The Great Bridge (51 page)

The letter was a bombshell. This was the same Hewitt who, four months earlier, sitting in this same room, had called the specifications “eminently wise” and whose own much publicized resolution had supposedly resolved all ethical questions raised by Roebling’s ties to the wire business. Moreover, Hewitt happened also to be the very one who had urged Roebling
not
to specify crucible steel this time, but to leave the bidding open for Bessemer steel as well.

Still, Hewitt was the expert, supposedly, and a looming figure these days, particularly among Democrats. And irrespective of politics or personalities, grave suspicions had been raised by the Hill attack and even the fairest, most impartial men in the room were quite honestly at a loss to know just whom to go along with: Hewitt or Roebling?

Furthermore, in the back of everyone’s mind were two very recent sensational tragedies. On the night of December 5, the Brooklyn Theater, built by William Kingsley’s construction company and owned by his partner, Abner Keeney, had caught fire and 295 people had lost their lives, many of them because the balcony had collapsed. It was the worst disaster in the city’s history. Then on the night of December 29, one of the worst railroad disasters of the nineteenth century occurred when a bridge failed at Ashtabula, Ohio. The bridge was just eleven years old, a wrought-iron truss over a seventy-five-foot gorge. When a train pulled by two locomotives started across it in the middle of a snowstorm, the center span gave way. It was thought that the metal had failed somehow. Eighty lives were lost.

The newspapers were angrily crying for an explanation.
Harper’s Weekly
in its latest issue asked:

The chief engineer of the railroad, a man named Charles Collins, who had had nothing to do with the design of the bridge, but had examined it frequently and conscientiously, tendered his resignation, then committed suicide.

The Ashtabula bridge had not been cheaply built and the iron had not suddenly lost its strength in some mysterious fashion. As subsequent investigations would show, the bridge probably went down because the derailed wheels of several cars ripped the bridge floor, causing a violent pull of a kind the truss had not been built to withstand. But the idea of bad (cheap) metal failing had been planted in the public mind.
*

After Hewitt’s letter was read the bids were reviewed still one more time, at the request of “Honest John” Kelly, Comptroller of the City of New York, who had replaced Tweed as the head of Tammany Hall. General Aspinwall said the history of crucible steel was too well known to need further consideration. The whole matter resolved itself, he said, into the question of whether they would put into the cables of the bridge a wire made from steel, the strength of which might be in doubt, as was the case with Bessemer steel, or use crucible steel, about which there could be no doubts whatever. Emphatically he was in favor of using crucible steel and nothing else.

Mayor Ely of New York said this was the most important question put before the trustees in the entire history of the bridge and he personally wanted more time to familiarize himself with the subject. He therefore moved for adjournment. But Stranahan said now was the time to discuss the issue, while there were so many of them present, and the meeting continued.

At about that point a trustee named William Marshall, who was a wealthy cordage manufacturer and one of Brooklyn’s most prominent citizens, recalled a conversation he had once had with John A. Roebling, during which Roebling talked about a testing strain for the wire that was half what his son had specified. So it did not seem to Marshall that anyone ought to get very worried about the standards called for in the specifications. The important thing, he said, was to buy wire that came up to standards. Thomas Kinsella, who had kept very quiet so far, said he thought no undue weight should be attached to the informal remarks of the elder Roebling. Kinsella did not think the lowest-price steel would be the cheapest. “It was the duty of the trustees to do for the bridge, as they would do for themselves,” he said. He was not interested in any special kind of steel, he wished them to understand. However, he did have an interest and pride in his own city and said he had a natural wish that the contract might come there. (There were two Brooklyn firms in the bidding, J. Lloyd Haigh and the Chrome Steel Company, but the Chrome Steel bid worked out to more than $200,000 higher than the Haigh bid and so was, for all intents and purposes, quite out of the running.) He would vote, Kinsella said, for using crucible steel.

