19
I never saw better days for bridge work.
—C. C. Martin
THERE was now one continuous path from Brooklyn to New York. The temporary footbridge, finished in early February 1877, was a sort of hanging catwalk strung from city to city, draped above the river at an elevation sixty feet higher than the actual roadway would be. Farrington had been in charge of the work and it was carried out with the greatest dispatch, even during days of extremely cold weather. No sooner was the footbridge in operation than the newspapers sent reporters to make the crossing, which a few of them managed to do, with Farrington going along each time as an escort. His own men were never bothered by great heights, he was quoted as saying. “No sir, no man can be a bridgebuilder who must educate his nerves. It must be a constitutional gift. He cannot when 200 feet in the air, use his brain to keep his hand steady. He needs it all to make his delicate and difficult work secure. They must plant their feet by instinct…and be able to look sheer down hundreds of feet without a muscle trembling. It is a rare thing for a man to lose his life in our business for loss of nerve.”
But few of Farrington’s first visitors were so constituted. One reporter described proceeding along, step by step, nearly frozen with terror, as though his feet were fixed to the slat floor by Peter Cooper’s glue, as he put it. Another wrote, “The undulating of the bridge caused by the wind, which was blowing a gale, the gradually increasing distance between the apparently frail support and the ground, the houses beneath bristling all over with chimneys, looking small enough to impale a falling man, the necessity of holding securely to the handrail, to prevent being blown off, produced sensations in the reporter’s head—and stomach—never experienced before. In vain he glanced furtively into his companion’s face to detect any signs of flinching on his part. Stolidly the master mechanic kept on, and the reporter fancied once that he caught a backward glance of enjoyment at his discomposure.”
The customary visitor’s entrance to the footbridge was from the top of the Brooklyn anchorage. Beside the short flight of steps leading up to the footbridge, a big sign had been posted.
SAFE ONLY 25 MEN AT ONE TIME.
DO NOT WALK CLOSE TOGETHER. NOR RUN, JUMP, OR TROT. BREAK STEP!
W. A. Roebling, Engr. in Chief
From there the footbridge swept upward to the tower, at an angle of about thirty-five degrees. The width of the bridge was just four feet. There were wire rope handrails on either side, at hip level, but there was nothing to prevent a person from tripping and falling under the handrail and there were spaces between the slats, big enough to look through, put there intentionally to give the wind less hold. Actually with its guy wires and storm cables, the bridge was amazingly solid. Though men walking on it experienced a slight rocking motion, in ordinary weather there was very little horizontal swing. Still Thomas Kinsella was telling people that old John Roebling had said the thing would probably be blown down a dozen times and to judge by the looks of it nobody found that hard to believe.
Halfway up the walk, between the anchorage and the tower, was the first cradle, a narrow platform, a hundred feet long, with wooden handrails, that was hung on cables, like a slender scaffold, at right angles to the cables. Five such cradles had been put up, one between each anchorage and its companion tower and three over the river, at equal distances. By all reports they were a good deal more stable underfoot than the sensitive” footpath, the main purpose of which was, in fact, to provide access to the cradles, where men would be stationed to see that the wires were hung precisely right and to bind them into strands.
Once when Farrington and a reporter from the Tribune reached the top of the Brooklyn tower, the reporter sat down to rest and to take in the view. But it was then his troubles began.
Trinity Church steeple was fencing with Grace Church, the City Hall was bumping into the [Central] Park lake, Governor’s Island, guns and all, was playing shuttlecock and battledore with Harlem, Beecher’s Church shook its windows on the top of St. Paul’s, the top of the Tribune tower had fastened itself somewhere and was swinging the building pendulum fashion, and the reporter leaned against the solid tower in dread lest his weight would push it over. *
On Washington’s Birthday, about nine in the morning, passengers leaving from Brooklyn on the Fulton Ferry suddenly spotted two young ladies out on the footbridge. “There was no hesitation or misgiving in the demeanor of the ladies,” according to one account. “On the contrary, they stepped out boldly…without the use of the handrail.” Everyone on the boat began waving and calling, as the girls, accompanied by a man and two boys, headed for New York. As was learned later, the girls were the daughters of C. C. Martin, who was the man seen accompanying them (the boys were his sons). They were, as the papers all noted, the first women to make the crossing, but the fact that they had been allowed to do so struck many people as utter lunacy.
