16
DUTY—That which a person owes to another; that which a person is bound, by any natural, moral, or legal obligation, to pay, do, or perform.
—As defined in an 1856 edition of
Webster’s American Dictionary of the English Language
belonging to Washington Roebling
FOR THE public the exact whereabouts of the Chief Engineer was a matter of considerable mystery. It was known that he was in a bad way, but nobody seemed sure just where he was or what was wrong with him or how much say he had in the bridge anymore. The papers did nothing to clear up the rumors.
Much nonsense would be written about Roebling in time to come. The impression given would be that he was still in Brooklyn all the while, living in a house overlooking the river, where, from an upstairs window, he kept watch over every move made at the bridge, sending his wife back and forth to tell the men what to do. But this was not the case, not during this particular stage in the story.
Roebling’s original intention, it seems, had been to stay in Wiesbaden only a month or two. But he and Emily had stayed on in the old resort on the Rhine for nearly six months, hoping against hope that the warm alkaline springs would work a transformation for him. Not until late in 1873 did they return to Brooklyn and then they stayed only long enough to purchase a new house on Columbia Heights, on the river side of the street, with rear windows overlooking the bridge, which was about half a mile away.
The journey to Wiesbaden had been to no avail and early in 1874, with the work at the bridge shut down for the winter, his doctors were urging still another change of scene. Roebling left Brooklyn for Trenton this time and there he stayed for nearly three more years.
So the entire time the towers were being finished, the anchorages built, the cable-making machinery assembled and set in position, the Chief Engineer was nowhere near the bridge and could see nothing of it. And in light of this fact his achievements seem all the more phenomenal, for a vigilance from Trenton was an even more extraordinary feat than it would have been from a bay window on Brooklyn Heights.
As it was, the day-by-day progress of the work, the changes in procedure and equipment, the advance preparations for the very different kind of work to come, all went on in his mind, supported only by letters from his assistants, or from Henry Murphy on occasion. His own orders and instructions had to be issued by return mail. The elaborate, formal specifications now required for all materials purchased he also drew up himself—an enormous task.
It was well after he left Brooklyn, for example, that he did the specifications for the granite for the New York tower, for the face stone, arch stone, and spandrel courses.
…Above the arch is the spandrel-filling of varying thickness of courses, and covered by a broad band-course at the line of the keystone. The space between the keystone and the cornice is occupied by a recessed panel…The interior space above the spandrel-filling is not all solid, but consists of three parallel walls, separated by two hollow spaces. The middle wall is 4 feet 2 inches thick, the outer ones vary from 4 feet 2 inches to 5 feet 3 inches in thickness, and the width of the hollow spaces varies from 4 feet 3 inches to 4 feet 9 inches…
He described precisely how the stone should be cut and joined, how it should be unloaded at the dock, the requirements for delivery. This particular set of specifications was prepared in the fall and the winter of 1874, but at about the same time and shortly thereafter, he also drew up complete specifications for the granite and the limestone backing for the New York anchorage, for the anchor bars and anchor plates, the saddles and saddle plates, and for the several varieties of wire rope needed (steel footbridge rope, iron handrail rope, iron ropes for guy wires under the footbridge).
He had help with all this, of course, from whichever assistant he had assigned to that particular part of the work in question. Still, he had to provide general guidelines for them, evaluate everything they provided in return, make refinements, and make the final decisions on every item.
Inevitably certain details had to be discussed at length with the other engineers, or explained to various members of the Board of Trustees, and all this required voluminous, tiresome correspondence. But always, when it came to making his views known, his language was patient, plain, and to the point. There was never any doubt as to what he wanted done or why he wanted it done that way.
His knowledge of everything happening at the bridge, his total confidence about how each successive step ought to be taken, the infinite, painstaking care he took, seemed absolutely uncanny to the others back in Brooklyn. Had his communications on technical matters alone been written by a healthy man who was regularly on the scene, they would have been regarded as exceptional. But the idea that they were emanating from a sickroom sixty miles away seemed almost beyond belief.