Henry Murphy read some extracts from engineering papers, extolling the superiority of steel made by the Bessemer process. Then there was a long discussion about what crucible steel was or was not, how Roebling’s earlier specifications called for crucible steel and why that was. William Marshall reminded everyone that the change had been made at Hewitt’s urging. “Mr. Hewitt was something of an expert and ought to know something about steel,” Marshall said. The problem seemed to be that Hewitt could be quoted to substantiate either side of the argument.

Comptroller Kelly said he wanted the bids for Bessemer steel referred back to the Executive Committee, Kelly wanted the other manufacturers to have the chance to bid on the lower quality of steel (as though they had not in the first place) and he moved the Executive Committee open up the bids again. Aspinwall seconded the idea. The motion carried and that might have ended things for the time being had Kinsella not said that they ought to test the prevailing mood of the meeting on the question of which kind of steel to use. He would offer a motion, he said, to make the contract with the lowest bidder for crucible steel.

Kelly said he hoped the resolution would not pass. Aspinwall said he did not want to be trapped into committing himself. Kinsella answered that he had no desire to trap anybody. The only object was to call a test vote. Stranahan said the motion, if carried, would pledge them to use crucible steel.

The vote was taken and the motion lost, 8 to 7, with four abstaining. After a few further comments, the meeting broke up. By that time it was nearing five in the afternoon. But then the Executive Committee met, privately, and instead of reopening the bids as directed by the board, the contract was immediately awarded to J. Lloyd Haigh.

There is no way of knowing what happened, since everything said in the meeting was kept secret. All Murphy said later in a letter to the board was that the committee’s decision had been the direct result of Kinsella’s test vote. “They [the committee] regard that vote, although wanting one of a majority, still as decisive against the use of Bessemer steel; for in so important a matter as the main cables, it would, in their opinion, be unwise to adopt a material which is distrusted by any considerable portion of the trustees. The question of cost is an important one, but it is subordinate to that of safety, and the difference of expense between the two is comparatively too small to permit such difference to prevent unanimity and entire confidence.” (The difference between the Haigh bid and that of the Roeblings for Bessemer steel came to $132,600.) The official record of the committee meeting states there were seven men present—Murphy, Stranahan, Slocum, Van Schaick, Motley, Marshall, and Kingsley.

How close was the vote? Who voted which way? The record provides no answers.

Since its meeting of December 23, the committee had done a complete about-face. But because everything was done in private, the public, to whom the bridge supposedly belonged, would never know anything about that. Four days later, on Monday, January 15, another special meeting of the board was called. Murphy announced that J. Lloyd Haigh would post $50,000, or about 10 per cent of the contract, as surety, and he read a letter in which Haigh promised to supply crucible steel of the same quality as his samples. Then a resolution giving Haigh the contract was adopted by a vote of 16 to 1, the one dissenting vote being cast by William Marshall.

So the wire in the bridge would not be Roebling wire. It would be made in Brooklyn by the one man Roebling had specifically warned Murphy not to trust.

The news was warmly received in Brooklyn. Thomas Kinsella called the decision “most satisfactory” and said it was a “matter for congratulation” that a Brooklyn manufacturer had won out over the leading wiremakers of America and Europe (he did not specify which he meant). The resolution of this whole wire controversy was a great triumph the
Eagle
contended. “It is, we suppose, admitted on all hands that the cables which are to sustain the bridge structure are the most important features of this great undertaking. These failing, all fails.”

The
Union
wrote that the bridge trustees had honored themselves and said, “We shall try to forget as soon as possible that they were ever brought to discuss so absurd a proposition as the use of Bessemer steel.” The impression left was that a catastrophic blunder had been narrowly averted. Someone had not known what he was doing and that someone had to be Roebling. The
Union
wanted prompt action taken.

There had been no comment from Roebling since the wire decision was announced, nor any from either of his brothers in Trenton. But a few days later, the following letter appeared in the
Eagle.
It was signed “Tripod.” Quite possibly it was written by Washington Roebling.