18
Sealed proposals will be received by the Trustees of the New York and Brooklyn Bridge, up to the 1st day of December, 1876, for the manufacture and delivery in Brooklyn, N.Y., of 3,400 net tons or 6,800,000 lbs. of Steel Cable Wire…
—From specifications issued over the signature of W. A. Roebling, Chief Engineer
EVEN among his political opponents Abram Hewitt was considered an honorable man. There was nothing very engaging about him. A nervous, brusque little person with an authoritative manner, he was anything but the ingratiating good fellow. But he was hard-working, not a politician by trade, and reputedly both intelligent and honest, all qualities that counted high with the electorate in the year 1876.
Hewitt had come quite a way since the late Mayor Havemeyer had asked him to take a look into the bridge management. He was a Congressman now, and more. His friend Tilden, who had become governor of New York chiefly because of his reputation as a standard bearer against Tweed, was the Democratic candidate for President. Hewitt was his campaign manager, and with the depression still gripping the nation, the Republicans divided, and ever more scandal in Washington, it looked as if Tilden might be in the White House come spring. Tilden’s opponent was the mild, modest, and largely unknown Rutherford B. Hayes, governor of Ohio, who had been picked that June at a convention in Cincinnati, where the Roebling bridge had been a way for delegates “to take some air” as the balloting dragged on, and where the nominee himself had begun his law career about the time that bridge was being started.
Tilden, however, was not much as a candidate. Cold and secretive by nature, not in the least eloquent, he was also in poor health and rather reluctant to spend any of his sizable personal fortune on behalf of his own cause. As a result Hewitt had become more than just his manager. He was the driving force of the Tilden campaign and, with his brother-in-law, Edward Cooper, the biggest financial contributor. Hewitt also happened to be running for Congress again, but his reputation was so high and his Republican opponent so weak that his election seemed certain, despite the little time he could give to it.
“Hewitt was as true a patriot, as pure a man, as ever lived, in my opinion,” wrote one admiring young campaign worker. Henry Adams, historian and man of letters, whose vision of his times would count so with future historians, wrote that Hewitt was among that New York school of politicians “who played the game for ambition or amusement, and played it, as a rule, much better than the professionals, but whose aims were considerably larger than those of the usual player, and who felt no great love for the cheap drudgery of the work.” Everything considered, Adams judged Hewitt “the best-equipped, the most active-minded, the most industrious…the most useful public man in Washington.”
Hewitt was known for his liberalism and sense of responsibility. He was the wealthy ironmonger who believed in labor unions. He was the Congressman who had the intelligence to appreciate scientific research, ardently supporting the geologic surveys in the West, for example. He was not simply a reform Democrat, he was what all respectable people longed for: a decisive gentleman in public life.
So it is not surprising that when Hewitt introduced a resolution at a meeting of the bridge trustees the first week in September, it was considered an exemplary piece of foresight and was adopted immediately and unanimously.
The principal piece of business to be attended to next was the awarding of the wire contract. It was plain a lot would be riding on the decision. Estimates were that the order for wire would come to somewhere near a million dollars.
Hewitt had arrived at the meeting a little late, just as the president of the board, Henry Murphy, was recounting the progress made since the previous meeting in July and predicting no more problems henceforth. The contractors for the stone had all been paid and the Chief Engineer’s specifications for cabled wire had been approved by the Executive Committee. There was no reason, Murphy said, why the bridge could not be completed in a short time.
But then Hewitt, who was vice-president of the board, said that while he had read the wire specifications and found them to be “eminently wise,” he had not found any provisions concerning those who should be allowed to bid for the contract. Hewitt expressed some surprise about this.
The Chief Engineer was also a manufacturer of cable wire, Hewitt reminded Murphy and the others. He himself was a wire dealer, but he did not consider it just that he should become a bidder, and would not, therefore. Bids from any firm, company, or individual interested in the bridge in any way should not be accepted, he said. The Chief Engineer especially should not be allowed to become a bidder. Hewitt said further that if Colonel Roebling was permitted to compete for the contract, he, Hewitt, would resign from the board and have nothing more to do with the bridge. It was quite a little speech. It made an issue of something that had never been considered an issue in all the years since John A. Roebling was first asked to build the bridge and apparently it made a great impression, for when Hewitt offered the following resolution, it was adopted without any further discussion:
Resolved, That bids from any firm or company in which any officer or engineer of the Bridge has an interest will not be received or considered; nor will the successful bidder be allowed to sublet any part of the contract to any such person or company.
There was no specific mention of Roebling or the Roebling company, but just so nobody mistook his intentions, Hewitt later repeated what he had said for the benefit of the press. “I am very strongly opposed to the Roeblings having anything to do with the filling of contracts for the bridge,” he was quoted as saying.
