The Great Bridge (42 page)

There was no work going on at the bridge all this time, other than paper work at the Fulton Street offices. Snow piled up in the yards. The two towers stood idle on either side of the ice-choked river. But Roebling in his bedroom on Hicks Street labored on, fighting with everything he had. In his condition writing for even half an hour was a terrible strain. He became extremely nervous and found he could no longer carry on an extended conversation with his assistants, who had been reporting regularly for instructions. His eyes began to fail. He thought he was going blind.

By early spring, when the weather was such that the men could return to the towers, it was common knowledge among the bridge workers that the Chief Engineer would not be resuming his command for some time, if ever. It had been decided that C. C. Martin would be authorized to certify bills and the masonry work would proceed as before. In April Roebling formally requested a leave of absence. His doctors had told him his only chance to live was to get away from his work. He and Emily had decided to go to Europe, to the health baths at Wiesbaden. The trip would be a frightful ordeal for him, but in this the darkest time he had ever known, he would turn for relief to Germany and the water cure. His feelings at the time can only be guessed at. But possibly in quiet desperation, everything else having failed, he had concluded that if the ways of his father had put him in this corner, then perhaps they might get him out as well.

Later that same spring of 1873, Dr. Andrew H. Smith presented the formal report on his experience as Surgeon to the New York Bridge Company, in which he included certain suggestions for future projects of a similar nature. The most important thing to do, he said, was to have some sort of facilities by which compressed air could be readily accessible
above
ground.

The concept of the apparatus described by Smith in this proposal is precisely the same as the so-called “hospital lock” used for modern bridge and tunnel construction, whenever men are working in compressed air. Had Smith installed such a device at the New York caisson, and had it been used in the way he describes, there would have been little or no suffering from the bends by anyone, there would have been no deaths, and the subsequent life of Washington Roebling and the story of the bridge would have been very different.

IT TOOK
three more years to complete the towers. The Brooklyn tower, started a year earlier than the other one, was finished a year before, in June 1875. And the last stone on the New York tower was set in July 1876, right when the country, with surprising exuberance and a seemingly insatiable delight in fireworks, was celebrating its one hundredth birthday.

Times had changed considerably. The terrible panic of 1873 had struck, worse than any ever before. The country had still not recovered from it and would not for some time. Incredibly, Jay Cooke & Company, the most famous banking firm of the day, had gone bankrupt. In no time one Wall Street firm after another had gone under. Thousands of businesses, mostly small ones, had been wiped out and thousands upon thousands of working people lost their jobs. The streets of New York had been filled with drifters and unemployed ever since.

But for all that the country kept growing, moving ahead. The poor and the hopeful kept streaming in from Europe, landing in New York, passing by the hundreds of thousands through the shabby, makeshift clearing point at Castle Garden.

Most Americans were anything but dissatisfied with the times. Simple, ingenious devices were coming along one after another, changing the way people lived and the look of the land in the most astonishing fashion—barbed wire and ready-made windmills for settlers on the Great Plains, to name but two.

In Hartford, Connecticut, Mark Twain was busy working on
Huckleberry Finn.
Edison was working on electric light at Menlo Park, New Jersey. Carnegie had built the Edgar Thomson works, the biggest steel mill on earth, at Braddock, Pennsylvania, and was producing Bessemer steel in quantities unheard of at the start of the decade. Big corporations were growing bigger, and though some railroads were going bankrupt, other lines kept right on expanding. More and more railroad tunnels and railroad bridges were built, including the nation’s most celebrated new bridge and its longest tunnel.

In St. Louis, Eads had finished his work. The bridge was hailed as an engineering marvel, which it was. A placard over one arch read: “The Mississippi discovered by Marquette, 1673; spanned by Captain Eads, 1874.” “The love of praise is, I believe, common to all men,” Eads had said in a speech that day, “and whether it be a frailty or a virtue, I plead no exception from its fascination.”

Then in Massachusetts, later that same year, on Thanksgiving Day, the record-breaking Hoosac Tunnel had been completed, nearly twenty-six years after it was first begun, and at a cost of ten million dollars and an appalling 195 lives, most of them lost because of inexperience in using nitroglycerin.

In New York the nation’s tallest office building had been completed, the ten-story Western Union Telegraph Building, designed by the architect George B. Post. With its tower rising 230 feet above Dey Street, it was still nearly 50 feet less than the top of the New York tower of the great bridge.

