The Great Bridge (8 page)
The terrible Panic of 1857 burst upon the country that summer and Roebling had all he could do managing things in Trenton and at Cincinnati, where work on the bridge was shut down altogether, not to begin again until the early part of the Civil War, when a Confederate force under Kirby Smith, advancing into the Blue Grass Country to the south, threw all Cincinnati into a state of panic. Soldiers and citizens alike rushed to fortify the hills on the Covington side, discovering in the process how very advantageous a bridge would be, had there only been one. And beside the pontoon affair that was hastily assembled stood Roebling’s half-finished towers to remind everyone what might have been.
There never was a siege of Cincinnati, but once the threat of one had passed, the fortunes of Roebling’s troubled Cincinnati Bridge took an immediate turn for the better. Subscriptions to new stock poured into Amos Shinkle’s office, the work commenced once more and with no opposition. For Roebling the bridge was a symbol of confidence rising above the “general national gloom.” It proved, he said, that there were still men about “with unshaken moral courage and implicit trust in the future political integrity of the nation.” When his Irish laborers, who shared no such feelings for the bridge or for the Union cause, walked off the job demanding higher pay, Roebling fired every man and hired only Germans as replacements. “The Germans about here are mostly loyal, the Irish alone are disloyal,” he wrote. “No Democrat can be trusted, they are all disloyal and treacherous, more or less.”
Two years later, the war nearly over, Washington Roebling was released from the Army and went almost directly to Cincinnati, where, by then, there was no longer any question about the relative importance of his father’s bridge. “The size and magnitude of this work far surpass any expectations I had formed of it,” the young man wrote to the rest of the family back in Trenton. “It is the highest thing in this country; the towers are so high a person’s neck aches looking up at them. It will take me a week to get used to the dimensions of everything around here.” From that point on, though his official title was Assistant Engineer, he had been in complete charge of the work. All the cable spinning, the most exciting, difficult part of the work, was done under his direction, his father having concluded that he would henceforth “leave bridgebuilding to younger folks.”
The Cincinnati Bridge wound up taking a total of ten years to build and it cost just about twice what John Roebling had said it would. But no one had any complaints. It was unquestionably the finest as well as the largest bridge of its kind built until that time. Both structurally and architecturally it was a triumph.
Talking in retrospect, Amos Shinkle had nothing but praise for the manner in which it had been built. From an engineering standpoint everything had gone very smoothly. Only two lives had been lost during the entire time of its construction, a remarkable safety record, as the gentlemen from the East agreed. For the Roeblings, he had only the highest admiration, and especially for the redoubtable father, about whom, apparently, a few of the Brooklyn men had expressed some uneasiness. Getting along with him should prove no problem, Shinkle assured them. His advice was simple: “He is an extraordinary man and if you people in Brooklyn are wise you will interfere with his views just as little as possible. Give the old man his way and trust him.”
At eight that evening the Bridge Party departed for Niagara Falls, by way of Cleveland, where they stopped for the night and where several of them decided things could be livened up a bit if the word was spread that they were a group of wealthy lunatics being conducted on an outing. The joke worked quite well, it seems, causing a considerable stir in the hotel dining room. But when Thomas Kinsella’s account of such goings on appeared in the paper back in Brooklyn, it served mainly to substantiate what a number of people there had been saying right along, that the bridge was the scheme of madmen.
Spring was late arriving at Niagara Falls. The snowbanks had nearly all disappeared but the weather was sharp still and gigantic slabs of ice could be seen plunging down the river as Roebling led his group out to inspect what was generally conceded to be his masterpiece, a two-level suspension bridge over the great gorge.
This tour could have been arranged in the reverse order just as easily, with Niagara the first stop instead of the last, which would have made better sense in some ways, in that the Niagara Bridge was an earlier work than either the Cincinnati or Allegheny River bridges. But Roebling had saved Niagara for the last for good reasons.
