Chief Engineer: Washington Roebling, The Man Who Built the Brooklyn Bridge
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Chief Engineer: Washington Roebling, The Man Who Built the Brooklyn Bridge
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Overview
Chief Engineer is the first full biography of a crucial figure in the American story--Washington Roebling, builder of the Brooklyn Bridge. One of America's most iconic and recognizable structures, the Brooklyn Bridge is as much a part of New York as the Statue of Liberty or the Empire State Building. Yet its distinguished builder is too often forgotten--and his life is of interest far beyond his chosen field. It is the story of immigrants, the frontier, the Civil War, the making of the modern world, and a man whose life modeled courage in the face of extreme adversity.
Chief Engineer is enriched by Roebling's own eloquent voice, unveiled in his recently discovered memoir, previously thought lost to history. The memoir reveals that his father, John-a renowned engineer who came to America after humble beginnings in Germany-was a tyrannical presence in Roebling's life. It also documents Roebling's time as a young man in the Union Army, where he built bridges to carry soldiers across rivers and fought in pivotal battles from Antietam to Gettysburg. He then married the remarkable Emily Warren Roebling, who played a crucial role in the construction of the Brooklyn Bridge, Roebling's grandest achievement-but by no means the only one.
Elegantly written with a compelling narrative sweep, Chief Engineer introduces Washington Roebling and his era to a new generation of readers.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781620400531 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Bloomsbury Publishing |
| Publication date: | 06/27/2017 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 384 |
| Sales rank: | 984,207 |
| File size: | 91 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
About the Author
Erica Wagner is the author of Gravity: Stories; Ariel's Gift: Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath and the Story of Birthday Letters and Seizure: A Novel. Pas de Deux/A Concert of Stories, co-written with storyteller Abbi Patrix and musician and composer Linda Edsjö, tours around the world. Twice a judge of the Man Booker Prize, she was literary editor of The Times for for seventeen years, and she is now a contributing writer for New Statesman and consulting literary editor for Harper's Bazaar, as well as writing for many publications in Britain and the United States. She is the editor of First Light: A Celebration of Alan Garner, which has just been published by Unbound.
ericawagner.co.uk / @EricaWgnr
Read an Excerpt
Chief Engineer
Washington Roebling: The Man Who Built the Brooklyn Bridge
By Erica Wagner
Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Copyright © 2017 Erica WagnerAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-62040-053-1
CHAPTER 1
"No one ever does just the right thing in great emergencies"
Death as destruction is impossible, it is only a change of all parts, whose composition on earth is adapted to local purposes but only to local purposes, and as long as they fit together and work together in accordance with the laws of nature, so long do they exist in the formation of a human being ...
— John A. Roebling in a letter to his father, 1844
Decades later, Washington Roebling would blame himself. In describing the event that would alter the course of his life forever, he would return to its details, almost as if by conjuring them he could call back the past. "Nothing happened to me," he wrote of that dreadful time — but he was wrong. Nothing, for him, was ever the same again.
In 1869, the year in which he became Chief Engineer of the East River Bridge, Washington Augustus Roebling was thirty-two years old. His childhood had been spent in Saxonburg, Pennsylvania, an industrious community of German immigrants founded, a few years before his birth, by his father, John Augustus Roebling. In his lifetime the elder Roebling was often referred to as "a lesser Leonardo"; he had been born in Saxony in 1806, and his mother had scrimped and saved to send her clever son to Berlin, where he would study architecture, bridge construction, hydraulics — and philosophy with Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. But, with a party of fellow pilgrims, he had escaped the restrictions of Prussia for a new life in the new world, a life in which he would swiftly establish himself as one of the greatest engineers and visionaries of his day.