He was attentive to more personal matters as well. He wrote to Collingwood to suggest remedies for a kidney ailment. He requested salary increases for Martin, from $5,000 to $6,000 a year; for Collingwood, from $3,000 to $3,600; and for Farrington, from day wages to “$3,000 per annum.” (The raises went through.) He approved the hiring of an assistant for Hildenbrand, an RPI man named Theodore Cooper, who had worked for Eads in St. Louis. Cooper was to be an inspector of iron for the superstructure. *When the work stopped in winter and Murphy, to save money, began letting men go, Roebling urged that the best of them be kept on. How could they ever replace a man like Hildenbrand, he asked. And in early 1875, when it had looked as though the work might have to stop altogether because money was running short, his seemed the one last voice of confidence. At the close of a long, persuasive letter to Murphy, he wrote:
I would further add, now is the time to build the Bridge. At no period within fourteen years have the prices of labor and material been as low as at present. A rise of 10 per cent in these items during the year is within the experience of all, and is but little thought of; but a rise of ten per cent means a million in the cost of the Bridge. To build now is to save money!
His own condition was much more serious and complicated than generally realized at the time, or than would be said in print later. He was worse even than when he left for Europe. He was in pain much of the time, in his stomach, in his joints and limbs. He suffered from savage headaches. Some days he was so weak he could scarcely hold up his head. Still, miserable as he was physically, he was not so bad off as he would be portrayed. “There is a popular impression that Colonel Roebling has been for years a helpless paralytic,” Emily Roebling would write in some private notes put down later. “This is a mistake as he has never been paralyzed for even one moment and there never has been a time when he has not had the full use of every member of his body.”
The major problem was that his nervous system was shattered. The slightest noise upset him terribly. He was still hounded by visions of his own death before the work could be finished, of disastrous incompetence on the part of some subordinate, of precious days lost at the bridge over some technical problem he could solve in a minute were he there. He felt imprisoned within his own body. He grew extremely short-tempered. When visitors were with him he suffered the whole while. Talk of any kind tired him more than anything else. His eyesight had grown so dim he could neither read nor write nor sign his own name.
His troubles were not solely the bends anymore. That was clear to those who had any regular contact with him. The standard explanation then, and later, was that he was suffering still from the bends. While residual pains and discomforts of the bends can persist, occasionally over a lifetime, the bends were only part of his problem. It is extremely unlikely, for example, that the bends could, at this stage, have had anything to do with his failing eyesight or the terrible discomfort he suffered whenever people were around.
When describing his own condition in private correspondence, Roebling himself does not seem to have used the words “bends” or “caisson sickness.” He spoke only of a nervous disorder and of his crippled physical condition. Farrington would later describe him as being a “confirmed invalid…owing to exposure, overwork and anxiety.” There is, indeed, every indication that the strain he was under, the limits he had pushed himself to during the winter of 1872-73 to get everything down on paper, the anguish and massive frustration of knowing so much about what ought to be done but able to do so very little—all that on top of the physical torment of the caisson sickness, had brought on what in that day was called “nervous prostration.”
He always told others his agony was his own doing. He had pushed himself too far he said. He longed for rest. It was the one and only cure he had faith in, but he simply had no time for that.
Collingwood, it seems, was also nearing a collapse of some sort and Roebling, gravely concerned about his old college friend, offered some revealing advice:
Regarding your health my council would be sit down and keep quiet…. Above all don’t let a fake ambition lead you on to undertaking tasks that will only break you down all the more. You are no doubt beginning to find out, as I have found out long ago, that nervous diseases are as intractable as they are incurable and only through mental rest of all the faculties and especially the emotions can they even be palliated in the slightest degree.
This letter, like all his correspondence with Brooklyn, the specifications and the rest, was dictated to Emily, who was in constant attendance as both nurse and private secretary. Gray-faced, he would lie propped up in bed or sit like an old man with a blanket over him in a chair by the window. She would sit close by taking down what he said in a letter book. When he had finished, she would read it back to him. He would make a few corrections, then she would do a final draft, in longhand, and read that back to him once more. As a result, week by week, month by month, she was learning quite a lot about the engineering of a wire suspension bridge.
