The Great Bridge (44 page)

On June 5, 1874, nearly two years after Demas Barnes first proposed changes in the original charter, the state legislature in Albany passed an amendment requiring that the cities of Brooklyn and New York be given increased representation among the directors of the Bridge Company. The mayor and the comptroller of each city were to pick eight directors and the mayor and the comptroller of each city were themselves to be directors. The bridge was formally declared a public highway and given a legal name at long last, The New York and Brooklyn Bridge. Then in May of the following year an act was put through dissolving the New York Bridge Company entirely and redefining the bridge as “a public work, to be constructed by the two cities for the accommodation, convenience and safe travel of the inhabitants…” Two-thirds of the cost was to be met by the city of Brooklyn, the remaining third by the city of New York. Private stockholders were reimbursed for their previous payments, with interest, and their title was extinguished.

But once again the old management survived—Murphy as president of the trustees (instead of the old Board of Directors), Kingsley now a member of the Executive Committee instead of superintendent. There was no change either in the engineering staff. So except for Roebling’s physical absence from the scene, the cast of characters was no different from what it had been at the start.

Most of the business of the company was still being conducted behind closed doors. But like the immense, irrefutable presence of the granite towers, a law on the books making the bridge the possession of the people did something important to the way the people felt about the bridge.

Early in July of 1876 the New York papers carried accounts of a new apparatus constructed by Colonel Paine at the New York tower by which he could test the strength of steel wire. In Brooklyn the
Eagle
ran long, optimistic articles titled “The Present Condition of the Work.” “Before winter shall drive the workmen from their positions,” the editors wrote, “we shall see the first strands of the great cable stretching aloft, spanning the river.” A contract for 120 tons of steel wire (“best quality”) was being filled by the Chrome Steel Company of Brooklyn. The bridge, the
Eagle
reported, would be finished in three more years and added that the engineers in charge were the very best in the business. “One thing is certain, the Bridge Company have been exceedingly fortunate in securing the services of professional gentlemen who are without peer in their respective fields and whose talent and genius have enabled them to surmount every obstacle…” The leadership was all in the plural now. There was no mention of Washington Roebling.

Presently, about the middle of July, Paine reported that the gigantic saddle plates were in position, each weighing 26,000 pounds, or thirteen tons. There were eight of them, four mounted on top of each tower. They were the bases for the big iron saddles, so called, on which the cables would ride. The saddles went up soon after that. They stood about four feet high, rested on rollers, and were elliptical in shape, with a groove on top, about the size of a barrelhead, in which the cable would sit. Each saddle could work to and fro on the rollers, according to the pull of its cable, and thereby alleviate any lateral strain on the tower.

The movable saddles, like the big expansion joints that were to be built into the actual roadway, were essential to the stability of the bridge. Its capacity to move, the fact that it would
not
be perfectly rigid like a stone bridge, was the thing that would keep it alive, as the engineers said.

Then in early August, when everything seemed to be in order, it was announced that the first wire would be taken across. The bridge was half built.

FOR THE
public the exact whereabouts of the Chief Engineer was a matter of considerable mystery. It was known that he was in a bad way, but nobody seemed sure just where he was or what was wrong with him or how much say he had in the bridge anymore. The papers did nothing to clear up the rumors.

Much nonsense would be written about Roebling in time to come. The impression given would be that he was still in Brooklyn all the while, living in a house overlooking the river, where, from an upstairs window, he kept watch over every move made at the bridge, sending his wife back and forth to tell the men what to do. But this was not the case, not during this particular stage in the story.

Roebling’s original intention, it seems, had been to stay in Wiesbaden only a month or two. But he and Emily had stayed on in the old resort on the Rhine for nearly six months, hoping against hope that the warm alkaline springs would work a transformation for him. Not until late in 1873 did they return to Brooklyn and then they stayed only long enough to purchase a new house on Columbia Heights, on the river side of the street, with rear windows overlooking the bridge, which was about half a mile away.

The journey to Wiesbaden had been to no avail and early in 1874, with the work at the bridge shut down for the winter, his doctors were urging still another change of scene. Roebling left Brooklyn for Trenton this time and there he stayed for nearly three more years.