But before the meeting adjourned another man present stood up and asked to be heard. His name was John Riley and he too wanted to say something concerning the Chief Engineer. He said he had understood that Roebling was very ill and unable to attend to his duties, but now he had heard that Roebling’s wife was doing his work for him. Clearly the time had come to give somebody else the job, Riley said. If there were mistakes in the construction of the bridge, the trustees would become liable, and he for one did not intend to be responsible for any such mistakes.
Murphy immediately answered that in the event of Roebling’s death, Martin, Collingwood, or McNulty could take charge of the work (nobody had said anything about Roebling dying) and Kinsella commented that there were no more efficient engineers. That seemed to satisfy Riley and everyone else and the meeting broke up.
That was on September 7, the day after William Tweed, who had disappeared from his house on Madison Avenue nine months before, stepped off a ship at Vigo, Spain, and was immediately arrested. After hiding out in a farmhouse in New Jersey for three months, Tweed had moved to Staten Island and from there went by schooner to Florida, where he lived in the Everglades until he was able to sail for Cuba. In Havana he had booked passage for Spain on a bark called Carmen. On the trip across he had been so seasick that he arrived in Spain weighing a scant 160 pounds. Still, incredibly, the Spanish authorities, with only a Nast caricature to go by, had recognized him. The news of his arrest caused a sensation in New York, about the time Hewitt, the man who had taken Tweed’s place in the running of the Bridge Company, was making news with his latest service in behalf of the great public work. His resolution was widely praised. And even though it was an intensely political season, and the pronouncements of candidates were pretty generally viewed with that in mind, Hewitt was taken at his word. Whether he or any of the other trustees anticipated the reaction in Trenton is impossible to say.
The New York and Brooklyn papers carried Hewitt’s resolution and his remarks about the Roeblings on the morning of September 8. In Trenton, later that same day, Washington Roebling dictated a letter of resignation.
His health, he wrote to Henry Murphy, was such that he could no longer continue as Chief Engineer. His doctors had been urging him to give up for the past two years, but he had not, he said, because his personal direction seemed to be absolutely necessary to the success of the bridge. Now things were different. “All plans down to the smallest detail have been prepared by me for several years to come,” he said; so the work would not suffer any if he were no longer in charge. He had been neglecting his private business. (“I have not been inside our mill for four years,” he added, but then thought better of that and had Emily cross it out.) “My health has been undermined by my faithful attention to these duties [as Chief Engineer] and the extra expenses I have been subjected to during these years have far exceeded the recompense I have received and I therefore feel I have earned a rest.”
Then he got to the heart of the matter. He had taken the full burden of responsibility for the engineering of the bridge, he had given the work his every energy, he had made financial sacrifices, he had endured years of physical suffering, but now his own honesty and integrity, and that of his family, had been questioned publicly and this he would not endure, and particularly at the hands of Abram Hewitt. For Roebling, as he would make abundantly clear in time, in his private correspondence, did not share the conventional view of Abram Hewitt.
Although devotion to the success of the work has been my ambition throughout, it is only by strict adherence to this principle that I have been able to steer clear of the entanglement connected with the general management of the work and maintain the impartial position on which alone an engineer should stand. It is therefore with regret at the close of our pleasant relations I am obliged to resent the gratuitous insult offered to me by the Vice-President of the Board of Trustees…a man whose designs upon the cable wire and ironwork of the superstructure are only too transparent and whose nominal connection with the Board of Management has had from the first no object but his own personal advantage.
According to Emily Roebling’s letter book the letter ended there. But a day or so later, still in a rage, Roebling wrote to the Brooklyn Eagle, explaining a little further what he meant by Hewitt’s “nominal connection.” Hewitt, Roebling charged, could resign his place as trustee anytime so as to evade his own resolution. The bridge itself meant nothing to Hewitt. But the letter never appeared in the Eagle. Either Roebling decided not to send it or Thomas Kinsella decided not to publish it.
Murphy did not keep Roebling waiting long for an answer. He said he could not accept Roebling’s resignation, only the trustees could do that at their next meeting. In the meantime, he urged Roebling to reconsider, assuring him that his services were vital, and that Hewitt was motivated by only the noblest intentions. Roebling was anything but pacified by this. Still hurt and angry, he was even more outspoken in his reply.
I was publicly and specifically singled out by name by Mr. Hewitt, as if I had spent my whole life in concocting a specification which I alone could fill or as if I were a thief trying to rob the bridge in some underhanded manner and against whom every precaution should be taken. Coming from such a source this is an insult I cannot overlook and I am compelled to resent it by declining to remain in a position where I am at any moment liable to a repetition of such acts on his part.
In light of later events, however, the most interesting part of the letter, none of which was ever made public, was this single sentence:
As you seem to be deeply impressed with Mr. Hewitt’s action in declining to become a competitor for this wire, I desire to say that his magnanimity is all a show, as the firm of Cooper and Hewitt have no facilities whatever for making the steel wire, and if you receive a bid from a Mr. Haigh of South Brooklyn, it will be well for you to investigate a little.
