kept each session quite formal and to the point. He had no time for anything but business, and no small talk whatever.

On occasion the two of them, father and son, would be seen walking on Hicks Street, talking intently, or down by the slate-gray river pacing about the spot where the tower was to rise, the father pointing this way and that with his good hand. They resembled each other in height and build, even trimmed their whiskers the same way. But while the son was quite handsome in the conventional sense, with strong regular features, the father’s face was a composite of hard angles and deep creases, of large ears and nose and deep-sunken eyes, all of which gave the appearance of having been hewn from some substance of greater durability than mortal flesh.

Most people, later, would talk about his eyes, his fierce pale-blue eyes. But just what sort of human being there might be behind them was a puzzle. He was a man of enormous dignity, plainly enough, full of purpose and iron determination, but accustomed to deference just as plainly, somebody to be admired from a distance. His look was all-knowing and not in the least friendly. Among those who were about to stake so very much on him and his bridge, or who already had, there was not one who could honestly say he knew the man.

And so on the evening of April 14, 1869, when General Grant and his Julia were just taking up residence in the White House and the dogwood were beginning to bloom across the lowlands of New Jersey, the Bridge Party boarded a private palace car in Jersey City and started west. The only one missing from the group was the elder Roebling, who was to get on at Trenton.

ANYONE
from Trenton who happened to be standing nearby on the depot platform that lovely April evening would have known who he was, and very possibly why he was waiting there. Trenton was still a small town, for all the changes there had been, and Old Man Roebling, as the men at the mill called him, was Trenton’s first citizen. The whole town looked up to him and took pride in his accomplishments.

It was commonly said that he had done more in one life than any ten men. The town had seen him build the wire business from nothing, raise seven children, bury two others and one wife, then marry again when he was past sixty. He had survived hard times, fires, cholera epidemics, the hazards of bridgebuilding, accidents at the mill, and his own particular notions about maintaining good health, which to some may have seemed the surest sign of all that the man was indestructible.

John Roebling was a believer in hydropathy, the therapeutic use of water. Come headaches, constipation, the ague, he would sit in a scalding-hot tub for hours at a time, then jump out and wrap up in ice-cold, slopping-wet bed sheets and stay that way for another hour or two. He took Turkish baths, mineral baths. He drank vile concoctions of raw egg, charcoal, warm water, and turpentine, and there were dozens of people along Canal Street who had seen him come striding through his front gate, cross the canal bridge, and drink water “copiously”—gallons it seemed—from the old fountain beside the state prison. (“This water I relish much…” he would write in his notebook.) “A wet bandage around the neck every night, for years, will prevent colds he preached to his family.
“A full cold bath every day
is indispensable…” Illness he regarded as a moral offense and he fought it with the same severe intensity he directed to everything else he did in life.

The town knew all about him, or thought so. It was common knowledge, for example, that he was an inventor as well as an engineer, that he had designed every piece of machinery in the mill, that he was an artist, that he wrote prolifically for scientific periodicals, that he read Emerson and Channing and other freethinkers. At home he was writing his own “Theory of the Universe.”

When he first came to Trenton, he had played both the piano and the flute, but then he caught his left hand in a rope machine and was left with three immovable fingers. Not long after his first wife died, he had taken up spiritualism. There had been talk ever since of after-dark gatherings, of table rappings and the like, inside the big Roebling house. The old man, on top of his other achievements, was now said to be on speaking terms with the dead.

The bridges were what he was best known for, of course, but only a few people in Trenton had actually seen any of them, except perhaps for a view in
Harper’s Weekly
or one of the other picture magazines. Roebling the industrialist was the man Trenton people knew.

He was called a man of iron. Poised…confident…unyielding…imperious…severe…proud…are other words that would be used in Trenton to describe him. There had always been something distant about him; he kept apart and had no real friends in Trenton, but he had also been accepted on those terms long since and he in turn was always extremely courteous to everyone. “He was always the first to say good morning,” a man from the mill would tell a reporter after Roebling’s death. When he spoke they listened.