John Roebling had proposed a bridge over the East River as early as 1857, setting out his stall in a letter to the New-York Tribune: "The plan in its general features proposes a wire suspension bridge crossing the East River by one single span at such an elevation as will not impede navigation ..." Precisely ten years later, his dream had become a reality: in April 1867, a charter authorizing a private company to build and operate an East River bridge had been voted through the state legislature in Albany; a month later, John Roebling was named the company's Chief Engineer. He was the one man alive, it was generally reckoned, capable of building a span across the river — which is, in fact, a congested, turbulent tidal strait. Such an endeavor was an unprecedented task: in the middle of the nineteenth century, suspension bridge technology was still in its infancy. In 1854 the bridge over the Ohio River at Wheeling, West Virginia — built by John Roebling's great rival, Charles Ellet — was nearly destroyed in a storm; it had been standing a mere five years. But the Brooklyn Daily Eagle put its faith in John Roebling, announcing at the end of June 1869: "The East River Bridge having now been finally approved by the Federal Government as well as by the board of U.S. Engineers and the eminent civil engineers to whom the plans were submitted, the work has now been placed in actual progress, and the erection has become a fixed fact." Should that fixed fact cause any anxiety, the article's subtitle read "The Bridge Six Times as Strong as the Greatest Possible Load Upon It." Now the work could begin.
And then, just three days after the Eagle's boast, John Roebling was injured in what most took to be a minor accident. "The circumstances were as follows," his son wrote of that otherwise ordinary day. "We had gone down after lunch to inspect the site of the Brooklyn Tower in the spare ferry slip — In order to see better he climbed on a heap of cord wood, and from that on top of the ferry rack of piles — Seeing a boat coming, and fearing that the heavy blow would knock him off I cried to him to get down — (I was up there also some 20 feet off) In place of getting down all the way he stepped from the fender rack down on the string piece of the prominent outside row of piles — the blow from the boat was severe, sending the fender rack so far in that its string piece overlapped the other one at the same time catching the toe of his boot on the right foot and crushing the end of his toes — When he uttered a cry I did not realize at first what had happened." Washington wrote to his younger brother Ferdinand that the piles had clipped his father's foot "like a pair of big shears would do."
Washington was his father's right-hand man. He and his young wife, Emily Warren Roebling — sister of Washington Roebling's commanding officer during his distinguished service in the Civil War — had, not long before, returned from an extensive tour of Europe, which they had taken at John Roebling's behest. It was no honeymoon, but a tour of steel mills in Germany and Great Britain, and the study of pneumatic caissons, which would be the foundations of the bridge. Washington Roebling had used his time at Rensselaer — then the United States' only engineering college, and still one of the most prestigious institutions in the United States — to qualify in his profession, then honed his trade building bridges for the Union Army to cross before Confederate troops could blow them up. He had volunteered in the spring of 1861, first in New Jersey and then again in New York: he entered the Ninth New York State Regiment a private, but by the war's end — by which time he was a veteran of Second Bull Run, Chancellorsville, Gettysburg, the Wilderness, and the Crater at Petersburg and had been a witness to the Battle of Hampton Roads, the first great clash of the ironclads Monitor and Merrimack — had risen to the rank of colonel. He had then supervised the work on his father's Covington-Cincinnati bridge over the Ohio, completed in 1867 and today known simply as the Roebling Bridge. Yet for all his expertise he was still his father's lieutenant; John Roebling, at sixty-three, was a vigorous man.
At the time of the accident the elder Roebling hadn't moved from his home in Trenton, New Jersey, to the work site; according to Washington he came over once or twice a week, and kept a couple of rooms at a Turkish bath on the corner of Cranberry Street and Columbia Heights in Brooklyn. Washington and Emily had taken a house on Hicks Street, a few blocks away "As quickly as possible I got him into a carriage and took him up to the Turkish bath where he was staying. As Dr. Sheppard did not feel like keeping such a sick man I took him to my house — With great difficulty we got him up the stairs where I undressed him and laid him on the bed which he never left. Dr. Sheppard recommended a Dr. Barber as surgeon. When he arrived he proved to be a young man of not much force. But he trimmed the wounds, cut away the crushed tissues and put on the first dressing all right — the mistake I made was in not taking Mr. Roebling to a hospital at once — but I had been brought up to look upon hospitals as the abode of the devil and upon a doctor as a criminal, perhaps I am excusable as no one ever does just the right thing in great emergencies."
Nothing more is known of Dr. Sheppard or Dr. Barber. What is known is John Roebling's violent dislike of any medical regimen other than one he had himself devised. Recalling his youth in Saxonburg, Pennsylvania, Washington wrote of his father's "especial animosity" toward doctors; "the average kindly family physician was held up to his children as a monster in human form." In the city's summer heat, Washington was unable to withstand his father's will.