What Henry Murphy thought of this is not known and there is nothing in the record to indicate that he followed up Roebling’s suggestion. So presumably Murphy either knew more than he was ever willing to admit or he figured Roebling’s accusations to be those of a man under a great deal of strain. Roebling and Hewitt had long been rivals in business after all and the Roebling brothers were all known to be staunch partisan Republicans just like their father.
How much Murphy knew about Haigh’s business reputation one can only guess. It is possible that he and the other trustees had no suspicions about the man, but it is not very likely, for J. Lloyd Haigh had certainly not gone unnoticed during his time in Brooklyn.
Haigh had arrived in town some twenty years before. He took up residence on Columbia Heights, joined Plymouth Church, and commenced his social life as “a single gentleman.” He was quite suave and handsome apparently, a fine vocalist and considered “a great catch.” At Plymouth Church he “not only became an enthusiastic attendant, but was noted for his intense admiration for the pretty girls of the Bible class. His captivating manners and his personal attractions made him a welcome guest in many households, and his triumphs in winning hearts soon assured as great a success in that direction as his subsequent career in his business operations.” In a short time he was courting the daughter of a prominent Willow Street family. An engagement was announced and the fashionable part of Brooklyn was “agog with the gossip of the approaching nuptials,” until the father of the bride-to-be did a little checking into Haigh and found the man already had a wife and two children living “in rural retirement.” The wife was brought to Brooklyn to confront Haigh and the whole affair was hushed up as quickly as possible by the Willow Street family.
Haigh, however, waited only long enough for the rumors to die down before setting off on another round of courtship, devoting his attentions this time to a young lady who lived only a few blocks from Willow Street, and again presenting himself as a bachelor. Again he was found out and again he became a suitor, on Henry Street this time, only now he was saying he had obtained a divorce. There was a wedding shortly, with Haigh’s first wife again in Brooklyn claiming he was still her husband. Eventually there was a third wife and some question whether there had ever been a second divorce.
That there was a single Brooklyn man on the Board of Trustees who had not heard something of all this seems very doubtful. It is also doubtful that none of them knew, as Roebling did, that in the wire business Haigh was considered little better than a crook.
When the trustees met a month later, there was no talk of Roebling resigning. No business at all was taken up since the turnout was not enough for a quorum. The crisis had passed apparently, the rift had been patched up some way or other. Perhaps Roebling’s assistants persuaded him to change his mind, or his brothers did, or Emily, or all of them together. Or perhaps he himself, with time to think things over, decided he had come too far, sacrificed too much, to quit over injured pride, that there was another honorable alternative, and that in truth the bridge really could not be built without him. Perhaps he was just incapable of giving up.
Whatever his reasons, he made two decisive moves in quick succession that October, both of which were taken as sure signs of his renewed determination to stay with the bridge.
About the middle of the month he left Trenton for New York. He was still in a very bad way, physically and emotionally. His condition, in fact, was so precarious that he was unable to make the trip by train, his nervous state being such that he could not endure that much speed or vibration or the crowds of people. So it was arranged for him to go the whole way by canalboat and tug, instead, and as he came up the bay and into the East River, he saw the bridge for the first time in three years.
It looked to him, he is reported to have said, exactly as he expected it would. The carrier rope was up by then, as well as the first of the cradle ropes. A newspaper item from about this time was clipped out and saved by Emily Roebling:
There is something colossal in the look of the East River piers as they show in the morning sunlight; the ropes already connecting the two piers seem like slender threads, and as the vessels pass and repass under them some idea may be formed of what may be the effect when the graceful upper wire structure is completed, with the roadway crowded with passengers and vehicles of all descriptions and the high-masted clippers and coasting traders passing underneath.
He and Emily moved in with her brother, General Warren, and his wife, who were then living on West 50th Street. The intention, it seems, was to stay there just temporarily, before completing the return to the house on the Heights.
Then, only a short time later, Roebling notified Henry Murphy that he had sold his stock in John A. Roebling’s Sons, three hundred shares, worth $300,000, thereby eliminating any possible conflict of interest. “Please acknowledge receipt of this letter,” he wrote, “and oblige me by making the above fact known to the Board of Trustees of the New York and Brooklyn Bridge at their next meeting.” This Murphy did, on November 6. According to the requirements of the Hewitt amendment, the Roebling company, the major wire manufacturer in the world, and the only one Roebling had total confidence in, could now stay in the bidding.
But the question of the Chief Engineer’s health had not been resolved in the view of several trustees, including General Lloyd Aspinwall of New York, a most piously civic-minded figure, who urged that “some competent engineer be associated with him [Roebling] at once, in order to protect the future interests of the public.”
Murphy replied that Roebling was greatly improved and able to see his assistants on a regular basis now that he was living in New York. Stranahan, too, rose to Roebling’s defense. But Aspinwall wanted a consultant just the same. There was a good deal more discussion, with much emphasis on the idea that nothing personal was intended toward Roebling, and in the end it was agreed that a committee be formed to select suitable candidates for the job.