The physical pain came and went. Frequently there were whole days when he felt well enough to be up and about the house. But everyone had to take extreme care not to upset him in any way. Since childhood he had been interested in geology and in collecting minerals. Now they became a passion. He began sending to one place and another around the country for different specimens. How he was able to take any enjoyment from them, with his sight so impaired, is a puzzle. But he did. Once, with a check for some new specimens, he had Emily include a note of explanation. “I am an invalid confined to the house and minerals are the only things that do not tire or excite me.”
A few incidents concerning the bridge upset him no end. Somebody in Brooklyn had suggested there was a secret connection between the Roebling wire works and Carnegie’s Keystone Bridge Company, implying that had been the reason why Keystone, not the lowest bidder, got a contract for anchor bars. Livid, deeply insulted, Roebling had sent off an icy reply to Murphy, saying he had no interest in the Keystone company, financially, politically, socially, or any other way, and further stated that if the policy henceforth was to give “contracts for supplies to the lowest bidders, irrespective of all other considerations, I hereby absolve myself from all responsibility connected with the successful carrying on of this work.” It sounded perilously like a letter of resignation.
The Eads lawsuit had also been a continuing aggravation for years now. In 1871 Eads had put in a claim for five thousand dollars, saying that Roebling, in the New York caisson, had infringed on the design he had used in St. Louis. Roebling called the charge absurd. But presently, after Roebling was stricken with the bends, Eads had angrily attacked him in the pages of Engineering, the esteemed English journal. The thing that had set Eads off was a harmless paper by Roebling published in Engineering in which Roebling had not, in Eads’s opinion, credited Eads properly for placing his air locks at the bottom of the shafts, part way inside the air chamber, instead of on top. Eads claimed he had been the first to do it that way and said Roebling should have said as much. He accused Roebling of stealing the idea and in a rather snide, roundabout fashion dismissed the younger man for having no creative talents of his own.
Eads’s letter was written in April 1873, but it did not appear in the magazine until later in the spring, when Roebling had just arrived at Wiesbaden, in no shape for any more emotional strain than he was already under. In a fury he wrote in answer to Eads’s letter: “Its perusal has left only the one prominent impression on my mind, that his skill in blowing his own trumpet is only surpassed by his art in writing abusive and unjust articles about other people.” Roebling said he had always had the greatest respect for Eads until then. He said he had designed his New York caisson before he ever saw anything of Eads’s plans or went out to St. Louis. “My actual experience in the St. Louis caisson,” he wrote, “consisted in nearly breaking my neck, and being half drowned in the bottom of a pitch-dark hole—certainly a forcible way of reminding one where the lock was located.” He said, furthermore, that Eads had ridiculed his idea of using timber for the caissons, that Eads’s prior interest in caissons had been scant and superficial, and that it was ridiculous to think that the position of an air lock was something that could be patented. “You might as well patent contrivances in a ship’s rigging if she were loaded with grain or cotton, or entirely empty.”
Then he wrote: “In conclusion I beg to assure Captain Eads that I feel perfectly competent to take care of the East River Bridge, and to overcome dangers and difficulties of which he has but little conception…. all of the St. Louis caissons together can find room in one of the East River caissons, with space enough left for several more like them…. And where would you go to find an easier material to sink through than at St. Louis, or a more difficult one than in the East River?”
It was an exchange of a sort not often witnessed in the profession, on the printed page at least, and might have been enjoyed as a memorable good fight had it not been known by many readers why Roebling was writing from Wiesbaden. Eads had never had any particular trouble with the bends himself, none personally that is, and this seemed hardly the time for him to be going after Roebling for what appeared to be a minor infraction, assuming even that Eads was within his rights. But Eads apparently was not to be put off by reports of Roebling’s condition and refused to let Roebling have the last word, writing still one more letter to the editors of Engineering.
His time was too valuable, Eads said, to take part in petty arguments, but he spent several columns of small print picking apart the things Roebling had said, and to prove his point about the position of the air lock, he included drawings of both his and Roebling’s designs, which, to be sure, looked remarkably alike.