Mayor Havemeyer was dead and Tweed was out of jail and on the loose somewhere. One morning in December 1875, Tweed had left the Ludlow Street Jail, with his son and two guards, to take a carriage ride. Tweed had wanted some fresh air. On the way back, they had stopped off at his house and were sitting in the parlor when he asked if he might go upstairs to see his wife. The guards had agreed and that had been the last anyone had seen of Tweed.

Across the river, beside the Brooklyn tower, a new ferryhouse had been built, a costly expression of confidence in the future of the ferry system, bridge or no bridge. The building stood where the old one had, at the foot of Fulton Street, but it was a much more elaborate affair, with tall mansard roofs, a particularly elegant cupola, and in a niche over the main entranceway, a life-sized statue of Robert Fulton now gazed impassively over the throngs of commuters that swarmed in and out below. New business buildings had gone up in Brooklyn. New industries had been started, whole new residential sections had been built. The sound of hammer and nails was still one of the characteristics of the place.

But the event that had stirred people up more than any other, more really than anything that had happened in Brooklyn since the war, was the Beecher-Tilton Trial, which began in the City Courthouse in January 1875. Theodore Tilton had decided to bring suit against Beecher for alienation of his wife’s affections. The show lasted six months and was the talk of the country. Beecher denied every charge against him. Not until late June, when the Brooklyn tower was being finished, did the jury retire. Then eight seemingly interminable days went by—the summer heat stupendous—before the jury returned to report no decision. Immediate tumult had broken out in the courtroom, with Beecher’s parishioners rejoicing as though he had been completely vindicated.

Whether Beecher was guilty of adultery with Theodore Tilton’s shy and decidedly neurotic little wife would never be proved. Beecher had turned out to be an inconsistent, fumbling witness. His testimony, like nearly everything said at the trial, had been treated by the papers as news of the highest importance, and a large part of the American public, not to mention the populace of Brooklyn and New York, had concluded he was just as guilty as could be.

Writers of later generations would decide that Beecher was absolutely guilty and, in general, a posturing fraud. He would be portrayed as the prime example of Victorian hypocrisy and his trial described as a watershed in the nation’s social history. But it does not appear as though the people of the time saw it quite that way. For the millions of Americans who had read the word from Plymouth Church, week after week, for nearly thirty years, taking it as very nearly the word of the Almighty, Beecher’s fall was assuredly a shattering blow. Still, nobody seems to have discarded his religion overnight, or his notions of right and wrong, because of what the Reverend Henry Ward Beecher allegedly did with Mrs. Tilton. Moreover, a great many people who thought Beecher might be guilty after all would continue to regard him as an extraordinary human being and felt he had suffered more than enough. And a very great many more people would believe in his innocence until their dying day. As a matter of fact, it is altogether possible that Beecher
was
innocent.

But apart from all that, something had very definitely happened in Brooklyn to the way people regarded the place. Brooklyn’s cherished reputation for respectability had suffered irreparable damage. The name Beecher could be an emblem no more. Rightly or not, the man had been pulled down by a running tide of public sensation over what a pamphlet of the day called “Wickedness in High Places.” No longer could the East River be viewed, as it had by many on the Heights, as the great dividing line between good and evil. No longer could Plymouth Church be regarded as the symbolic center of Protestant American virtue or as Brooklyn’s answer to Tammany Hall. So by the time the talk had turned to other momentous events of the day, to the great Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia, for example, Brooklyn had but one monument to take pride in. Brooklyn now had its bridge. The plain, barnlike church, never much of an architectural beauty, had been replaced by the immense Gothic bridge, which had been under way for seven years now, but still had a long way to go.

Building the bridge without the Chief Engineer on hand to direct things had posed no serious problems. The plans were very clear, his written instructions quite thorough, to say the least. Nor was there anything especially novel or complicated about the work. Most of it was straightforward masonry construction, the only significant difference being the immense size and height of the towers. (The towers were actually eight and a half feet higher even than John Roebling had initially said they would be. This was one of several changes that had been made as the work progressed. The height of the completed towers above the water was 276 feet 6 inches.)

But Roebling, it must also be remembered, was served by an exceedingly able staff of assistants, all of whom had been on the job since the beginning and each of whom had developed an uncommon loyalty both to the work and to the Chief Engineer.

“…probably no great work was ever conducted by a man who had to work under so many disadvantages,” Emily Roebling would write in time to come, when her own role in the engineering of the bridge had become the talk of Brooklyn. “It could never have been accomplished but for the unselfish devotion of his assistant engineers. Each man had a certain department in charge and they worked with all their energies to have the work properly done according to Colonel Roebling’s plans and wishes and not to carry out any pet theories of their own or for their own self-glorification.”