Abram Hewitt did not attend this session, nor would he appear again for some time. The little Congressman had much else on his mind. The elections were over, and while he himself had won handily enough, there was some question about who had been elected President. Tilden, as the official returns later showed, had a plurality of more than a quarter of a million votes and was the rightful winner, but at that point the outcome in three southern states—South Carolina, Florida, and Louisiana—was still undetermined, and if they were to go for Hayes, then Hayes would have the electoral votes needed to win—which was what the Republicans were claiming. Hewitt, still the moving spirit of the Tilden camp, was doing all he could to rescue his man, writing speeches, sending prominent citizens off to the disputed states to see that a fair count was made (Grant, meanwhile, was sending his own set of “visiting statesmen”), and rallying his fellow Democrats to “boldly denounce all…fraudulent contrivances for the destruction of self-government.” But in the year of the centennial of American democracy, the Presidency was about to be stolen by the Republicans, who were quicker and more efficient with their bribes than the other party. Hayes would win in the Electoral College by a majority of one. But it would be March before that happened, and until then Hewitt was spending most of his time in Washington. How he felt about Roebling’s recent moves he did not say.
In the meantime there was work to be done and Roebling applied himself to it.
Still in confinement in New York, he was kept constantly informed by his assistants as the footbridge cables and the second cradle cable went up and he himself kept after Murphy not to let things slide while waiting for a decision on the wire contract. A whole force of men had to be trained for spinning the cables, he explained. It was work in which all would be novices, which would be immensely difficult at best and seem terribly dangerous to anyone not accustomed to it. Men would have to be taught the crucial techniques of regulating the deflection of individual strands. Others would have to be taught to oil and splice the wire. He would need good men to operate the various machinery to be used. “Our previous bridges,” he said, “always came near enough together so that many of the old and experienced hands were to be found to initiate the new ones, but they are entirely wanting for this work.”
Only a small amount of wire ordered now would be enough for the men to work with and would make a great difference he said. So Murphy ordered thirty tons of wire—ten tons each from John A. Roebling’s Sons and two other firms, one of which was J. Lloyd Haigh of South Brooklyn.
Roebling sent off a steady stream of dispatches to his assistants—to specify how he wanted the oil kettles housed, to say that a sample ferrule joint sent over for his inspection looked a little short, to explain the differences in working with iron and steel wire (steel wire may crack, he warned). In a long letter to Murphy and Stranahan on the matter of a consultant, he expressed himself with customary bluntness. Any consultant would either be his superior, in which case he would resign, or his equal, in which case he would resign, or his inferior, in which case the man ought to take his place in the ranks. It was understandable that Aspinwall and some of the other New York trustees were concerned lest he die before the bridge was built. But there were things they ought to understand: “Man is after all a very finite being in his capacities and powers of doing actual work,” Roebling wrote, “but when it comes to planning, one mind can in a few hours think out enough work to keep a thousand men employed for years…. Continuing to work has been with me a matter of pride and honor! You must however trust me in so far that the moment I am unable to do full justice to my duties as chief engineer, I shall give you ample warning…” He really did not want to be troubled by any more talk of consultants.
To better familiarize himself with what the Europeans were doing with steel, he had begun learning Danish and Swedish. He sent Ferdinand lengthy, highly technical instructions on steel-wire extrusion, and in one such letter, commenting on the deficiency of a Roebling product already in service, there appears what may possibly be a touch of his old humor: “Everybody is getting afraid of the carrier rope, so many wires are breaking in it and when they break they make such a noise you can hear it all over. It hangs right over the Trustees’ office and if it breaks it might kill a dozen of them.”
Sealed bids for the cable wire were to be received at the bridge offices in Brooklyn up until the first of December. In the meantime, on Pier 29, beside the New York tower, wire samples sent with each bid were being tested on various machines in the presence of the bidders or their agents, all of whom thus far had expressed total satisfaction with the procedure.
The specifications called for steel wire of what was known as Number 8, Birmingham Gauge (this was a diameter designation), with a breaking strength of not less than 3,400 pounds. The steel was to be of medium quality, neither too hard nor too soft, and the wire had to be “straight” wire, that is to say, when a ring of it was unrolled on the floor, the wire had to lie perfectly straight, without any tendency to spring back into coils.
The specifications called for 6.8 million pounds of wire. During the tests, the wire would be required to bear a certain amount of strain before it broke, and to stretch a certain number of feet, then recover a certain portion of the stretch when the strain was removed. “In the case of any dispute arising between the inspector and the manufacturer,” the specifications stated, “the Engineer is to be the sole arbiter.” But the way things were, with Roebling bedridden, the tests were actually being conducted, the records kept, by Paine, with Martin in over-all charge.