“While Revs. Drs. Storrs and Buddington and several excellent ladies are moving in the matter of providing a new insane asylum for this city,” wrote the Eagle, “a considerable number of our people are providing the necessity for such an institution and their own fitness to be life occupants of it…by crossing the footbridge…without call, without necessity, out of no business or artistic impulse, and from sheer foolhardy and peripatetic ‘cussedness.’”
Something like a hundred people crossed the footbridge that same day. They were able to go right up onto the anchorage and out onto the footbridge. There were no gates to stop them, no guards on duty. But Martin’s daughters were the only ones to cause any kind of popular stir, “BEAUTY ON THE BRIDGE” ran one headline the next morning and the New York Illustrated Times published a panoramic engraving of the two, their silk scarves and heavy skirts whipping in the wind, stepping nimbly out from the tower, as high as the clouds, a gentleman in a derby showing them the way.
Enough of a fuss was made over the incident that Henry Murphy decided all visitors would henceforth be required to apply for a pass. This was supposed to put a stop to the traffic, and it did, temporarily.
For now there was too much going on in preparation for the cable spinning for there to be room for anyone on the catwalk who did not belong there. Outside the Brooklyn anchorage yard, in the vicinity of James and Front Streets, workmen were tearing down old houses to make room for an expanded storage yard for the wire. The air was filled with dust and noise. Rubble was piled in immense heaps, enough brick it seemed to build twice the number of houses being torn down. Old women in shawls and street urchins came daily to gather whatever firewood they were able to carry off.
Inside the anchorage yard, both back and front, every foot of space was taken up with heavy timber frames, about six feet high, where the wire coils were hung out to dry after being coated with oil. The wire came from the factory galvanized but not oiled. This was done inside a low shed on the Front Street side of the yard. The coils were simply dipped into a trough of linseed oil—a two-man job.
On top of the anchorage, inside an enormous covered shed, was a wilderness of big wooden drums mounted upright in vertical timber frames, like a convention of water wheels, as someone remarked. Each drum was about two feet in width and eight feet in diameter, but mounted as they were, clear of the floor, they stood nearly twice as high as a man and they had handles all around their outer rims, exactly like a ship’s wheel. Also, standing to the rear of the drums, on the floor, in a horizontal position, were a number of smaller reels, built along the same lines, but only half the diameter.
Once a coil of wire had been dried out sufficiently in the yard, it would be hoisted to the top of the anchorage, where it would be wound first onto one of the small horizontal reels, then onto one of the big upright drums, the wire going on as smoothly as thread around a spool. It was from the big drums that the wire would play out over the bridge, in much the way a fishing line goes from the reel at the handle out along the rod.
Since a coil from the factory constituted only a few hundred feet of wire, innumerable splices had to be made before the wire was wound onto the drums. It was essential, of course, that every splice be as strong and weather-tight as the wire itself. It had taken two years of experimenting and testing to develop the system settled on. A galvanized steel ferrule two inches long and about as thick as a lead pencil was double-threaded inside, at both ends, one thread to the right, the other to the left, and corresponding threads were cut on the ends of the wires to be joined so that the same turn of the ferrule would screw both ends at once. The ends of the wires were also mitered, so that once the wires had been screwed tightly they could not twist. With the help of a small viselike apparatus, the wires were held together and the ferrule was put on, great care taken to screw it straight. The sharp edges of the ferrule were then beveled, the joint was cleaned of dirt and oil and dunked into a small ladle full of melted zinc to give it an all-over galvanizing. That done, the joint was coated with red paint.