Who was right in all this is difficult to say and not especially important. But the dispute deepened the division between the two men and caused them both considerable anxiety at a time when each had troubles enough to contend with. Each man believed his good name had been stained by the other. Neither was about to stand by and let that happen, or to have his bridge denigrated. The anger on both sides was all out of proportion to the issue. For Roebling, who let the matter drop, Eads’s accusations were the cause of lasting mental torment, but for Eads, Roebling’s amenity appears to have had some rather different consequences.
Eads needed every friend he could get just then, for it was in that summer of 1873, the summer of the exchange of letters in Engineering, that Grant’s Secretary of War, William Belknap, convened a board of Army engineers to decide whether Eads’s bridge was a hazard to navigation on the Mississippi and ought to be stopped. And it was in September, soon after Eads’s last letter attacking Roebling, that the Army board issued its report calling the St. Louis Bridge “a very serious obstruction” to river traffic. By January the Army engineers were saying that probably the bridge ought to be torn down and what is so extremely interesting about all this is that the most outspoken member of the board was G. K. Warren, Washington Roebling’s brother-in-law.
Very possibly Warren’s opinion was a purely professional judgment. Had there been no bad blood between Roebling and Eads, Warren might have arrived at exactly the same conclusions. But the wording of his opinion suggests otherwise.
“I am convinced,” he wrote in summary, “that a bridge suited to this great want [spanning the Mississippi], at an expense much less than has already been made, almost if not entirely unobstructing navigation, could years ago have been completed, upon designs well-known and tried in this country, had not the authors of the present monster stood in the way.”
Since neither the construction cost nor the aesthetic merits of the St. Louis Bridge were at issue, Warren’s comments on both were uncalled for, as well as quite debatable. The “monster,” as he called it, happened, for example, to be regarded by many as one of the handsomest bridges in the world. Moreover, it is pretty obvious that the “well-known and tried” designs referred to were those by John A. Roebling.
But fortunately for Eads and his bridge, Secretary Belknap, General Warren, and the other Army engineers were overridden when Eads, as a last resort, went to the White House to see his old friend Grant. Congress had authorized the building of the bridge, Grant told Belknap, so only Congress could decide to pull it down, which Congress did not do.
In another couple of years, with his bridge completed and being talked about everywhere, Eads had become a great popular hero. He was “the noble engineer.” Early in 1876, a Presidential election year, it was discovered that Secretary Belknap had been getting kickbacks from the sale of Indian trading posts in the West. This on top of the sensational disclosure of a “Whiskey Ring” operating in St. Louis under the direction of Grant’s supervisor of internal revenue had the whole country wondering where, from what walk of life, an honest leader might be found. The editors of Scientific American decided they had the answer. “In war and peace his commanding talents and remarkable sagacity have been devoted to patriotic labors…We nominate for the Presidency Captain James B. Eads of St. Louis. The man of genius, of industry, and of incorruptible honor.”
Eads kept on pressing his claim against Roebling and Roebling got so he could not bear even the mention of the man’s name. Finally, in May, Roebling gave in. “I am willing to accede to the proposition of Captain Eads in order to settle this matter,” he wrote to Paine. “I give my consent more as a matter of expediency than from conviction. I am not in a frame of mind to stand any further worry about a lawsuit.”
The issue was thereupon settled out of court and that at least was one less worry for Roebling to dwell on.
The previous winter had been a particularly bad time for Roebling. At one point, his nervous state had become so unsettled, his physical discomfort so acute, that in a moment of total despair he decided to give up on the bridge.
“My health has become of late so precarious a nature,” he wrote to Henry Murphy, “that I find myself less and less able to do any work of any kind. I am therefore reluctantly compelled to offer my resignation as Engineer of the East River Bridge. The hopes that time and rest would effect a change have been in vain, rest being simply impossible.”
The letter must have been ignored in Brooklyn, or perhaps it was never even sent. The one and only copy of it is in Emily Roebling’s cardboard-backed letter book, written in pencil, in December 1875. Maybe, just possibly, she wrote it herself, without his knowing it, at a moment when her own endurance failed, but then the moment passed. In any case, nothing came of the letter.