"He did not rally from the first shock until the next day — Then when Dr. Barber came he told him that he would take command of his own cure himself and would take no orders or treatment from him. Dr. Barber shook his head with a dubious smile — A Tinsmith was ordered — He fixed up a big tin dish like a scale, supplied with a hose and running water — into the dish Mr. R. put his foot — the stream of water playing on it all the time — When Barber saw that he exclaimed you are inviting sure death for yourself — nature in endeavoring to cure such a severe wound must have recourse to pain, to fever, in order to supply the increased vitality necessary to the healing process ... He ordered Barber out of the room in a violent manner."
Tetanus remains deadly in developing countries. In most Western nations, the incidence is less than one case per million population per year, following the development of a widely available vaccine in the 1920s. Clostridium tetani is a bacteria that produces a toxin affecting the brain and central nervous system; it is not contagious, but can be acquired through contamination in a wound such as the one John Roebling suffered. Untreated, the symptoms are dreadful, even when described clinically in the modern day. "Trismus (lockjaw) — the inability to open the mouth fully owing to the rigidity of the masseters [jaw muscles] — is often the first symptom ... Generalized tetanus is the most common form of the disease, and presents with pain, headache, stiffness, rigidity, opisthotonus [the severe, rigid arching of the back, head and neck], and spasms, which can lead to laryngeal obstruction. These may be induced by minor stimuli such as noise, touch, or by simple medical and nursing procedures ... The spasms are excruciatingly painful and may be uncontrollable leading to respiratory arrest and death."
Washington Roebling kept watch over his father. "After three or four days I noticed an inability to eat or speak. Barber ventured up and at once pronounced it lockjaw, incurable at that — Dr. Kissam was called in, in consultation he confirmed it ... Tetanus antitoxin was then unknown. Now came ten terrible days. As the jaws set, eating and swallowing became impossible. With feverish haste he started to write all kinds of directions about his treatment about the bridge about his financial affairs as his powers waned his writing became more and more illegible, nothing but scrawls at the end. As there was no trained nurse, I assumed that function, with an occasional friend to sit up nights — Dr. Barber being dismissed I telegraphed to Dr. Brinkman of Philadelphia a water cure doctor whom my father knew — he tolerated him — but Brinkman knew it was too late, coming only as a matter of form and to write the death certificate."
Washington wrote this text nearly forty years after the event, decades beyond his father's death; but despite the passage of time it is clear from his swift cursive hand that in his mind the images from those days remained clear, haunting, violent. The scene crowds in on him; his father's feverish haste becomes his own, and his self-reproach is the more poignant for his efforts to refute it — even as he returns to the dawn of his father's death, his final stillness as the sun rose over the East River, over the ferries, over the unbridged stream.
"Daily and hourly," he wrote, "I was miserable witness of the most horrible tetanic convulsions, when the body is drawn into a half circle, the back of the head meeting the heels, with a face drawn into hideous distortions — Hardened as I was by scenes of carnage on many a bloody battlefield, these horrors often overcame me — When he finally died one morning at Sun rise I was nearly dead myself from exhaustion.
"We all have to die — It is useless to tax one self as to whether life could have been prolonged or death hastened by this or that treatment — Criticisms are all in vain, we should be thankful that we know not what the future has in store for us." His father's death was the pivotal moment in Washington Roebling's life; the criticisms he feared were not made by others: they were the voice in his own head. Thinking back to that moment on the pier he wrote: "I have often taxed myself that if I had kept still and given no warning nothing might have happened — But the experiences of a long life teach me that such self criminations [sic] are futile."
John Roebling had set out his vision for his great work in a letter to the New York Bridge Company dated September 1st, 1867.
Gentlemen.
On the 23rd of May last, I accepted the appointment as Chief Engineer of the Bridge proposed to be erected over the East River, between the two Cities of New York and Brooklyn, under the provisions of your charter, with the understanding that I should proceed to make the necessary Surveys, to determine upon the best location, to make out Plans & estimates, and to report upon the subject at as early a day as practicable. I commenced this task without delay, and have been engaged on it ever since.
The following Report & accompanying plans are the results of my labors & are respectfully presented to your consideration.
The contemplated Work, when constructed in accordance with my designs, will not only be the greatest Bridge in existence, but it will be the great Engineering Work of this Continent & of the Age.