In this way coil after coil was spliced and run onto the big drums as a single continuous wire. On each drum there were fifty-two coils, or nearly ten miles of wire. Once things really got going, it was expected that the cable-making machinery would consume some forty miles of wire a day, or about four drums a day. So for months the work crews were kept constantly busy “drumming up” wire.
On Tuesday, May 29, things were far enough along to send a first experimental wire across the river. (Just to see that everything was in proper order, and that the wire was strung at exactly the right deflection, Farrington, for one, crossed over the footbridge a total of fourteen times in that one day.) On June 11, 1877, the spinning of the great cables was begun. The way the system worked, two cables, those on the downstream side, were built simultaneously.
The impression among most people was that the wires were to be twisted, like the fibers in an ordinary rope or like the wires in the different steel ropes already in use on the bridge. But this, of course, was not the case.
In the first place it would have been impossible to twist such a mass of steel over such a distance, and even had it been possible, twisted strands would have less strength than those laid up parallel, all in line, as these were, like a bundle of rods, and compacted into what would, in the end, be essentially a great curved bar of solid steel.
The traveler rope was now working back and forth across the river day in, day out, the big horizontal wheel upon which it revolved turning overhead on the Brooklyn anchorage, first this way, then that, and all the other smaller pulleys and belts and innumerable cogs keeping up a low, steady rumble.
The wires were taken across the river by what was known as a “carrier,” a big iron wheel that looked like an oversize bicycle wheel with six spokes. Its axle was fastened to the working rope by an iron arm, or gooseneck, and was weighted to make it stand out perpendicular from the rope so as to clear the cradles and supports on the towers. At the Brooklyn anchorage, the end of a wire would be drawn off one of the big drums and a loop of it slipped over the carrier wheel; the end of the wire would be drawn back taut and secured around a hefty iron brace, or “shoe,” that was shaped roughly like a horseshoe magnet, about two feet long and little more than a foot across with a groove around the periphery for the wire to ride in—as a skein of yarn is held on one’s thumbs. The shoe was secured flat on the back end of the anchor bars, or at the end opposite from where the strands would be finally attached. The engineer would then start up the working rope and away would go the carrier, trundling off toward the Brooklyn tower, then over the tower and out across the water, towing the loop of wire behind, which meant that two wires were being strung at once.
In the meantime another carrier wheel would be coming back from New York, riding on the other half of the endless working rope. So by the time the first carrier was approaching New York with its load of wire, the empty carrier would be arriving in Brooklyn to pick up another loop in exactly the way the first one had. When the outgoing carrier reached the New York anchorage, the engine would be stopped at a signal from flagmen and the loop would be slipped off and drawn taut around a shoe there. Then the engine would be reversed, the empty carrier would start its return trip, while the other one would be starting out from Brooklyn with two more wires. And so it went, always with one carrier going out as the other came back, the two of them in turn constantly towing over big loops of the same unbroken wire that kept playing off an enormous upright drum, until a whole strand was built up—hundreds of wires in unbroken continuity, with uniform tension and with exact parallelism between all of them.
With everything working right, it took the carrier about ten minutes to make the full trip from anchorage to anchorage. Along the way men were stationed on the towers and cradles to watch the progress of the traveling wire and to see that each wire was positioned with the proper sag and tension. As the running wire went over the tower, pulled by the carrier, a man would lightly guide it with his hand to keep it from chafing against timbers or masonry. Another man would catch it with a great pair of clamps that were attached to a block and tackle and with this he would draw up the slack until the wires from the tower back to the anchorage hung with exactly the same sag, or deflection, as the others. From the cradle halfway between the anchorage and the tower, men called “regulators” would signal just when to stop, then fit the new wires up against the others, signal again, and one of the towermen would immediately mark the wire with red paint where it passed a similar mark on the other wires, exactly at the point of crossing the axis of support. Similar marks would also be made at the cradle.