So the entire time the towers were being finished, the anchorages built, the cable-making machinery assembled and set in position, the Chief Engineer was nowhere near the bridge and could see nothing of it. And in light of this fact his achievements seem all the more phenomenal, for a vigilance from Trenton was an even more extraordinary feat than it would have been from a bay window on Brooklyn Heights.

As it was, the day-by-day progress of the work, the changes in procedure and equipment, the advance preparations for the very different kind of work to come, all went on in his mind, supported only by letters from his assistants, or from Henry Murphy on occasion. His own orders and instructions had to be issued by return mail. The elaborate, formal specifications now required for all materials purchased he also drew up himself—an enormous task.

It was well after he left Brooklyn, for example, that he did the specifications for the granite for the New York tower, for the face stone, arch stone, and spandrel courses.

He described precisely how the stone should be cut and joined, how it should be unloaded at the dock, the requirements for delivery. This particular set of specifications was prepared in the fall and the winter of 1874, but at about the same time and shortly thereafter, he also drew up complete specifications for the granite and the limestone backing for the New York anchorage, for the anchor bars and anchor plates, the saddles and saddle plates, and for the several varieties of wire rope needed (steel footbridge rope, iron handrail rope, iron ropes for guy wires under the footbridge).

He had help with all this, of course, from whichever assistant he had assigned to that particular part of the work in question. Still, he had to provide general guidelines for them, evaluate everything they provided in return, make refinements, and make the final decisions on every item.

Inevitably certain details had to be discussed at length with the other engineers, or explained to various members of the Board of Trustees, and all this required voluminous, tiresome correspondence. But always, when it came to making his views known, his language was patient, plain, and to the point. There was never any doubt as to what he wanted done or why he wanted it done that way.

His knowledge of everything happening at the bridge, his total confidence about how each successive step ought to be taken, the infinite, painstaking care he took, seemed absolutely uncanny to the others back in Brooklyn. Had his communications on technical matters alone been written by a healthy man who was regularly on the scene, they would have been regarded as exceptional. But the idea that they were emanating from a sickroom sixty miles away seemed almost beyond belief.

He was attentive to more personal matters as well. He wrote to Collingwood to suggest remedies for a kidney ailment. He requested salary increases for Martin, from $5,000 to $6,000 a year; for Collingwood, from $3,000 to $3,600; and for Farrington, from day wages to “$3,000 per annum.” (The raises went through.) He approved the hiring of an assistant for Hildenbrand, an RPI man named Theodore Cooper, who had worked for Eads in St. Louis. Cooper was to be an inspector of iron for the superstructure.
*
When the work stopped in winter and Murphy, to save money, began letting men go, Roebling urged that the best of them be kept on. How could they ever replace a man like Hildenbrand, he asked. And in early 1875, when it had looked as though the work might have to stop altogether because money was running short, his seemed the one last voice of confidence. At the close of a long, persuasive letter to Murphy, he wrote:

His own condition was much more serious and complicated than generally realized at the time, or than would be said in print later. He was worse even than when he left for Europe. He was in pain much of the time, in his stomach, in his joints and limbs. He suffered from savage headaches. Some days he was so weak he could scarcely hold up his head. Still, miserable as he was physically, he was not so bad off as he would be portrayed. “There is a popular impression that Colonel Roebling has been for years a helpless paralytic,” Emily Roebling would write in some private notes put down later. “This is a mistake as he has never been paralyzed for even one moment and there never has been a time when he has not had the full use of every member of his body.”

The major problem was that his nervous system was shattered. The slightest noise upset him terribly. He was still hounded by visions of his own death before the work could be finished, of disastrous incompetence on the part of some subordinate, of precious days lost at the bridge over some technical problem he could solve in a minute were he there. He felt imprisoned within his own body. He grew extremely short-tempered. When visitors were with him he suffered the whole while. Talk of any kind tired him more than anything else. His eyesight had grown so dim he could neither read nor write nor sign his own name.

His troubles were not solely the bends anymore. That was clear to those who had any regular contact with him. The standard explanation then, and later, was that he was suffering still from the bends. While residual pains and discomforts of the bends can persist, occasionally over a lifetime, the bends were only part of his problem. It is extremely unlikely, for example, that the bends could, at this stage, have had anything to do with his failing eyesight or the terrible discomfort he suffered whenever people were around.