On Monday, December 4, the trustees gathered for the formal opening of the bids. There were nine bids in all, including three from European manufacturers. The highest bid, from a wiremaker in Worcester, Massachusetts, came to nearly fourteen cents a pound, which would bring the aggregate cost close to a million dollars. The lowest bid, from John A. Roebling’s Sons, was for less than half that, at six and three-quarter cents per pound for Bessemer steel. The Roebling company had also submitted a bid for crucible steel, but it was higher than the one other bid submitted for crucible steel, that from J. Lloyd Haigh of South Brooklyn. *
None of the bids were released for publication when the trustees ended their meeting. All further consideration of the subject was to be deferred, reporters were told, until the tests were completed. Just the same, the rumor got about that the Roeblings were the low bidder and everyone assumed that was that.
But on December 13 the New York Herald published an interview with a man named Albert Hill, who was described as a consulting engineer with offices on Fulton Street in Brooklyn, and who had a number of very unflattering things to say about the wire specifications Roebling had drawn up and about the tests by which the wire was being judged. Nobody connected with the bridge would have believed that cable wire and its technical characteristics could ever become subjects of public interest, but that is just what was about to happen.
Hill considered the specifications very poorly written (“complex,” “onerous,” and “vague” were some of his adjectives). He thought there was too much emphasis on the manufacture of the wire and too little about the type of steel to be used. He objected strongly to the fact that Roebling had not specified what kind of steel he wanted. Hill’s view was that crucible steel was the only acceptable thing for such a bridge and he said it was what Roebling himself had required in his earlier specifications for the different steel ropes already in use—which was quite true. What possible reason Roebling had for not demanding crucible steel this time was a great mystery to Hill.
Finally, Hill was not in the least happy that the Chief Engineer, the man with the final say on the tests, was a member of the famous Trenton wire family. Hill wanted the tests conducted by an impartial board of engineers, so as to place the awarding of the contract beyond all suspicion of favoritism.
The reporter who interviewed Hill went over to Pier 29 the next day to see how the tests were being conducted and to talk to C. C. Martin. But Martin sent him back to Brooklyn to see Murphy, who chose to make no comment.
Murphy wasted no time contacting Roebling. What was he supposed to say, Murphy wanted to know. Roebling answered that he attached nowhere near the importance to the tests that everyone else seemed to. There was nothing to guarantee that a bidder would supply wire of the kind submitted for the tests. “If one man’s samples were too good he would be sure to reduce his standards, provided he got the contract, and another man, whose wire fell short of the standard, would have to make his wire come up to the mark before any could be accepted.” The point of the tests, Roebling said, was to satisfy him that each bidder could produce the kind of wire called for and to satisfy the bidder that making such wire involved no impossible demands. When he drafted the specifications, Roebling said, he knew the contract was to go to the lowest bidder and he had considered it his duty to include the tests as a simple protective measure. “Of all known materials, wire possesses a shape most susceptible of being tested in every direction. If necessary, a whole mile of it could be tested for its elasticity, throughout every foot of its length, without injuring it in the slightest degree. It is not like a huge casting, which may be full of hidden flaws, or like a big gun which bursts at the first discharge.”
Were he asked point-blank which were the finest samples tested to date, he told Murphy, it would be those from Richard Johnson & Nephew of Manchester, England. As far as the bids themselves were concerned, he remained “in total ignorance.”
Hill, however, had still more to say. The mathematics in the specifications were not up to snuff, he next claimed, and the Herald presented his own computations, in several long, dense paragraphs, full of wire weights and measurements, diameters and principles of physics, very little of which anyone other than a professional engineer could or would wish to struggle through. But seeing it all set forth in print in one of New York’s most powerful papers had a profound effect on the nervous system of those trustees who had had any prior misgivings about Roebling’s ability to handle the job, most of whom knew next to nothing about engineering.
“Of course this is only a theoretical demonstration,” Hill remarked in conclusion. Just how the Herald happened to come upon Hill or why the editors chose to give his opinions such a play was not made clear. He had never built a suspension bridge, as he admitted. None of the assistant engineers had ever heard of him, including Martin, who had been a Brooklyn man for more than twenty years. But the Herald called Hill’s argument clear and lucid and claimed the errors in Roebling’s calculations were so glaring that the specifications were worthless and no contracts should be made on them. Herald reporters looked up another engineer who agreed with Hill, a General Francis Vinton, professor of civil engineering at Columbia, who was interviewed at his bachelor quarters at the Racquet Club. Herald editorials demanded that the bridge trustees answer the charges and every one connected with the management of the bridge began getting extremely edgy.
The gist of all Hill’s arithmetic was that the Number 8 wire being specified had a breaking strength of 3,600 pounds instead of 3,400 as Roebling had it.
In actual fact, there was nothing at all to Hill’s charges, as anyone working on the wire tests could have shown, and as would be explained by Paine very shortly. But before that happened three badly informed trustees agreed to be interviewed on the subject. General Aspinwall made the silly comment that with 6,300 wires in each cable he did not see how a difference of two hundred pounds one way or the other mattered much; Thomas Kinsella said simply that he was going along with Hewitt on all this and that Hewitt, who was a wire manufacturer himself, had found nothing wrong with the specifications. And the third man, who refused to be named, said he could understand why Roebling might want his brother to get the contract. If he were Roebling, he said, he would want his brother to get the contract.