Martin, the senior man among them, efficient, pleasant, colorless, was still serving as Roebling’s stand-in, supervising the work over-all. Collingwood, the Elmira jeweler whose initial intention had been to stay with the job only a month, was now assigned to completing the Brooklyn tower, while the inventive and reliable Paine had charge of the New York tower.

Once the Brooklyn tower was finished, Collingwood went across the river to take charge of the New York anchorage, that foursquare masonry pile, which, with its pair of deep arches, looked like the beginnings of a Roman bath. The anchorage was already as high as an eight-story building. It stood nine hundred feet inland from the New York tower and filled most of the block between Cherry and Water Streets. Four great cables descending from the tower would be secured to this mass on top, up near the end closest to the tower. The cables from the tower to the anchorage would carry what would be known as the land span of the bridge. They would be fixed to chains of huge iron bars that disappeared into the anchorage and were, in turn, tied to four great cast-iron anchor plates embedded deep within the granite, in the heel of the anchorage, as it were, down near the level of the street.

The dimensions of the New York anchorage and that of the one in Brooklyn were 119 by 129 feet at the base and 104 by 117 feet on top. For the time being the two structures stood just over eighty feet high, bristling on top with the same sort of timber derricks and other stone-hoisting apparatus used on the towers. Once the cables were finished, more stone would be added, taking the level up to that of the roadway, or to nearly ninety feet. The final total weight of each anchorage would be 120 million pounds, or sixty thousand tons.

Had either one of them been built someplace elsewhere, it would have been regarded as most imposing and awe-inspiring, in the way the Brooklyn tower had been when it loomed up all alone at a height of eighty feet. But standing in line with one of the towers, an anchorage did not look like much. The towers attracted all the attention, understandably. Still, in terms of the engineering involved, the anchorages were extremely interesting and their importance to the bridge was very great indeed.

Roebling wrote that there were but two factors to deal with in the anchorages—granite and gravity. The first he described as “a material whose very existence is a defiance to the ‘gnawing tooth of time’”; the second he called the only immutable law in nature; “hence, when I place a certain amount of dead weight, in the shape of granite, on the anchor plates, I know it will remain there beyond all contingencies.”
*

The anchor plates—four to an anchorage, one for each cable—had been set in position during the early stages of the stonework. Their general shape, as Roebling said in his specifications, was that of an immense oval spider, 16 by 17.5 feet and 2.5 feet thick. They weighed 46,000 pounds, or twenty-three tons, apiece and just getting them into position properly had taken some doing.

The plates rested flat at the bottom of the stone mass, like mushroom-style ship anchors standing upright. Each of them had been cast with two parallel rows of nine oblong apertures into which eighteen of the iron eyebars were placed, set perfectly erect, making thereby two identical upright rows of nine bars each. The anchor bars, as they were called, stood twice as tall as a man and had an eye at each end. They had each been forged in a single piece, smooth, flat, and exactly like the others to be used in the same position—no easy trick at the time.

(Roebling had had to decide whether to use iron or steel for anchor bars. During his visit to the Krupp works at Essen, in 1867, the managers had forged an all-steel prototype for his inspection but could not guarantee the quality he wanted. So he settled on wrought iron. Several different mills produced the bars—the Keystone Bridge Company, the Edge Moor Iron Company, the Phoenix Iron Company—and as William Kingsley wrote, the finished products were considered “splendid specimens of what American manufacturers can do.”)

Below the underside of the anchor plate, through the nine eyes of each row, all matched in position as one, big steel pins were inserted and drawn up against the plate, fitting into semicylindrical grooves, and thereby forming the first link, a double-tiered link, of a gigantic double-tiered eyebar chain that extended up through the masonry in a gradual arc until it surfaced on top.

The anchor bars were of slightly different sizes, depending on their position in the chain, but they averaged twelve and a half feet in length, and in the first three links—those nearest the anchor plates, where the pull from the cables would be felt the least—they were seven inches wide and three inches thick, swelling enough toward the ends to compensate for eyeholes five to six inches in diameter. The bars of the fourth, fifth, and sixth “links,” however, were increased in thickness, to eight by three inches, and from there to the top, as the bars became horizontal and so came directly in line with the pull of the cable, they measured nine by three, except for the last link, where the number of bars was doubled and their width was halved. The last link had in all thirty-eight bars, in four tiers, to catch hold of the cable wires. Washington Roebling had spent months working out the entire arrangement.