Then the towermen would turn their attention to the river side, where the same system would be repeated, with the regulators on the three river cradles going through the same motions as their turns came up. So by the time a loop of wire reached the New York anchorage, it would be thoroughly “regulated”—its sag properly adjusted all along the line—and the paint marks provided a ready index of any slip or strain that might need correcting.
Once a strand had been completed, pairs of workmen would go riding down from the towers in “buggies,” compressing the wires into a cylindrical form with big clamp tongs and applying temporary “seizings,” bindings of soft wire, every fifteen inches or so, to hold the strand together until all nineteen strands of the cable had been strung and could be clamped into one compact unit. The buggy was nothing more than a pine wood trough, about 10 by 6 feet, with a side rail, and was suspended from overhead trolley wheels that rolled nicely along the bundled wires on which the work was being done. The men would merely let themselves down from the towers by letting out a long rope.
During the time a strand was being made, it hung higher than the ultimate position of the cable it was to be part of. At mid-span over the river the difference in elevation was sixty feet. This not only kept the wires well above the topmasts of passing ships, but nearly doubled the tension the wires would have at the lower level—the deeper sag—and that helped straighten any crooks, or kinks, there might be and further tested the strength of the wire. Once the seizings were completed, the strand would be unhitched from the temporary fastening at the anchorage by a powerful block and tackle, let forward carefully into permanent fastenings at the end of the anchor chains and also lowered into the saddles on the tops of the towers.
It was basically the same system used at both the Niagara and Cincinnati bridges, only here, as with everything else, the work was on a far bigger scale. Judging by previous experience, Roebling estimated that the time needed to make the four cables would be about two and a half years, taking into account that much would depend on the weather.
Sometimes wires would break when part way over the river. The loose end would have to be hauled in and a splice made. Sometimes the delay would be only a matter of minutes. Other times, when the break occurred on the New York side, more than an hour might be lost. “These delays often occurred in the midst of a promising day’s work,” Farrington wrote, “and were very vexatious.”
High winds and fog could make the delicate business of aligning the wires virtually impossible. Extreme temperature changes would cause significant expansion or contraction in the wires that would have a pronounced effect on their deflection and in the early stages this could complicate things enormously.
Before the first wires went across, the engineers had four guide wires strung for the men in the cradles to go by when adjusting the deflection of the first wires. To everybody’s surprise the two land spans had not hung the same. The difference in the deflections could be readily seen just by looking at them. But only after considerable trouble was the cause found. There was a slight difference in the diameter of various lengths of wire and to solve the problem hundreds of coils had to be stretched out, measured, and enough wire selected of uniform size and weight to make up the required lengths. After that the weather had to be watched for periods of perfect calm, during which time the necessary adjustments could be made, to a hairsbreadth. As a result of all this, about six weeks were used up.
But the wire stringing, once it got going, went faster than had been anticipated. The weather was just about ideal. With a little practice the men were laying up fifty wires a day, which was not bad for a start and would have been better had the wire manufacturer been delivering on schedule. The Eagle was now calling the bridge “The Gigantic Spinning Machine.”
By July 2 the first of two strands was completed for the two cables on the downstream side of the bridge. The work of lowering the strands into position then began. At the anchorages the strands were drawn back by a hoisting engine until the shoe was released from its fastening. Then shoe and strand were lowered slowly, carefully forward, twelve feet, the hoisting engine and a block and tackle holding the immense pull of the strand. Because there was a twist in the tackle, the shoe turned up on edge as it came forward and slipped neatly in between the eyelets of the anchor bars. The forward motion was stopped then and a seven-inch steel pin was passed through the eyelets and the shoe.
On the towers, too, the strands had to be lowered into the groove of the saddle, a distance of about three feet. This was done by eight or ten men working a capstan on a platform built over the saddle. The capstan turned a nut on a screw that lowered the strand. Once the strand was properly attached at the anchorages, and at rest in the tower saddles, then it was also at the desired altitude over the water. The whole operation was “difficult and delicate,” as the newspapers reported, requiring “nice calculations.” The great danger, of course, being that the strand might get away. The strain exerted by each strand at the anchorages was about seventy tons.