The extraordinary thing is that Roeblmg’s mind through all this time seems not to have been affected in the slightest. If anything, his powers of concentration, his remarkable gift for recalling in every detail things he had seen, seemed greater. No longer able to work problems out on paper, as he always had, he did everything in his head, and when his younger brothers came to call on him, as they did from time to time, to inquire about his health or to discuss problems at the mill, it was he who seemed able to sort things out quickest and come up with solutions. In fact, his ability to direct the family business, in absentia, seemed no less than his ability to direct the bridge, and nearly as vital.
His brother Charles, who had come into the business in 1871, after finishing at Troy, had grown into a fastidious, intelligentlooking young man who wore a stovepipe hat and whose primary interest now was his work, which was the production side of the business. Ferdinand, who with his rimless spectacles and mustache appeared older than his age (thirty-four by 1876), was supposed to see to commercial matters.
Roebling thought highly of Charles. He admired his unfailing industry and his technical competence. “He was his father over again, to a far greater degree than any of the other children,” Roebling wrote. “He inherited his temperament, his constitution, the concentrated energy which drives one to work and be doing something all the time.” Charles, at twenty-seven, was still a bachelor.
When Charles had returned from college in 1871, everything had been prepared for him to take his place in the mill, and since Ferdinand knew comparatively little engineering, Charles had been more or less his own master from the start and old Charles Swan, his guardian, had turned over to him something like $300,000 “in good securities.”
“Charles had one very strong point,” his oldest brother would write admiringly, “he never copied; [he] tried to solve every problem according to the best of his ability. Every task was an education to him.”
Roebling’s relationship with his brother Ferdinand, the one John Roebling kept home during the war, had grown rather strained, however. Charles Swan, who had always looked after things at the mill whenever a bridge was being built, was not the man he had been, and in the time Roebling had been away from Trenton, Ferdinand, or “F.W.” as he was called, had more or less taken charge. “He lost no opportunity to make me painfully aware of it,” Roebling would write.
Now for the first time in his life, Roebling had become bitter over what he considered an unjust disparity between his own fate and that of his brothers. It was not at all like him. But his physical suffering, the endless confinement, the strain of everything he had on his mind, had begun to tell. And besides, his feelings were not without justification.
He had been the only one of them ready and able to carry on what his father had left undone at Brooklyn and he had been paying a terrible price for it. His brothers, both in perfect health, had had everything handed to them, as he saw it; they were getting rich speedily and effortlessly in a business that had been all set up for them in advance and that he felt he understood better than either one of them. He, on the other hand, and on top of all his other anxieties, was convinced he was nearly ruined financially. He never said a word about this publicly. The only record of his feelings is in private correspondence written years afterward. Nor is it possible to know whether his financial plight was quite so serious as he pictured it. His salary on the bridge remained at ten thousand dollars a year, but his expenses, he estimated later, were twice that. The medical expenses were the worst. The six months in Europe had been particularly costly. There had been Eddie’s private schooling to pay for, as well as that of his own young son. The house in Brooklyn had cost him forty thousand dollars. Moreover, he saw his expenses growing greater in time to come. But realistic or not, his concern was still another severe strain, and his unspoken feeling of indignation was deep-rooted enough to last a lifetime.
Nobody outside the family would ever know anything of this. What is more, the respect he commanded inside the family appears not to have been diminished in the slightest, either by the rise of his brothers’ fortunes or by the tragic turn his own life had taken. When it came time to incorporate John A. Roebling’s Sons, in 1876—when Charles Swan was finally persuaded to retire—Ferdinand was made secretary and treasurer, Washington was made president.
The identification of the name Roebling with the bridge at Brooklyn was, of course, quite a good thing for the family business. Unquestionably the firm’s reputation had already benefited. When a reporter came down from Brooklyn to tour the mill, Ferdinand showed him about.
“Their grounds cover fourteen acres,” the visitor wrote afterward, “and within the walls are five wire rolling mills, and all the buildings needed for their three hundred and fifty workmen and office purposes…Their products amount to three-fourths of all the wire rope made in this country. It was a rare sight to watch these busy workmen taking blocks of red-hot steel in their tongs from white-heat furnaces, passing them through rolling mills which stretched them until they lay upon the iron floor like interlacing snakes in bizarre shapes, ready to be carried by other hands to annealing furnaces, and thence through other draw plates until the wire was prepared to bind together either the delicate handiwork of the jeweler or the two cities of New York and Brooklyn with their millions of inhabitants.” The mill was then producing something like 450 miles of wire a day.