Hill fired back that a difference of 200 pounds per wire among 6,300 wires added up to a 1,260,000-pound difference and that he was not out to prove Roebling was no engineer. In conclusion he added a last gratuitous comment, which Roebling doubtless found about as revolting as anything said about him to date:
I fully appreciate that Colonel Roebling would, to a certain extent, be liable to criticism for these errors, but, taking into consideration the facts that Colonel Roebling is only following out the work commenced by his father, and had also impaired his health…there are extenuating circumstances that the trustees should bear in mind. The errors that I have pointed out might have been made by some subordinate in whom Colonel Roebling had confidence, and were thus printed without his having really supervised the work. As for the gentleman saying that were he chief engineer he also would desire his brother to obtain the contract under him, that is a matter of taste.
To a great many people it probably seemed that an absurdly big fuss was being made over very little. But the effect on several trustees was quite serious just the same. Hastily it was decided that the specifications and tests were “worthy of investigation” and Murphy told Paine to come up with an answer to Hill’s charges at once.
Ferdinand Roebling came on from Trenton to tell Henry Murphy that the Roebling family had had about enough of all this and to simplify things would just as soon withdraw their bid. But Murphy, who seems to have maintained his composure, talked him out of it.
Two days before Christmas Murphy called a private meeting of the Executive Committee to consider the bids and make a recommendation. The tests, he announced, were now completed and he had a report on the results from the Chief Engineer. He also had Paine’s reply.
Hill’s theoretical mathematics, Paine explained, were based on Hill’s own figures for the specific gravity and diameter of Number 8, Birmingham gauge. These were different from the ones the bridge engineers were going by, which, he acknowledged, were round figures. “These specifications were intended for the guidance of practical wiremakers,” Paine said, “and are written in plain language, easily understood by practical men, and are not incumbered by the formula employed, or the details of calculations necessarily used in their construction.” He proceeded then to disprove each of Hill’s charges, point by point, confirming the accuracy of the specifications to the satisfaction of everyone at the meeting. Paine did not, however, attempt any answer to the question Hill had raised about the quality of steel to be used.
Murphy next read Roebling’s report on the tests.
The letter was dated December 18. Roebling still had not been told which firm was lowest bidder or what any of the bids were. He said that nearly every bidder had been able to meet the standards required. Except for a few cases, he had no information concerning the variety of steel used in the numerous samples submitted. Nor did he know whether the manufacturers had provided that information with their bids. Regardless, he said, “It would be very unwise to accept two special prepared rings, as an absolute guarantee of the perfection of 6,000,000 pounds.” He then gave a brief account of each manufacturer’s samples, describing the first on his list this way:
Mr. J. Lloyd Haigh presented several samples of very good wire, apparently cast-steel, of three different stocks. The tensile strength exceeding the requirements, the elongation very good, the elastic limit up to the mark, the modulus of elasticity admissible. This wire is very straight, galvanizing smooth, the polish, though of no advantage, adds to the appearance of the wire….
The best wire was from the English firm Richard Johnson & Nephew. The rings from the Cleveland Rolling Mill Company were quite good, but not well galvanized. A German wire was also rated as excellent, and one ring of Bessemer steel wire from John A. Roebling’s Sons was designated very good, but two other Roebling rings, of cast steel, had not stood up to the bending tests satisfactorily.
Once Murphy had finished Roebling’s report, the committee unanimously recommended that the contract be awarded to John A. Roebling’s Sons and Murphy was requested to convene a special meeting of the board the following week.
But now things began changing swiftly behind the scenes. Several trustees, and most notably Thomas Kinsella, began playing for time. When the board met next, two days after Christmas, it was decided, on a motion from Kinsella, to postpone the final vote on the contract for two more weeks. The newspapers were informed that the results of the tests were still under consideration. Only the bids were released for publication, which made headlines but left the story still very much in the air.
These latest delays were the direct result of the Hill disclosures, the Herald quickly claimed, commending the “honorable members” of the board for their discretion. A little later, under an article headed “CHEAP STEEL INSURES A WEAK BRIDGE,” the paper insisted that the whole issue at stake was the one Hill raised at the start: why Roebling had not specified crucible steel.
Then the night before the trustees were to meet to vote, the Eagle, after first demolishing Hill’s attack (Hill was actually a Hungarian, the Eagle had earlier claimed, by way of a disclosure), suggested that perhaps Bessemer steel was not after all the best answer. “Unquestionably Bessemer steel wire is the cheapest,” wrote Kinsella in a three-column editorial, “but whether the trustees should get the cheapest wire, or the best at the cheapest rate, is the question which they will be called upon tomorrow to consider.”
