CHAPTER IIITHE BROOKLYN BRIDGE

Early in the fifties, when the Niagara accomplishment was more or less the talk of two continents and communication under seas by cable had helped to emphasize the possibilities of wire, John A. Roebling, protagonist of the wire bridge idea, advanced a proposal to connect New York and Long Island by a suspension bridge and release the people of Brooklyn from a segregation which they had made a somewhat futile pretense of enjoying. Habit dies hard. The crust of custom becomes strangely indurated with long exposure, and Brooklyn residents had fought the East River in profitable, if archaic, ferryboats too long to be lured lightly into any liaison with iconoclastic Manhattan by way of a wire bridge.

Roebling waited another decade, but he hustled while he waited. The Brooklynites continued to make their uncertain ways across the river in times of storm and tide and ice as the Lord gave them strength, and the sacred ferryboats still paid dividends. The vicious winter of 1866-7, coldest, bitterest, longest the cities have ever known, wrung forth at last a cry for relief. They could wrap themselves up against the weather, but no weight of woolens could turn the shafts of ridicule. It was grand ammunition for the advocates of the bridge, when people traveling by train from Albany actually reached New York sooner than did the man who did business in New York, and left his domicilium in Brooklyn at the same hour.

And besides, the Roebling cap had another feather in it now, in the completion of the Ohio Bridge. He was building wire bridges everywhere, and it began to look as though there was some body of truth in the Western contention that New York was the most provincial city in America, for all its self-approval.

At one of the many hearings that were held on the bridge question a famous engineer who favored the wire type was asked what reason he had for believing it would do the work.

“I believe it,” he replied, “because Roebling says so.”

THE INITIAL CHARTER GRANTED

The demand for the bridge rose to a clamor. In the month of May, 1867, the initial charter was granted, and Mr. Roebling was appointed engineer. Three months afterward he submitted his report and estimates, which were examined and approved by a commission of engineers from the United States War Department. Then he set about preparation for the task.

THE DEATH OF JOHN A. ROEBLING

It was while fixing the location for the Brooklyn tower that he met with the accident that caused his death. But his work had been well done, and his son and associate, Col. Washington A. Roebling, took up without delay the execution of the plan he had helped to create.

If the older Roebling encountered obstacles in bringing his great idea to the point of acceptance, the pathway of his successor, called without warning to take over responsibility for the greatest engineering labor of the age, was not strewn with roses.

THE WORK OF CONSTRUCTION BEGINS

WIRE ROPE IN THE QUARRY

It was in the summer of 1869 that John A. Roebling died. The second day of January, 1870, saw the actual work of construction begun, when laborers started to clear away to prepare for the foundations of the Brooklyn tower. From that day forward, through a baker’s dozen of years, there was no rest, though there was plenty of interruption. Until the job was ended Washington A. Roebling simply lived the Brooklyn Bridge. It was a colossal job, punctuated with changes and problems and complications, but it went forward. The landmarks of a bygone age, old houses of historic memory on the water fronts of both cities, vanished silently and where they had been, by and by there grew piles of masonry to form the approaches. From the huge caissons over against either shore rose the towers, tall and grim, which were to carry the cables. In due time they stood complete, with their broad bases welded to the rock by an ingenious bond of stone and concrete in the river’s bed, and their crests nearly three hundred feet above the top of the tide. A hundred and nineteen feet—and three inches, to be precise—above the water opened the two tall arches in each tower, stretching upward one hundred and seventeen feet in air. It was through these the bridge proper was to pass, with its gangways for horse and foot and railway traffic.

COULD THOSE SLENDER TOWERS CARRY THE GREAT LOAD?

The hurrying people of New York and Brooklyn watched the thing grow and wondered fearfully whether the slender towers would stand the strain. In Harper’s Magazine for May, 1883, now itself yellowed by age, is an exhaustive article concerning the Brooklyn Bridge, in which one is told at length and with an engineer’s exactness, the steps by which the achievement was brought, after thirteen laborious years, to proud completion.

Even to the curious layman the details are no longer of insistent interest. One thing is emphasized, however, which well as we know it now can never cease to hold the mind in a certain wonder—that all the weight and solidity and massiveness are in the towers, the foundations and the long expanses of stone work, which stretching inland nearly a thousand feet, serve to guard and strengthen the anchorage for the cables which are the working force. The rest is wire, for the most part; wire, slender by contrast and against the background of the sky, but endowed with great strength by care and skill in fabrication. John A. Roebling and his son had staked their name and their future on the strength and quality of Roebling wire.

In that long ago story of the Brooklyn Bridge, there is written the lesson that clear thinking and courage and perseverance can accomplish the seemingly impossible. What traveler over those high-hung roadways ever stops to ask himself how those great round cables, stretched in long, inverted arches above the surge of the river traffic, were ever put in place? They are today simply a part of the stage setting of a busy life, like the river itself.

HOW THE GREAT CABLES WERE MADE

Each of these cables consists of nineteen strands of about two hundred and seventy-eight No. 8 B. W. G. wires each, and each wire is continuous in its strand, like the yarns in a skein, traveling eternally to Brooklyn and back, up over the top of one tower, down in a long curve above the tideway, up to the other tower and down again, to be gripped and carried by links, like a chain, down to the everlasting clutch of the rock and concrete-bound anchorage. Each skein is a million feet long—nearly two hundred miles—and still men talk of “Oriental patience.”