Once the cable spinning commenced over the East River the public would be treated to the most spectacular demonstration imaginable of the Roebling product—or so it was naturally assumed in Trenton—and during the last part of Washington Roebling’s confinement there, he had the pleasant task of helping to plan a display for Machinery Hall at the Centennial Exhibition.
A variety of Roebling wire and cable, some of it on big spools, would be set out within a display area framed with iron rope draped as velvet rope would be customarily. But the centerpiece of the arrangement would be a sample section, or model, of the cable for the East River bridge, mounted on a little pedestal, like a piece of sculpture, and having as its backdrop an enormous drawing of the bridge by Hildenbrand that measured seven by twelve feet and presented “the noble proportions of the structure to great advantage.”
The section was made up at the mill especially for the occasion and exactly as Roebling had decided the real thing would be put together. When finished, it looked like a metal drum about three feet long and fifteen and a half inches in diameter and bound with brass bands. The upper end was cut off and planed smooth so the position of the wires could be seen. In all it contained 5,282 steel wires, each a little over an eighth of an inch thick, and it weighed 1,200 pounds. The wires had been laid as they would be in the cables—parallel and in distinct stages: 278 wires bound together formed a strand, as it was called; 19 strands in one great bundle, all tightly wrapped in protective skin of soft iron wire, formed a cable.
Roebling had worked out the entire arrangement and in the early part of 1876 completed his final specifications. Each of the nineteen strands in a finished cable would be continuous wire some 185 miles in length, drawn from one anchorage to the other, up and over the towers, back and forth, back and forth, above the river. Each cable would contain just over 3,515 miles of wire and the wire in all four cables would come to more than 14,000 miles.
The whole process would begin with a single wire taken across by boat, then lifted up over the towers. After that a heavier steel rope would be pulled over, the “traveler” or “working rope” as it was known, which would do the job of hauling the cable wire itself back and forth. The trick would be getting the wires in each strand in exactly the right position..
Roebling’s specifications called for 6.8 million pounds, or 3,400 tons of wire “of superior quality steel.” The wire was to have a tested strength of not less than 160,000 pounds per square inch, which meant it would have nearly double the strength of the iron wire used at Niagara and Cincinnati. In addition, to guard against the corrosive salt air over the East River, the wire would be galvanized—coated with zinc—something that had not been done before and that a few later-day suspension-bridge builders would neglect to do to their regret. *
Sealed bids, the specifications stated, would be “received by the Trustees of the New York and Brooklyn Bridge, up to the 1st day of December, 1876.” But it seemed a foregone conclusion that the Roebling company would get the contract, and when the Centennial Exhibition opened in May, the prototype slice of bridge cable set up in the Roebling display turned out to be one of the most popular items in Machinery Hall, along with Ben Franklin’s old hand press, a first typewriter, and a telephone displayed by a courtly Scottish immigrant, Alexander Graham Bell. One day in Machinery Hall the fair’s most popular visitor, Emperor Dom Pedro of Brazil, put his ear to Bell’s device, then dropped the receiver, exclaiming, “My God, it talks!” The fair was a success from that moment on.
Machinery Hall was also the place to see the favorite attraction of the entire fair, the gigantic Corliss stationary steam engine. It stood just down the way from the Roebling display, taller than most houses, with two tremendous walking beams, a gigantic flywheel, several flights of stairs and little platforms for the mechanics and oilers. It had been erected in the central transept of the hall and provided the driving power for some thirteen acres of machinery displayed throughout the building.