Roebling was sixty-three in 1869, but even when he was years younger, he had a special hold on men, it seems, with his commanding stares and wintry scowls, like an Old Testament prophet. His success in everything he turned his hand to was generally attributed to an inflexible will and extraordinary resourcefulness. “He was never known to give in or own himself beaten,” one of his employees would recall and another would quote a saying of his they all knew by heart, “If one plan won’t do, then another must.” Charles B. Stuart, an engineer and author who knew Roebling, would later write: “One of his strongest moral traits was his power of will, not a will that was stubborn, but a certain spirit, tenacity of purpose, and confident reliance upon self instinctive faith in the resources of his art that no force of circumstance could divert him from carrying into effect a project once matured in his mind….” It was a quality he had worked hard to instill in his children as well.

Time was something never to be squandered. If a man was five minutes late for an appointment with him, the appointment was canceled. Once, during the war, so the story went, he had been called to Washington by the War Department to give advice on something or other and was asked to wait outside the office of General John Charles Frémont, the illustrious “Pathfinder.” Roebling took out a pencil, wrote a note on the back of his card, and had it sent in to the general. “Sir,” the note said, “you are keeping me waiting. John Roebling has not the leisure to wait upon any man.”

In all his working life John Roebling had never been known to take a day off.

He had settled in Trenton twenty years before, in 1849, when he was forty-three, or past the age, he knew, when most brilliant men do their best work. He had had no money to speak of then and not much of a reputation. All that had come in the years since. How much was generally known in Trenton of his life prior to that time can only be guessed at, but the story was well known among his family certainly, and, for the most part, in the engineering profession.

He had been born on June 12, 1806, in Germany, in the province of Saxony, in the ancient walled town of Mühlhausen, where for about a thousand years more or less not very much had ever happened. Bach had once played the organ in the church where he was baptized and in the spring of 1815, when Roebling was nine, five hundred of his townsmen had marched off to fight Napoleon at Waterloo, but other than that no one in Mühlhausen had ever done much out of the ordinary.

His father, Christoph Polycarpus Roebling, had a tobacco shop and the accepted picture of him is of an unassuming, rather comfortably fixed burgher of good family, who had no desire to be anything more than what he was and who smoked up about as much tobacco as he sold. Roebling’s mother, however, was a fiercely energetic sort, with a mind of her own and some very fixed ideas about getting on in the world. It was their proud, determined, long-departed grandmother, Friederike Dorothea, John Roebling’s children were raised to understand, who scraped and saved to send their father to the famous Polytechnic Institute in Berlin, and who later was the first to support his decision to leave Mühlhausen, something no Roebling had done before.

In Berlin, he had studied architecture, bridge construction, and hydraulics. He also studied philosophy under Hegel, who, according to one biographical memoir, “avowed that John Roebling was his favorite pupil.” The renowned philosopher had been preaching a powerful doctrine of self-realization and the supremacy of reason to a generation of ardent young liberals hemmed in by an autocratic Prussian regime. The effect was pronounced, and not the least on Roebling. The contact with Hegel was a privilege and a calamity for Roebling, according to an old family friend in Trenton. Hegel had taught Roebling to think independently, he said, and to rely on the validity of his own conclusions, but the experience was a calamity “because it begat a pride and arrogance of opinion and a frigid intellectuality that came near putting the heart of him into cold storage.” But according to family tradition, it was Hegel who started the young man thinking about America. “It is a land of hope for all who are wearied of the historic armory of old Europe,” Hegel taught. There the future would be built. There in all that “immeasurable space” a man might determine his own destiny.

For three years after leaving Berlin, Roebling worked in an obligatory job building roads for the Prussian government. Once during a holiday in Bavaria, he had hiked to the old cathedral town of Bamberg, where he saw his first suspension bridge, a new iron chain bridge over the Regnitz and known locally as the “miracle bridge.” He walked about it, made a number of sketches, and it is the traditional story that he decided then and there on his life’s career.

In any event, not long afterward, in the spring of 1831, the year Hegel would die of cholera, Roebling returned to Mühlhausen and began organizing a party of pilgrims to leave for America, something that had to be done with caution just then since the government frowned on the immigration of anyone with technical training.

Talk of immigration was a common thing in Germany. Ever since the July Revolution of the previous year, there had been increasingly less personal freedom, less opportunity for anyone with ambition. Nothing could be accomplished, Roebling would write, “without first having an army of government councilors, ministers, and other functionaries deliberate about it for ten years, make numerous expensive journeys by post, and write so many long reports about it, that for the amount expended for all this, reckoning compound interest for ten years, the work could have been completed.”