In the meantime, the first two strands for the two upstream cables were begun. So by the end of the first week in July all four cables were being strung simultaneously; all four carriers were shuttling back and forth high over the river, as regular as clockwork. Paine and Farrington had been assigned by Roebling to be certain everything was done just so. Collingwood and McNulty had been put to work on the approaches. And Roebling, too, was now watching the work himself once again, for at the start of the month he and Emily had returned to Brooklyn, to the brick house on Columbia Heights. With a pair of field glasses, from a bay window overlooking the river, he could at last follow the day-by-day progress being made.
That was the summer of the Great Railroad Strike and for much of the country it was a dark, discouraging time. Half a dozen cities were hit by walkouts and violence. In Baltimore twelve people were shot down by militia. Pittsburgh was in the grip of a mob for two straight days. Millions of dollars’ worth of railroad equipment was destroyed in Pittsburgh alone. The Union Depot was burned, stores were looted, and a pitched battle between rioters and soldiers took the lives of fifty-seven. It was the bloodiest labor uprising the country had ever known and it left much of the populace wondering what in the world was happening to life in America.
But at the bridge things had never gone better. Not in eight long years had the work advanced so smoothly. Even the newspapers seemed satisfied with the way things were being handled and could find fault with no one. “The network of wires across the East River is rapidly beginning to look something like a bridge,” commented the Herald in mid-August. By then four strands had been completed and a new feature added, “regulation cradles,” as they were known, long, narrow, flimsy-looking scaffolds suspended fifty feet below the regular cradles, which put them in line with the lowered strands and made possible a closer surveillance of the strands as they lined up alongside one another.
Somber-looking trustees in stovepipe hats climbed the stairs on the James Street side of the Brooklyn anchorage to pose for group portraits at the start of the footbridge, or they went off to Saratoga or the White Mountains with their families, confident the bridge was in good hands. And for thousands of New Yorkers and visitors, the footbridge had become one of the city’s greatest summertime attractions. Virtually anyone could go up and sample the view and test his nerve if he cared to. In fact, so many people were now applying for passes to take the walk that Henry Murphy was spending an hour every morning just listening to what the applicants had to say.
“People from every corner of the globe have crossed the bridge,” he said, “Australians, New Zealanders, a man from the Cape of Good Hope, and persons from every country in Europe and Asia, from every state in the Union, from Canada and South America. The Governor of Bermuda went across the other day, and the officers of the Russian man-of-war gave us a visit. Captains of steamships and merchantmen are frequent applicants, and we like to pass them, because they will have to sail under the bridge, and we desire their friendship.” As a general rule, five classes of applicants were granted every courtesy—foreign visitors (“They may never come again, and it is natural they should desire to cross the bridge while they have the opportunity,” Murphy explained), newspapermen, engineers, and all politicians and preachers.
Daily at the Bridge Company’s Brooklyn offices the crowds jammed the hallways and lobby waiting to see Murphy. Everyone had his particular reason for wanting permission to make the walk.
“I am a stranger here,” explained one applicant.
“Where are you from?” asked Murphy.
“From New York,” the man replied gravely, and the story was soon all over Brooklyn.
A Connecticut couple, both in their seventies, had walked over. Murphy even allowed a doctor and his wife to carry their newborn baby across. But when a Miss Mazeppa Buckingham requested permission to ride over on horseback, he said no. (Her agent proposed to hoist the horse up onto the Brooklyn anchorage with a sling.) “It would have made a great sensation,” Murphy told reporters, “but you see that’s just what we want to avoid. We don’t want to turn the bridge into a show.”
By the middle of August two or three thousand people had made the crossing, and most all of them went home to tell how he or she had been “one of the very first” to cross the Brooklyn Bridge and thus the claim would be passed along proudly to many thousands of grandchildren and to their progeny.