Kinsella also pointedly raised the issue of Roebling’s connection to his family’s business, and even implied that perhaps Roebling’s break with the business was not altogether certain or done for the most commendable reason. “He had recently, it appears, sold out his interest in the Trenton works, so as not to embarrass his brothers…There is no disguising the fact, however, that the whole subject is complicated by this consideration.”
For anyone who had been following the story closely, it was clear the tables were turning. Never once before had the Eagle had a critical word for Roebling. Indeed it was Kinsella, more than anyone, who had made such a popular figure of the man. Moreover, Kinsella’s call for the best steel at the cheapest price was clearly another way of saying that the contract ought to go to the lowest bidder for crucible steel, who, of course, was J. Lloyd Haigh of Brooklyn. But no one knew which of the other trustees Kinsella was speaking for or how many of them there were.
The meeting of the trustees on the afternoon of January 11, 1877, was held as usual in the board room of the bridge offices, where now the model of Roebling cable exhibited at the Centennial was prominently on display, along with Hildenbrand’s mural-sized drawing in a mammoth frame. The meeting was the largest ever held. Nineteen were present, which was the entire board save one—Abram Hewitt, who was “unavoidably detained” in Washington, but whose presence would be very much felt all the same. Also in the room, sitting unobtrusively in the back and saying nothing, were a few privileged visitors, one of whom was J. Lloyd Haigh.
First on the agenda was the annual report from the Chief Engineer covering the year 1876, which was presented by Henry Murphy. The document included, among other things, Roebling’s explanation of how and why the wire had been tested, and emphasized, as Roebling had to Murphy, that the tests should not be taken as a hard-and-fast guarantee. “The assurance of the correct performance of these tests must remain a matter of confidence and trust,” said the Chief Engineer. “The building of the whole bridge is a matter of trust.”
The board then proceeded to consider the resolution from the Executive Committee recommending that the contract be awarded to the Roebling company. General Slocum wanted Army engineers appointed to inspect the wire before it left the Roebling works. This he said would entirely remove all public suspicion about the Chief Engineer. Action on the resolution was deferred.
Then the chair was asked to read a letter from Abram Hewitt, dated Washington, January 8. The letter was addressed to Murphy and was quite long. Hewitt was still extremely concerned about who was to get the wire contract.
He began by saying that if the trustees were willing to rely on the specifications and on the kind of inspection called for in the specifications, then he did not see how the trustees could do anything but award the contract to the lowest bidder, the Roeblings.
In this event, however, in view of the personal relation of the chief engineer to the stockholders of that company, and for the protection of the honorable reputation which he deservedly enjoys, it seems to me that it will be the imperative duty of the trustees to provide for the inspection of the wire entirely independent of the supervision and control of the chief engineer. In this particular I have no doubt I only anticipate a request delicacy and a sense of propriety would have led him to make to the trustees.
But, said Hewitt, there remained the very big question of whether the specifications guaranteed a suitable quality of wire, provided it were of Bessemer steel, and in his opinion they did not. He did not consider Bessemer steel of sufficient quality. He had had a great deal of experience in these matters, he said, and the kind of tests Roebling had designated were not enough to prove or disprove the quality of Bessemer wire.
So far as I can see, therefore, a proper regard for the public safety requires that the trustees should either stipulate on the contract that Bessemer steel should not be employed for the manufacture of the wire, or if it be employed the wire should be subjected to different and more ample tests than are provided for in the existing specifications. Those tests should be made by engineers having no relations to the contractors…
…I confess that I have such grave doubts that I would not venture to record my vote in favor of Bessemer steel upon the tests now provided for in the specifications, and I am convinced that the apparent economy involved in the use of wire made from this material should not weigh against the risk involved in its use, unless it can be more carefully guarded than it now appears to be…
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:
Was it improperly constructed? Was the iron of inferior quality? After eleven years of service, had it suddenly lost its strength?…Was the bridge, when made, the best of its kind, or the cheapest of its kind?
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.
…They.. They [the trustees] can help us and the public to forget this by taking the next most necessary step in their great undertaking, the selection at once of a suitable and eminent consulting engineer. We know the exceeding delicacy of this point. No one, and not we, certainly, desires to be unconcerned or lacking in sympathy with the physical troubles and disabilities of the present Chief Engineer…But we must deal with things as they are; the subject is too important for sentiment, and the bridge needs the live attention of a man in his best powers. It is almost such a case as that where General Winfield Scott used to sit in lethargy over the early business of the war, when the great rebellion at its outbreak found him with his great powers masked and half useless by the infirmities of age. It seemed to be unkind and treasonable to say of this old hero, and in his presence, that the duties of the Commander-in-Chief must be done by someone who could take the field, endure the hardship, and live in the saddle…. So now the great bridge enterprise needs an active consulting engineer, bringing to his duties the best qualities of natural fitness and training, with physical powers equal to every emergency. It is loading a great and difficult undertaking to an unnecessary strain, this carrying with it its disabled chief engineer, and keeping down its discussions to the atmosphere and the hush of his sick room…
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.