When describing his own condition in private correspondence, Roebling himself does not seem to have used the words “bends” or “caisson sickness.” He spoke only of a nervous disorder and of his crippled physical condition. Farrington would later describe him as being a “confirmed invalid…owing to exposure, overwork and anxiety.” There is, indeed, every indication that the strain he was under, the limits he had pushed himself to during the winter of 1872-73 to get everything down on paper, the anguish and massive frustration of knowing so much about what ought to be done but able to do so very little—all that on top of the physical torment of the caisson sickness, had brought on what in that day was called “nervous prostration.”

He always told others his agony was his own doing. He had pushed himself too far he said. He longed for rest. It was the one and only cure he had faith in, but he simply had no time for that.

Collingwood, it seems, was also nearing a collapse of some sort and Roebling, gravely concerned about his old college friend, offered some revealing advice:

This letter, like all his correspondence with Brooklyn, the specifications and the rest, was dictated to Emily, who was in constant attendance as both nurse and private secretary. Gray-faced, he would lie propped up in bed or sit like an old man with a blanket over him in a chair by the window. She would sit close by taking down what he said in a letter book. When he had finished, she would read it back to him. He would make a few corrections, then she would do a final draft, in longhand, and read that back to him once more. As a result, week by week, month by month, she was learning quite a lot about the engineering of a wire suspension bridge.

The physical pain came and went. Frequently there were whole days when he felt well enough to be up and about the house. But everyone had to take extreme care not to upset him in any way. Since childhood he had been interested in geology and in collecting minerals. Now they became a passion. He began sending to one place and another around the country for different specimens. How he was able to take any enjoyment from them, with his sight so impaired, is a puzzle. But he did. Once, with a check for some new specimens, he had Emily include a note of explanation. “I am an invalid confined to the house and minerals are the only things that do not tire or excite me.”

A few incidents concerning the bridge upset him no end. Somebody in Brooklyn had suggested there was a secret connection between the Roebling wire works and Carnegie’s Keystone Bridge Company, implying that had been the reason why Keystone, not the lowest bidder, got a contract for anchor bars. Livid, deeply insulted, Roebling had sent off an icy reply to Murphy, saying he had no interest in the Keystone company, financially, politically, socially, or any other way, and further stated that if the policy henceforth was to give “contracts for supplies to the lowest bidders, irrespective of all other considerations, I hereby absolve myself from all responsibility connected with the successful carrying on of this work.” It sounded perilously like a letter of resignation.

The Eads lawsuit had also been a continuing aggravation for years now. In 1871 Eads had put in a claim for five thousand dollars, saying that Roebling, in the New York caisson, had infringed on the design he had used in St. Louis. Roebling called the charge absurd. But presently, after Roebling was stricken with the bends, Eads had angrily attacked him in the pages of
Engineering,
the esteemed English journal. The thing that had set Eads off was a harmless paper by Roebling published in
Engineering
in which Roebling had not, in Eads’s opinion, credited Eads properly for placing his air locks at the bottom of the shafts, part way inside the air chamber, instead of on top. Eads claimed he had been the first to do it that way and said Roebling should have said as much. He accused Roebling of stealing the idea and in a rather snide, roundabout fashion dismissed the younger man for having no creative talents of his own.

Eads’s letter was written in April 1873, but it did not appear in the magazine until later in the spring, when Roebling had just arrived at Wiesbaden, in no shape for any more emotional strain than he was already under. In a fury he wrote in answer to Eads’s letter: “Its perusal has left only the one prominent impression on my mind, that his skill in blowing his own trumpet is only surpassed by his art in writing abusive and unjust articles about other people.” Roebling said he had always had the greatest respect for Eads until then. He said he had designed his New York caisson before he ever saw anything of Eads’s plans or went out to St. Louis. “My actual experience in the St. Louis caisson,” he wrote, “consisted in nearly breaking my neck, and being half drowned in the bottom of a pitch-dark hole—certainly a forcible way of reminding one where the lock was located.” He said, furthermore, that Eads had ridiculed his idea of using timber for the caissons, that Eads’s prior interest in caissons had been scant and superficial, and that it was ridiculous to think that the position of an air lock was something that could be patented. “You might as well patent contrivances in a ship’s rigging if she were loaded with grain or cotton, or entirely empty.”