Amazingly, there were no accidents. Several men became so dizzy that they got down on their hands and knees and crawled back, hugging the slat floor for dear life. At least one woman fainted and had to be carried off; many started out, then turned back. Several people had gotten about halfway out over the river with no trouble but then suddenly froze with fear, unable to move one way or the other. One of these was a Brooklyn hatter who figured such a conspicuous display of daring would be good for his business.
Among the children to cross was Al Smith, whose father had been employed as a sort of guard to keep unauthorized people off the bridge and who “gave himself permission to take Alfred across,” as Smith’s sister told the story years later. Smith himself would often describe the hazardous journey over the footbridge as the most thrilling experience of his boyhood, while his sister would remark, “I remember Mother sitting at home, saying ten rosaries all the time they were gone! But my father was determined to take the boy across the bridge so he could say he crossed it before it was built.”
Murphy saw no reason why anyone should not be allowed to travel the footbridge, providing he had a comparatively valid reason and looked as though he would not do anything foolish out there. He was annoyed by the way people were cutting the wires and taking off pieces for souvenirs, but then it was the people’s bridge. None of the workmen seemed bothered by the sight-seers traipsing along. The thing they found most interesting was the number of women who passed by and how fearless they appeared. Murphy admitted to one reporter that he himself had not been across as yet. “I started to go once,” he said, “and while I looked upward or ahead I was all right; but I chanced to look down, and…and I determined that I couldn’t afford to lose the President of the company just then, and so I went back.”
And then it was September and a broken and aged-looking Tweed was standing before the New York Board of Aldermen telling the whole truth and nothing but the truth, on the understanding that if he did, “Honest John” Kelly would see that he was set loose from prison and be henceforth immune from further prosecution. It was at this time that Tweed described in his own words the part he had played in getting the bridge started and Henry Murphy and William Kingsley spent the better part of several days denying everything Tweed had to say about as fast as he said it.
And before the month was out an English seaman walking the footbridge was seized by an epileptic fit and it was all several workmen could do to hold on to him as he writhed in convulsions. In desperation they finally tied him to the narrow floor of the bridge, with his arms and legs hanging over the side. The man recovered shortly and was helped back to the ground, but the story was made so much of by the papers that Murphy promptly stopped issuing any more passes. The fun was over.
In early October workmen digging foundations for the Brooklyn approach turned up some old Spanish coins worth about sixteen cents at most and the story spread through town that Captain Kidd’s treasure had been discovered. One paper commented that if they kept digging they might find enough to finish the bridge. Another expressed great pleasure that the New York approach required the demolition of one of the city’s worst neighborhoods, and the Eagle, with nothing better to say apparently, ran a long macabre essay on the bridge as the coming place for the truly artistic suicide. “It is hardly necessary to point out to thoughtful men the splendor of a suicide committed from this virgin height.” Hanging, poison, blowing one’s “vulgar brains out” with a pistol, were all condemned for their “despicable lack of originality.” The river below is swift and treacherous, the editors wrote, and there would always be a good-sized audience on board the ferries. If jumping did not appeal, there were other choices. “Let us imagine a man addicted to hanging and think of the unique picture which early passengers would behold should they turn up their eyes in the ghostly dawn and see a man hanging by his neck fifty feet from the water’s edge! A little ingenuity would enable him to so affix one end of his rope that he could not be cut down for hours and could oscillate before the eyes of an admiring though horror-stricken crowd of thousands.” Even poison, shooting, and stabbing would have some style, the editors concluded, if done from the Great Bridge.
In October a well-to-do New Yorker named Henry Beers, a spokesman for the so-called Council of Political Reform, announced that he was joining the cause to have the bridge stopped. It was nothing but a flagrant waste of public money, he contended, and a serious hazard to navigation, which was the same claim being made by a warehouse owner named Abraham Miller, who had decided to sue the Bridge Company. English law, said Beers, who was assisting Miller, always held rivers and oceans sacred to seamen.