Its most conspicuous features, the great Towers, will serve as landmarks to the adjoining cities, & they will be entitled to be ranked as national monuments. As a great work of art, & as a successful specimen of advanced Bridge Engineering, this structure will for ever testify to the energy, enterprise & wealth of that Community which shall secure its erection.
Respectfully Submitted/John A. Roebling
The report that follows runs to fifty-two pages of John Roebling's bold, clear, sloping hand. Nine days later, in the pages of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, Roebling's plans were reproduced for all to read and approved in a long editorial essay that spoke to the necessity of the work. Roebling's report, said the paper, "will attract great interest, for it may be accepted as the first practical step towards the realization of one of the most remarkable enterprises of our time." There could be no doubt of the need for the bridge as the cities of New York and Brooklyn flourished in the years just after the Civil War. "Is the bridge necessary?" asked the Eagle, "We have nearly reached the accommodation the ferries can furnish on the routes of travel. The population of Brooklyn has increased four-fold within fifteen years ... If the ferry companies cannot more than accommodate the travel of our present population, how would it be if three times the number pressed upon them? ... Last winter on several days, and for hours each day, ferry travel was interrupted for hours. We assert, without fear of contradiction, that it would be better for Brooklyn to sacrifice an amount equal to the whole cost of the bridge rather than have it established as a fact that, in winter time, no resident of Brooklyn could count on getting to New York to do his business." (On the same page the paper noted under "Topics of To-day" that "the Spiritualists' proceedings were duller than usual at the Cleveland convention. The feminine delegates, as described by a reporter, are not specially attractive ... Women care less for blossoming in Bloomers than ever for voting.") But — largely thanks to the corrupt, wholly male world of politics of the city of New York, still a separate metropolitan entity from its as yet more rural neighbor across the water — by the time of John Roebling's death little evidence of a bridge could be seen.
That said, New York and Brooklyn were growing and changing at such a rate in the years after the Civil War that they were in a state of constant flux. In a process that had begun long before the conflict between North and South, these great cities were undergoing dramatic shifts in function and form. Where once homes and businesses had existed side by side, now the rapid expansion of business districts meant that the more affluent sought peace and quiet away from their places of work and the middle-class habit of commuting began. From 1837, the New York and Harlem Railroad offered regular service to 125 th Street — at the time a full six miles north of the built-up area downtown. Lines reached Westchester County by 1844: the New-York Tribune predicted that "the line of this road will be nearly one continuous village by i860." Between 1810 and i860 the steam ferry, the omnibus, the commuter railroad, and the horse-drawn streetcar were all introduced into city life, changing the pattern of that life forever; cities were being turned "inside out."
By the third quarter of the nineteenth century, wrote William Stone in his Centennial History of New York City, New York had become "the national city": "cosmopolitan, European as well as American, and obviously one of the few leading cities of the world — the third city of Christendom." (He declined to name the first two, allowing other grand conurbations to flatter themselves, perhaps, that they remained ahead of New York.) Stone claimed that the real value of property in New York City was, at this time, one trillion dollars — or a thirtieth part of the entire property of Great Britain; and, he wrote, "35 tons of mail-matter are received here for our citizens, and 55 tons are sent out daily." The city could boast 2,621 blacksmiths, 6,307 boot- and shoemakers, 9,501 dressmakers, 5,978 merchants, 1,232 lawyers, and 855 piano makers.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Chief Engineer by Erica Wagner. Copyright © 2017 Erica Wagner. Excerpted by permission of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc.
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Table of Contents
Foreword xi
1 "No one ever does just the right thing in great emergencies" 1
2 "The finest place in the world" 19
3 "Something of the tiger in him" 36
4 "I was not a chip off the old block" 61
5 "It is curious how persons lose their heads in times of excitement" 77
6 "The urgency of the moment overpowers everything" 89
7 "I am very much of the opinion that she has captured your brother Washy's heart at last" 113
8 "All beginnings are difficult, but don't give up" 130
9 "I will have to go to work at something" 151
10 "Good enough to found upon" 171
11 "I have been quite sick for some days" 189
11 "Now is the time to build the Bridge" 197
13 "Trust me" 219
14 "She goes everywhere and sees everything" 247
15 "The image of his wife floats before him" 266
16 "You can't desert your job" 288
17 "Time & age cures all this" 303
Epilogue: Cold Spring 310
Acknowledgments 313
Notes 317
Bibliography 347
Index 355