On the opening day, the hall filled with spectators, every machine had stood motionless as President Grant, dressed all in black and looking pale and tired, stepped to the controls of the giant engine, along with Dom Pedro and George H. Corliss, its creator. Grant and the little Emperor each took hold of a lever. Then Corliss waved his hand, a signal to admit steam into the cylinders (the boilers were located outside of the building). “It was a scene to be remembered,” wrote one reporter, almost overcome with excitement, “…perhaps for the first time in the history of mankind, two of the greatest rulers in the world obeyed the order of an inventor citizen.” When the two men swung their levers, the engine hissed loudly, the enormous walking beams began moving, ever so slowly, the floor trembled. Then the walking beams were going up and down. The flywheel gathered momentum, belts moved, shafts and pulleys turned, and machines everywhere came to life—sewing cloth, printing newspapers (the New York Herald, the Sun, the Times), printing wallpaper, sawing logs, grinding out plug tobacco. The Pyramid Pin Company had a machine attended by a little girl that turned out 180,000 pins stuck in paper in a single day.
The giant Corliss itself required only one attendant, which greatly impressed most observers, including William Dean Howells, who wrote: “The engineer sits reading his newspaper, as in a peaceful bower. Now and then he lays down his paper and clambers up one of the stairways…and touches some irritated spot on the giant’s body with a drop of oil, and goes down again and takes up his newspaper; he is like some potent enchanter there…” Americans liked their mechanical marvels done up on a grand scale, the bigger the better, and it was an age that adored pageantry. So a combination of the two was bound to please. But it was the contrast between man and machine that made the machine seem so monstrous big, the man so touched by some blessed new power, and the whole hall so enormously popular.
There were some, of course, who saw the Corliss engine as a menace, “ready at the touch of a man’s fingers to show its awful power”; but most people went back to the cornfields of Indiana or the dry goods store in Fall River or wherever it was they came from filled with pride and admiration for all they had seen.
Two of the Roebling brothers went over to Philadelphia to attend the opening ceremonies. Charles probably considered the Corliss engine overly large for its purpose and inefficient, which it was, and Ferdinand must have been extremely pleased by the attention paid the section of bridge cable. The fair would be attended by eight million citizens by the time it ended in the fall, or about one American out of every five, a very large percentage of whom took some time to look over the Roebling display.
For Washington Roebling news of all this, like news of everything else happening beyond his walls, came to him second or third hand. The fair was an easy morning’s train ride from Trenton, but for him it could as well have been on the other side of the world. The opening ceremonies in Machinery Hall and all the other attractions were described at great length in the papers. There was Old Abe, the famous eagle mascot of the Civil War, which, for fifty cents, could be seen dining on live chickens; or the gigantic hand and torch of the great statue Liberty Lighting the World, a one hundredth birthday gift from the people of France. These he could readily picture as Emily read aloud for him, just as later the following month he could see the gruesome scene on the high plains of Montana when she read about the slaughter of 264 federal cavalrymen and their commanding officer, George Armstrong Custer. Roebling and Custer were of about the same age. That the Little Big Horn and Machinery Hall were part of the same America said perhaps as much as anything about the sort of country it was after a hundred years if one stopped to think about it, which doubtless Roebling did.
And then, very gradually, he began to show signs of improvement. In July he was talking to Emily of returning to the bridge and he dictated a letter to Paine to tell him as much. The work he liked best, the work he knew best, was about to begin. When he had first arrived in Cincinnati after the war, the cable spinning had only just begun and he had been the one in charge from then on, not his father, as most people failed to appreciate. Now he grew keenly interested in everything to do with the footbridge. Farrington was the man to build it, he wrote Henry Murphy. Farrington had been through all this before at Cincinnati and knew just what do to. “He is a man of great resource when unforeseen troubles arise,” Roebling told Murphy, who already knew all about Farrington and his abilities, “and he has the necessary coolness and perseverance and does not easily get frightened in time of danger…” It was what someone else might have said about Roebling.
Then on the afternoon of August 14, shortly past one o’clock, a telegram was sent up to the Roebling house from the Trenton depot. It was from Paine: THE FIRST WIRE ROPE REACHED ITS POSITION AT ELEVEN AND ONE HALF O’CLOCK. WAS RAISED IN SIX MINUTES.
Two other telegrams followed, one from John Prentice, treasurer of the Bridge Company, and one from Farrington late in the day. They reported what he hoped they would: after the first rope was in position, a second had gone across, the two to form an endless cable stretching from anchorage to anchorage. The whole operation had gone off without a hitch, exactly as planned. It was a moment Roebling had been anticipating for seven years and he had missed seeing it.