My attention has been called to an article in the Union, relating to the appointment of a consulting engineer for the New York and Brooklyn Bridge. I know not what power behind the throne dictates the spirit of this, and similar articles, though I am forced to the conclusion that there is one as there was in the case of Mr. Hill, who professed to expose inaccuracies in the specifications for the wire, a matter by the way, in which he has finally failed…
The Union calls for a consulting engineer who will “endure great hardship” and practically “live in the saddle.” If the writer understood whereof he wrote, he never would have used those expressions in that connection.
Consulting engineers seldom seat themselves in any other saddle than a cushioned office chair, or expose themselves to any greater hardships than a few hours’ quiet office chat, per day, and the labor of signing a monthly receipt for their salary.
The hardships of a campaign usually fall on the subordinate officers, as they have in the construction of the Bridge, since the illness of Colonel Roebling commenced. If Colonel Roebling had thrown more of the details of the work on his subordinates, in its earlier stages, he would not now be taunted by the Union, with breathing the air of a sick room, nor insulted by comparison with a superannuated general of armies.
Neither would the present Assistant Engineers, who under the immediate direction of the “invalid,” have successfully brought this great work thus far on its way toward completion, with unsurpassed skill, fidelity and endurance, be told that they were of no account, and that they must give way to a consulting engineer whose “natural fitness, training and endurance” qualify him to lead “in the saddle.”
Will the Union kindly tell me where such a one is to be found? Can it point to any living engineer outside of the “sick room” who has had sufficient training in this specialty of suspension bridge work to guarantee to the trustees and the taxpayers that he could do the work as well as the “invalid” assisted by those who may be said to have grown up with the work, under Colonel Roebling’s own eye, who are familiar with his plans, and devoted to their success?
…The fact is, there is no better talent in the country in this specialty than is now engaged in the construction of the New York and Brooklyn Bridge. It is ample for all its needs, present and to come. And if chronic grumblers and those who have private “axes to grind” would let the work alone, they might wake up some morning and find it completed, and be ready to take part in the opening ceremonies.
If the letter was indeed from Roebling, then it is the one and only time his feelings ever appeared in print. But by then there were people in Brooklyn talking about more than just a consulting engineer. The move had begun to get rid of Roebling entirely. On January 18 another editorial appeared in the Union.
THE CHIEF ENGINEER
It has become the deepest of mysteries in the Board of Bridge Trustees, too solemn for the keenest reporter to penetrate, and far too solemn for gossip, where the chief engineer is, and what is his condition. For aught any public act or appearance of his may indicate, he may have been dead or buried for six months. He is surrounded by clouds impenetrable…. We declare the great East River Bridge in peril, because it has no head, because its wires of control run into somebody’s closely guarded sickroom, because it is certain that a sick depressed tone runs through all its engineering discussions, from this cause…. The sooner we have a live, active chief engineer in full powers on the bridge work, the better the public of two cities will be pleased with the prospect.
When Henry Murphy read this, he must have figured, knowing Roebling’s sensitivity to such charges, that another letter of resignation would be in his hands the next day. But no such letter arrived and there would be no more talk of resignation from Roebling. He had decided he would stay with the job, and fight for it, if need be.
Some time in 1877, when things had quieted down a bit, Washington Roebling made some extraordinary private notes in his letter book.
The whole maneuver to take the wire contract away from the Roeblings and give it to J. Lloyd Haigh had been the work of Abram Hewitt, he said, just as he had warned Murphy. Haigh, a known scoundrel, was in fact Hewitt’s man. Hewitt, Roebling noted, held a mortgage on Haigh’s wireworks and he had made a deal with Haigh not to foreclose so long as Haigh turned over 10 per cent of what he made from the bridge contract. When his first attempt at exempting the Roeblings from the bidding had failed (because Roebling sold his stock), Hewitt had then manufactured the crucible steel issue. Roebling never said Albert Hill was working for Hewitt or for Haigh, but that would seem to be the case and what is implied by “the power behind the throne” reference in the letter signed “Tripod.” Hill did not interest Roebling much, but Hewitt did: “In laying this plan, he [Hewitt] well took the calibre of the men in the board, for when a demagogue wants to effect an object he always raises the cup of public virtue—and under cover of the smoke he raises, slips in himself. It is on such low and crafty tricks that the honor of a Hewitt rests,” wrote the engineer.
Roebling never bothered to speculate in his notes on why Kinsella turned on him and worked so hard in Haigh’s behalf. Maybe the editor was sincerely convinced crucible steel was the superior product. He also very much favored the idea of the contract going to a Brooklyn firm, as he said. But there is a further point to consider. No paper in the East had so strongly supported Samuel Tilden for President that fall as had the Brooklyn Eagle. Kinsella’s efforts in behalf of Abram Hewitt’s candidate had been extremely helpful and much valued by Abram Hewitt. And that January of 1877, with Tilden very likely about to become President, the times were ripe with possibilities for a brilliant, politically ambitious and cooperative editor.