At Pittsburgh he had been able to show as solid, dependable, and handsome a piece of workmanship as he had ever built. The Allegheny River Bridge was a bridge everyone liked. It had caused nobody any headaches when it was being put up or in the time since. At Cincinnati, the unprecedented length of the single river span was the most important thing on display, from the technical point of view. But the bridge had also a grandeur of a kind rarely seen and his new clients had come away from it with a keener appreciation of monumental scale as well as engineering genius.
But the Niagara Bridge, or International Suspension Bridge, or just Suspension Bridge as it was called locally, was neither terribly solid-appearing nor especially large. Indeed, every bridge they had inspected so far was longer. Also, unlike any of the others, it had been built with two levels—carriages and pedestrians traveled the lower level, while the Great Western Canada Railroad crossed on the one above—and the whole thing trembled quite noticeably when traffic was heavy. For some people the experience of crossing by carriage was positively terrifying. “You drive over to Suspension Bridge,” wrote Mark Twain, “and divide your misery between the chances of smashing down two hundred feet into the river below, and the chances of having a railway-train overhead smashing down onto you. Either possibility is discomforting taken by itself, but, mixed together, they amount in the aggregate to positive unhappiness.”
Its single span was 825 feet, which was nothing exceptional any longer. Its four stone towers stood only about half as high as those at Cincinnati. It had not been the first suspension bridge over the gorge and it did not stand alone, unrivaled, the way the Cincinnati Bridge did.
The first bridge had been built downstream at Lewiston, New York, in 1851, by Edward Serrell, brother of the Serrell traveling with the Bridge Party. It had been a very light suspension bridge and was badly shaken by a storm in 1855, after which, at Roebling’s suggestion, it had been refitted with guy wires. But later when these wires were loosened by an ice jam, somebody neglected to tighten them. A spring storm tore the bridge floor to pieces and left the cables and suspenders dangling uselessly in mid-air. And there they were still, about as dramatic an example of what could happen to a poorly engineered suspension bridge as could be seen, short of an actual collapse.
The other bridge over the gorge was very much in view from where they stood, about two miles upstream, near the falls. It was a brand-new suspension span designed by a Canadian, Samuel Keefer. It had been opened just that January and was already an extremely popular attraction, being near the best hotels. But since it was only ten feet wide, or too narrow for carriages to pass one another, traffic had to cross it in turns, first one way, then the other, and long waiting lines built up. In years to come it would be remodeled extensively and become famous as the Honeymoon Bridge. But at this stage it was being publicized only as a greater span than the one at Cincinnati, which indeed it was in terms of length. It was more than two hundred feet longer, which meant it now held the world’s record.
It would appear then that the gentlemen from Brooklyn might have been somewhat disappointed with this, the final Roebling bridge on the tour. But not so. Like nearly everyone who ever stood there at the brink of the gorge, with the bridge before them, they looked upon it with nothing less than awe.
The site alone was enough to take a person’s breath away. Upstream were the falls, while directly beneath the bridge, deep in the abyss, was the first of a series of savage rapids that swept on downstream for a mile or better, ending in a tremendous whirlpool held in a looming rock basin. Past there the current veered to the right and disappeared through a narrow channel overhung by sharp cliffs and trees. It was an absolute no man’s land below, but here above it had been conquered, bridged, beautifully.
Once, not many years before, an excursion boat, the
Maid of the Mist,
had gone shooting by below to the utter astonishment of those who happened to be on the bridge at the time. The boat had been built upstream, between the rapids and the falls, to take sight-seers for a rather terrifying close-up view of the falls. But the boat had never been a financial success. The owner, a Captain Joel Robinson, got into debt and when he heard that the sheriff was on his way to confiscate the boat, he decided his only chance was to escape down the rapids, something nobody had ever done before and lived to tell the story. Two men volunteered to go with him. The people on the bridge saw the boat make one long leap down the rapids. Her funnel was knocked flat by the blow, the whole boat was underwater from stem to stern. Then she was up again and skimming into the whirlpool, where “she rode with comparative ease upon the water, and took the sharp turn around into the river below without a struggle.” Captain Robinson’s wife later said her husband looked approximately twenty years older when he came in the door that evening.
