The Great Bridge (5 page)

His curiosity about all aspects of seamanship, navigation, ocean currents, rules for passengers, or the personal life history of the captain and each member of the crew seemed inexhaustible. He wanted to know the name of every sail, every stay, brace, bowline, halyard, every rope and how each one worked and he made diagrams to be sure he understood. He talked to the captain (“a very just, straightforward, and
sober
man”) about astronomy, meteorology, philosophy, history, about Isaac Newton and the American coinage system. He was the first one on deck in the morning and generally the last to leave at night, and once, when nearly every passenger was miserably seasick and lay groaning in his berth, Roebling, his head spinning, his stomach churning, was resolutely walking the deck. The malady, he rationalized, “involves no danger at all,” noting that “a cheerful carefree disposition and a manly, vigorous spirit will have great influence on the sickness.”

For his son there must have been places in the old diary where the youthful and impressionable narrator seemed a little difficult to identify with the father he had known. One entry, for example, was taken up almost entirely with a long, vivid description of waves. Apparently his father had stood at the bowsprit watching them for hours on end and to no particular purpose. In the account of phosphorescence after dark, as the sea rebounded from the sides of the ship, it was as though the writer had been caught up in a spell:

For the moment—except possibly for the word “friction”—it was as if nature was not something to be explained endlessly or to be “rendered subservient,” as John Roebling would say in another time and place. And again, as the ship headed into Delaware Bay, there is a moment when the gifted young graduate of Berlin’s Polytechnic Institute reflects with sadness on the Indians who once lived on shore—“quietly on the property inherited from their ancestors,” long before “the sheltered loneliness of these wild surroundings was interrupted by the all-disturbing European.”

From Philadelphia, Roebling and his followers headed west across Pennsylvania, having decided to settle on the other side of the Alleghenies. At Pittsburgh he and Karl purchased some seven thousand acres located to the north, in Butler County, not far from Harmony (the price was $1.37 an acre, with a thousand dollars down and the balance to be paid in two equal yearly installments
“without
interest,” as he wrote home). And there he established his town, first laying out one broad Main Street exactly east-west, in the German fashion. He called the town Germania for a while, but then changed it to Saxonburg.

Roebling had concluded, his son Washington would write in jest, that western Pennsylvania was destined to be “the future center of the universe with the future Saxonburg as the head center, which then was a primeval forest where wild pigeons would not even light.”

“My father would have made a good advertising agent,” Washington would remark at another time. “He wrote at least a hundred letters to friends in and about Mühlhausen, extolling the virtues of the place—its fine climate—the freedom from restraint—the certainty of employment, etc. Many accepted and came. To each one was sent exact directions how to come, what to take—what to bring along, and what to leave behind. Most tools were to be left behind, because American tools were so much better, such as axes, hatchets, saws, grubbing hoes—nodody could cut down a tree with a German ax.”

The beginning is hard, Roebling had warned. But there were “no unbearable taxes,” no police commissioners. And finally: “If this region is built up by industrious Germans, then it can become an earthly paradise.” But the soil turned out to be mostly clay, the winters were bleak and bitterly cold, and the roads to Pittsburgh or to Freeport, the nearest point on the Allegheny River, were “atrocious.”

Among the early arrivals there were only two who knew a thing about farming. But according to one of the old histories of the town, they all “possessed to a remarkable degree the valuable attribute of industry, and, though many of their first attempts were ludicrous and miserable failures, they yet persevered until they became adepts at handling the ax and agricultural implements.” Every newcomer was heartily welcomed and encouraged to stay. Presently more and more did come and settle and the surrounding country, only sparsely settled earlier by Scotch-Irish, began filling up with Germans. “They have made good farmers,” an old Butler County history concludes, “succeeding, by patient industry and close economy, in gaining an independent condition where the people of almost any other nationality would have failed, in a majority of instances, to have secured more than a mere living.”

The first building to go up in Saxonburg was a plain two-story house built by Roebling at the head of Main Street. It was clapboard on the outside, but brick behind that, and like everything he ever built, it was built to last. Five years later Saxonburg, if not exactly paradise, was at least a going concern, populated by a weaver, a grocer, a blacksmith, a cabinetmaker, about six carpenters, a tanner, a miller, a baker, a shoemaker, a Mecklenburg tailor, a Mühlhausen tailor, one artist, one brewer, a veteran of Waterloo, and an increasing number of plain farmers with names like Emmerich, Rudert, Goelbel, Heckert, Graff, Schwietering, Nagler, and Helmhold. And in May 1836, in his own front parlor, Roebling married Johanna Herting, the oldest daughter of the Mühlhausen tailor.

But in less than a year, with everything going about as well as he could have hoped, Roebling seems to have run up against the one problem he had not figured on. He had become bored. When he heard the state was in need of surveyors, he immediately wrote to Harrisburg. That was in 1837, the year he became a citizen, the year Karl died of sunstroke while working in a wheat field, the year Roebling became a father for the first time. In a letter to the chief engineer of the Sandy and Beaver Canal, he wrote, “I cannot reconcile myself to be altogether destitute of practical occupation…”

“So he took to engineering again, his true vocation,” Washington Roebling
wrote, “and let my mother do the farming again,
which she did very well
when he would let her.” By the time the son was old enough to understand such things, the father’s agrarian dream, if indeed that is what it was, was long since over.