But the old buildings kept coming down inland from the New York anchorage as the path for the approach pressed toward City Hall Park. And out over the river the carrier wheels, glistening in the sunshine, kept spinning along, faster than ever. Never had he seen such weather for bridgebuilding, C. C. Martin said. By November, twenty-two strands were in place. On the cradles, little sentry boxes had been built where the men could get out of the cold while waiting for the carriers to come by. In the sheds over the saddles, wood stoves had been installed and the men were wearing heavy mittens and shoes of buffalo hide.
On Thanksgiving Day one of the wires snapped. It was considered a small matter. Nobody was injured and the newspapers heard nothing of it, but Paine decided to send a section of the wire over to Roebling for him to take a look. “It is as brittle as glass,” Roebling wrote back to Paine. “…The first question arises is how much of this same brittle wire has been going into the cable without our knowledge and secondly what steps must be taken to prevent its reoccurrence. Is it due to a wrong system of inspection or what is the reason in your opinion?”
Roebling also broke off several pieces of the wire and put them in with a letter to Henry Murphy.
“This is what Mr. Kinsella is pleased to call the best,” he wrote angrily. “In reality it is worthless…and the most dangerous material that could be employed. How much of this poor wire has been going into the cables I do not know. Can I be held responsible for that? It is scarcely right that the engineers should have to be acting as detectives. I see but one way of preventing such wire being run out and that is to double the number of inspectors at the contractor’s works.”
If Murphy read Roebling’s letter to the members of the Executive Committee at their next meeting, or to the trustees, there is no mention of it in the official records.
Kinsella and Roebling were running head on once more.
Bessemer steel had become a bone of contention again, exasperating the engineers no end. No issue it seemed ever stayed resolved for very long. This time the argument was over the suspenders, the wire ropes that would hang down from the cables to the roadway. Roebling had decided that Bessemer wire would do perfectly well and that was what he specified, but at the last minute, at Murphy’s urging, he had had the word “Bessemer” scratched out of the printed specifications. Again “steel wire” was all that was called for. Kinsella had been furious, exclaiming in the editorial columns of the Eagle that cost was no factor here, that no chain was stronger than its weakest link, etc., etc. The engineers had no business deciding such matters alone, he said. And when John A. Roebling’s Sons, the lowest bidder for the suspenders, was awarded the contract, Kinsella wrote that it was solely because Washington Roebling wanted it that way and that the contract should have gone to a Brooklyn firm (unnamed).
Henry Murphy was quoted as saying that Roebling had nearly died when the earlier contract was awarded to Haigh and that he, Murphy, had no wish to see that happen again. “All of which is bosh,” responded the Brooklyn Union and Argus. “We have as much sympathy for Mr. Roebling as other people…But, we submit, that this work is entirely superior to any man or all of the men concerned in its construction, and it cannot, nor any part of it, be subordinated to the whims, fancies, or caprices of a sick man.”
The paper refused to let the matter drop, writing scornfully of Roebling’s power and of the stupidity of the “stupendous enterprise being wholly committed to a single brain, which is extremely liable at any moment to be stilled forever.”
The sick man, meanwhile, had had a powerful telescope mounted at his window and trained on the bridge. As for the things being said about him in the papers, he had no comment. He would not see reporters.
Late one Saturday afternoon, shortly before Christmas, there was a bad accident behind the Brooklyn anchorage. Masons were finishing up a series of arches, set on big, square brick piers, that would support the roadway of the approach inland from the anchorage. The foreman noticed a great crack in one arch, about twenty-five feet above the street, and immediately ordered the men down off the work. But one man standing below never heard the warning and when the arch gave way he was buried.
The men started digging frantically through the rubble and in about ten minutes they found him, so badly crushed that he would have been difficult to identify had they not known who it was. The body was covered with a sheet of canvas and carried to a tool house. A big crowd had gathered around by then. The area was one of seeming chaos even under normal conditions, with heaps of brick and stone all about, swinging derricks, and their countless ropes, cement machines, scaffolds, great half-dug pits, and sixty or seventy men busy at one task or another. But now things were out of hand. Somebody began saying the other arches were coming down. There was a panic and the crowd went surging in every different direction and nobody seemed to know what was happening. Then somebody was saying something about one more man trapped under the debris. So half a dozen volunteers started digging again and the crowd rushed back to watch, fully expecting to see the rescue workers buried next.