In the first week of May there had been the farewell visits with school friends and aged aunts, the last Sunday at church, the final evening walks through the ancient cobblestone streets. Then on the morning of the 11th, with his older brother Karl and a number of others, he had set off. His determination now was to become…an American farmer! Having had no previous experience in agriculture, having nothing in his background, training, or temperament that would indicate any interest in or bent for such work, he would become a man of the soil, in a distant land he knew only by reputation. The architect, the scholar, the musician, the philosopher, the engineer, the burning liberal idealist, the twenty-four-year-old bachelor, would now plant himself, willfully, somewhere in the American wilderness. His ambition was to establish his own community, which if not utopian in the religious sense—like Harmony, Pennsylvania, or some of the other earlier settlements founded by zealous Germans—would at least provide the honest German farmer, tradesman, or mechanic, men good with their hands and accustomed to work, a place where they could make the most of themselves, which to Roebling’s particular way of thinking would be about the nearest thing possible to heaven on earth.

He never saw Mühlhausen or Germany again. In 1867, to prepare for the bridge at Brooklyn, he had sent his son Washington and his pretty, pregnant daughter-in-law back across the Atlantic. It was a journey he would have liked to have made himself no doubt. He could have returned in triumph. As it was, the young couple arrived at Mühlhausen to a rousing welcome, and in a small inn across the street from the old family home, his first grandson and namesake had been born. Later, he had sent the town a sizable gift of cash in gratitude.

In a bookshop in Mühlhausen in 1867, Washington Roebling found a rare printed edition of the journal his father had kept on route to America, which Washington carried with him on his own return voyage.
Diary of My Journey from Muehlhausen in Thuringia via Bremen to the United States of North America in the Year 1831
it is titled. It is an extraordinary little document, a recognized classic of its kind, describing days of howling winds and high seas, and a steamboat—the first Roebling had been—laboring mightily by, and later, like a specter, a derelict hulk of an abandoned sailing ship, a huge brig with all sails gone, drifting on the horizon; then days of no wind and bad drinking water, the burial at sea of a child, and at last, on a night in July, the smell of land in a warm westerly wind. “The odor was strikingly distant and…would also indicate that the entire American mainland is covered with an almost uninterrupted forest and a great abundance of plants, whereby the atmosphere is saturated with aromatic particles, which the winds blowing away from land carry away to a great distance. This scent of land produced a beneficial effect upon all the passengers.”

His band of pilgrims consisted of fifty-three men, women, and children, most of whom had never laid eyes on salt water. Their ship was the
August Eduard,
a 230-ton American packet bound for Philadelphia, which, in all, took eleven weeks to make port, or longer than it had taken Columbus to make his first crossing.

Roebling himself was an immigrant of a kind the history books would pay little attention to, chiefly because they were so relatively few in number. He was seeking neither religious freedom nor release from the bondage of poverty. His quest was for something else. He came equipped with the finest education Europe could offer, he had a profession, and he was traveling first class, which meant he had one bed among four in a cabin he described as “very roomy” and “excellently lighted.” Between them, he and his brother were also carrying something in the neighborhood of six thousand dollars in cash, a princely sum, and he had come on board with a whole trunkful of books—thick geographies, works of physics and chemistry, a German-French dictionary, Euclid’s
Elements,
volumes of English literature and poetry, and one of English essays that opened with a favorite quote from Johnson: “No man was ever great by imitation.”

What the American captain and his crew thought of this spare, incredibly energetic young German can be imagined. He started right off, for example, by instructing them on how to build a proper privy for the passengers in steerage, whose only facility was the usual sailor’s seat perched precariously outside the stem of the ship, beside the bowsprit. Such an arrangement, Roebling announced, was altogether unacceptable for the women and children, or for anyone who might become sick or weakened by the voyage. He and the other cabin passengers, like the ship’s officers, were entitled to use a relatively comfortable, enclosed affair that protected its occupant from sudden waves washing across the deck. The same or better should be made available for all on board, Roebling declared. He explained how it could be done and it was done. “If one earnestly desires it,” he wrote, “everything will be brought to pass, even on board a ship…” The great thing, he believed, was getting people “to leave the accustomed rut.”