Roebling built dams and locks on the Sandy and Beaver, between the Ohio and the lakes, then on the Allegheny feeder of the Pennsylvania Canal near Freeport. In 1839 he began surveying a prospective railroad route east of Pittsburgh that would later be adopted, in part, by the Pennsylvania Railroad. Living in tents, working in all kinds of weather through the roughest kind of wilderness, he and a few assistants covered more than 150 miles, plotting a line through the Alleghenies. His work was such that he was made Principal Assistant to the Chief Engineer of the state, a man named Charles L. Schlatter, and his report to Schlatter included not only full details on the grades, embankments, bridges, and tunnels required, but a number of prophetic observations about the locale around the village of Johnstown, where one of the nation’s principal iron and steel industries would one day rise. “The iron ore on the Laurel Hill is only waiting for means of transportation to be conveyed to the rich coal basins below, where also limestone is to be had in quantity and, moreover, where an abundance of water power can be furnished by the never-failing waters of the beautiful mountain stream…and certainly capitalists could hardly find a more eligible situation for starting mammoth furnaces on the largest scale…”

At Johnstown he also became familiar with the workings of the newly built Portage Railroad, a system of long, inclined planes devised to haul canalboats up and over the Alleghenies, between Hollidaysburg at the foot of the eastern slope and Johnstown at the foot of the western slope. It was popularly thought to be one of the engineering marvels of the age and Roebling was fascinated by it. He also decided, after a good deal of study, that it could be greatly improved by dispensing with the immense hemp hawsers then in use. These were about nine inches around, more than a mile long in some cases and cost nearly three thousand dollars. They also wore out in relatively short time and had to be replaced or, as happened more than once, they snapped in two, sending their loads crashing down the mountainside. In one such accident two men had been crushed to death.

Roebling proposed to replace the hawsers with an iron rope just an inch thick, a product not made in the United States then, but which he had read about in a German periodical. Such a rope, he said, would be stronger, last longer, and be much easier to handle. Apparently he was the only one who took the idea seriously, but he was told to go ahead and try if he had such confidence in it—at his own risk and expense.

He began fashioning his new product at Saxonburg some time in the summer of 1841, using the old ropewalk system on a long level meadow behind the church he had built soon after finishing his house. The wire, purchased from a mill at Beaver Falls, northwest of Pittsburgh, was spliced inside a small building and wound onto reels for “running out.” Separate strands of wire were laid up first, then twisted into the larger rope by means of a crude machine he had devised, which, like everything else in the process, was powered by hand.

A six-hundred-foot rope finished “in the best style,” as he said, was tried out at Johnstown in September and it was a failure. Someone hired by the hemp rope interests had secretly cut it at a splice, with the result that it broke during the test. But the sabotage was discovered, Roebling was given a second chance, and his rope worked with such success that it was soon adopted for the entire Portage system. Orders began coming in from other canals with similar inclined planes. The rope was wanted for dredging equipment, for pile drivers, for use in coal mines. Roebling published an article on it in the
Railroad Journal.
“His ambition now became boundless,” his son would write. Production in Saxonburg picked up sharply, as “farmers were metamorphosed into mechanics and an unlooked-for era of prosperity dawned.”

“About eight men were needed for strand making,” according to Washington Roebling, “but sixteen or eighteen were required for laying up the rope. These were recruited for a day or two from the village and adjacent farm—quite a task—in which I took my full share. The men were always glad to see me because it meant good pay and free meals for days. Work was from sunrise to sunset—three meals, with a snack of bread and butter in between—including whiskey. Meals were served at the house. My poor, overworked mother did the cooking—all done on an open hearth.”

John Roebling could be sure, he was told in an admiring letter from Charles Schlatter, that before long he would be “at the head of the list of those benefactors to mankind who employ science to useful purpose.”

In 1844, at age thirty-eight, he got his first real commission as an engineer. A prize of one hundred dollars had been offered in a notice in the Pittsburgh papers for “the best plan for a wooden or suspension aqueduct” to carry the Pennsylvania Canal across the Allegheny River in place of a ponderous, inadequate structure built years earlier by the state. Roebling worked out a plan for the world’s first suspension aqueduct. He made a model and went to Pittsburgh to enter the competition, which he won, mainly because his bid was the lowest. He built the aqueduct in record time. He worked nine months nonstop and when he was finished, Pittsburgh, at a cost of $62,000, had a structure unlike any in existence.

From two iron cables seven inches in diameter, he had suspended a big timber flume, crossing the river with seven spans of about 160 feet each. The flume was sixteen and a half feet wide and eight and a half feet deep. It carried something over two thousand tons of water and a steady procession of canal barges that floated across high over the Allegheny, hauled by mules that walked a narrow plank towpath.
*
“As this work is the first of the kind ever attempted,” wrote the
Railroad Journal,
“its construction speaks well for the enterprise of the city of Pittsburgh.” But in 1861, after the canal had been put out of business by the Pennsylvania Railroad that Roebling had helped to lay out, the aqueduct was pulled down.

The winter he built the aqueduct had been the most trying, strenuous period in his life. Not only had he designed it himself, but he had directed and participated in every step in its construction, in freezing winds, sleet, snow, going back and forth over the spindly catwalk or swinging along one of the cable strands in a little boatswain’s chair. The cables had been strung in place, wire by wire, in much the way his subsequent bridges would be. He had also devised a novel technique for anchoring the cables, attaching them to great chains of iron eyebars embedded in masonry, a plan not used in any prior suspension bridge and the one he would use on every bridge he built thereafter.

He had finished in exactly the time he had said he would and no one was more keenly aware of the real importance of what he had done than he. Judged against his later work, the bridge was crude, small, and uninspiring. And probably he knew the day it was finished that its life-span would be brief. The significant thing was that he had demonstrated the immense weight that could be borne by a suspension bridge, not to mention his own skill and integrity as a builder.