There is no twist in these ponderous cables, as there is in a wire rope. Every reach of wire lies flat and separate, and when all were in place they were laboriously bound together, first the strands, then when all the strands were up, the whole fabric, into cylindrical form. There are other strange things about these cables; one is that they make practically no strain on the towers save to sustain their weight. Another is that the long storm cables that radiate downward from the top of the towers to the bridge floor, for a space of four hundred feet inside and outside each tower, are themselves calculated to sustain, if need be, the imposed weight for that distance. So that the margin of safety in this seeming web-like structure is far in excess of what timid imaginations have pictured. That was a cardinal feature in all John A. Roebling’s plans. He left a safety margin many times greater than the load. It has been an open secret for years that the Brooklyn Bridge has been unwisely taxed, but he knew it would be.

STRINGING THE CABLES ACROSS THE EAST RIVER

Before the cables were in place, New York and Brooklyn stared up at the river-wide space between the bare towers and wondered by what wizardry a bridge could ever be swung across it. The beginning was simple—as simple and prosaic in a way as the hitching of a horse—in principle. It began with wire rope. A scow with a coil of three-quarter inch rope was moored alongside the Brooklyn tower, and the end of the coil was hoisted up the face of the masonwork, passed down on the land side and then carried back.

HELPING TO RELIEVE THE FREIGHT CAR SHORTAGE BY QUICK LOADING

Next, suspending the river traffic for the necessary time, the scow was towed across the river, paying out as she went, and the rope carried over the New York tower, then wound on a huge drum till it hung high above the river and clear of the tallest topgallant. A second rope was run in the same manner and the two were joined around huge driving wheels or pulleys at each end. An endless belt or “traveler,” revolving by steam power, now stretched from city to city, and on a day in August, that lives yet in the memory of every man who was there, E. F. Farrington, the master mechanic of the project, who was a veteran of Niagara and the Ohio Bridge, set out to show the workmen, who on this slender aerial were to begin the long labor of hanging the cable, that it was easy if you only thought so. In a “bosun’s chair” he shot out from the top of the Brooklyn tower, down the long sag in the traveler and up to the New York side, while a million people craned their necks from the streets and docks and housetops and boats along the river, and swallowed hard at their hearts.

The bands played, the cannon tore the air, the multitudes yelled themselves hoarse, the steam whistles of the harbor shrieked to the sky the tidings that, though nobody then understood it, “Greater New York” was on the way.

This was six years and a half from the time when Washington A. Roebling had begun the work of construction. Seven other years followed, years full of troubled effort, of planning and replanning and replanning, of battling with the twin devils of Contraction and Expansion. The tensions all had to be secured in absolutely uniform weather. A determination made when the sun was shining on one part of the bridge and not on another might have thrown the whole calculation awry. Sun and wind played pranks with the work in the summer and in the winter snow and ice coated the wires and running gear so that work was often impossible. Deflection varied a third of an inch for every degree of temperature.

“In short,” says the writer of that time, “the ponderous thing, while neither small nor agile, has a trick in common with the minute and lively insect which when you put your finger on him isn’t there.”

THE FABRIC GROWS TOWARD COMPLETION

But in due time the great cables were in place, and bound. Then the suspender bands were set, from which suspender cables hung to hold the frame of the roadway. And so the fabric grew toward completion, hung practically in two sections, which all the world nowadays doesn’t know, with an expansion joint connecting them in the middle to absorb the expansion and contraction of the metal. Even the rails at this section are split in half lengthwise, to permit them to slide back and forth with the changes in temperature.

There were accidents and drawbacks and political complications, as there are always bound to be in public works; there were believer and unbeliever, booster and knocker, as now, but the work went on to its completion and in 1883 the day of realization came. Wire was king. Doubters and malcontents murmured for a time, but little by little subsided. The opening of the bridge was one of those memorable days of which New York has had so many in her brief history, a day when President and Governor and many lesser dignitaries, who have now passed from the stage, strutted their little hour to hail the passing of a milestone, and there were “fireworks in the evening.”

THE BEGINNING OF A NEW ERA

A new era had now definitely begun. There was a recognized agent in the world strong enough, with engineering guidance, to shoulder its most staggering burdens, and the name of Roebling began to weave itself in letters of wire through the whole web of modern industry. Thirty-seven years have come and gone since the Brooklyn Bridge was finished and thrown open to the swarming people. Even when they saw they wouldn’t believe it; many of them mounted to its span with their hearts in their mouths. There had been a world of carping and prophecy of disaster. A public that clutched at novelty as an addict does for stimulant could not assimilate the idea that there could be safety in wire where such enormous weight was laid upon it. Its frailty of appearance fooled them. For years after the Bridge had taken up its load and was carrying without protest or misbehavior the traffic of two cities, there came periodical alarms regarding the discovery of strange faults in construction, or disintegration of the wires caused by vibration. It was the one dependable theme for the alarmist and sensational writer.

But the proof was in the using. The slender span has stood the test of time and tide and wind and wear, and stood them all so well that it has fixed for a century at least the type of the super-bridge.

TWO MORE BRIDGES TO BROOKLYN

Wire bridges have become a familiar thing in the lives of cities. Two more have come to give the crowding population of New York freeway over the East River, as the city’s life has spread northward. For the Williamsburg the Roebling firm furnished the wire and installed the cables. In the Manhattan Bridge it had no part save the making of the wire, not a trivial task, since in the cables alone there are 12,000,000 pounds.

These bridges are bigger than the Brooklyn Bridge with which the troublesome river was first overcome, but it will be many a day before the glamour that surrounded the earlier creation will have worn away, or people the world over cease to speak of it with wonder and a certain measure of awe. Anybody, perhaps, can build a wire bridge now; perhaps, too, somebody some day can build one with more of simple grace and slender beauty, but it is certain nobody ever has.

Back to Index Next