But the bridge seemed to make the whole breath-taking panorama all the more terrifying, all the more magnificent. It was one of those occasions when the hand of man had enhanced that already wrought by the hand of God.
To begin with, the bridge seemed so serene and refined against such tumultuous doings of nature. Its essential components were four plain towers sixty feet high, four cables ten inches in diameter, their suspenders and stays, and a straightforward timber truss joining the two levels of the one span, which over such a gaping cavity in the earth looked ever so much longer than 820 feet. The bridge looked to be exactly what was called for, no more, no less. It was as though it was the only possible bridge for the place.
Actually, of course, one uninterrupted span was the only kind that would have worked there, since supporting piers in the gorge itself would have been out of the question. But this bridge was not simply for carriages and pedestrians, like the one upstream, indeed, like every other suspension bridge in the world at the time. It carried a railroad. That thought alone was enough to command the respect of anyone who knew a little about bridge engineering or recalled when it had been built. But even if a person were ignorant of such things, the sight of a moving train held aloft above the great gorge at Niagara by so delicate a contrivance was, in the 1860’s, nothing short of miraculous. The bridge seemed to defy the most fundamental laws of nature. Something so slight just naturally ought to give way beneath anything so heavy. That it did not seemed pure magic. The reasons it did not were the very foundation of all Roebling’s work. And if his band of clients, consultants, and other interested parties could return to Brooklyn understanding this bridge, they would understand what his work was all about.
In time to come, suspension bridges would not be used much for railroads, as Roebling expected they would. The Niagara Bridge was, in fact, the only noteworthy railroad bridge of its type ever built. The important thing, however, was that Roebling had demonstrated, at one of the most spectacular locations on earth, that the principles of suspension could be applied with perfect safety even to something so heavy as a locomotive and railroad cars, and this in turn had a profound effect on the whole evolution of bridge design, not to mention the acceptance of his own theories. At Niagara he had built the first truly modern suspension bridge.
The great appeal of the suspension bridge, apart from its beauty, was its economy. It required considerably less material than other kinds of bridges. But prior to the completion of Roebling’s Niagara Bridge in 1855, suspension bridges had a dubious reputation. In all America then there were only two engineers who had any firm belief in them or who had built any of consequence. Roebling was one. The other was Charles Ellet, Jr.
The reason for so much distrust of suspension bridges was simply that so many of them had come crashing down over the years, and frequently with tragic consequences. In England in 1831 a suspension bridge had collapsed under the feet of marching troops. (The bridge was the work of Sir Samuel Brown, whose suspension bridges came down about as fast as he put them up, one after another—at Berwick, Brighton, Montrose, and Durham.) In France in 1850 another wire bridge had failed under almost identical circumstances, killing two hundred men. In America a number of small suspension bridges had collapsed under droves of cattle, including one at Covington, Kentucky, over the Licking River, just a few years before Roebling commenced his Cincinnati Bridge.
Nobody understood quite why these things happened. In actual fact the bridges had either been inadequately built to begin with or badly maintained, but whichever the cause, it had generally gone undetected and a large body of distrust had built up about the suspension method in general. In Europe especially, few engineers had confidence in such bridges for spans of any appreciable length or for heavy traffic, and this despite the fact that the earliest suspension bridges approaching the size of those by Roebling or Ellet were built in Europe from about 1820 on.
The basic idea was of course nearly as old as man. In China, South America, and other parts of the world, crude bridges had been slung from vines over rivers and ravines since before recorded history. There was, however, an obvious and important difference between such bridges and those that began to appear in the early part of the nineteenth century. The latter-day variety had a stiff, level floor that did not curve or sway with the ropes that held it, but was—or was supposed to be—as stable as any other kind of bridge floor. Moreover, these were no longer simple footbridges, but big enough to handle carriages and wagons.