By this time, too, the news had spread over to Fulton Street that a lot of men had been killed and a crowd coming from that direction was so big that the police had trouble holding them back.
No more arches fell and no other bodies were found, but an investigation was immediately called for and there was great public sympathy for the victim and his family. He was Neil Mullen, a Brooklyn man and a widower with six children.
A coroner’s inquest established that the centering, the temporary wooden supports used under the arches, had been removed before the mortar had set properly. The Brooklyn approach was McNulty’s domain and McNulty, who testified at the inquest, looked to be pretty much at fault. Roebling was infuriated by the whole affair. It was exactly the sort of thing he might have prevented had he been on the job. “The brick arch fell because it had a right to fall,” he wrote bitterly to Henry Murphy, who felt, understandably enough, that he ought to have an explanation on hand from the Chief Engineer. “Every arch, be it round or flat, must fall if its thrust is not met by an adequate lateral support,” Roebling lectured. “…The real accident was not so much that this arch fell, as that the other one stood.”
As to the matter of responsibility I am primarily responsible because it is my business to see that everything goes along right. Mr. McNulty is secondarily responsible because he was the engineer directly in charge of the construction and because he did not sufficiently heed the special warning I gave him about this very thing some weeks before its occurrence.
McNulty had told Roebling he did not know why he had removed the centering. “Ambitious natures are apt to be overconfident and to shrink from asking counsel of more experienced persons for fear their infallibility might be impugned,” Roebling wrote Murphy. “Time and age cures all this.” But then he added that the real explanation might be simply that McNulty was overworked.
Roebling could appreciate the problem. He himself was doing more now than he had since the long, difficult winter before the Centennial. For a great many people it might have appeared that his real work was nearly done. The engineering involved, the planning, and the decision making ought to be all but over, it would seem, now that the towers were up and the wire was going across. But it was not that way. Nor did Roebling by any means have everything all figured out.
In the public mind he had become a thorough mystery, the tragic victim of his own wondrous creation, cursed perhaps, like his father before him, remote, hidden, maybe a little mad, seeing everything and yet never seen. It was said he was so crippled that his wife had to feed him, which was true partly. It was said the disease had affected his mind, which was not true. And still, from a chair behind a distant window he could raise towers of granite and spin steel through the sky.
But for the man himself every detail was a personal concern and no answers came easily, despite the things said about his genius. Nothing could be taken for granted, especially now after the accident. Nobody could be trusted, completely. Anybody might let him down, including his father.
At the moment he was wrestling with the design of the enormous truss that would stiffen the roadway and wondering whether to make it of steel, instead of iron as his father had specified. He was not sure either if his father had made the truss big enough. He delegated Paine to find out all he could on the latest advances in steel-making. He wrote to Hildenbrand, day after day, pouring out his own thoughts, his doubts and questions, for pages.
There are so many points to be considered, so many conflicting interests to be reconciled on the parts of the truss that it is perfectly bewildering to pick out the best thing. For example, I want to reduce the aggregate weight so as to keep down the pressure on the masonry. I want to simplify the superstructure so as to make work in the shop easy and erection easy and safe and I also want to keep down the wind surface as much as possible. On the other hand I want the truss sufficiently strong to resist a reasonable amount of bending, and this goes against the other points. But the only possible way in which I can reduce pressure on masonry and wind surface is by reducing the height and weight of the trusses and increasing the strain per square inch on the iron. I do not see that any reduction of weight is possible in any other parts of the structure. By making the truss rods as far as possible of steel we make some reduction in weight but it is only in the low truss that the rod section is great enough to enable us to attain any appreciable advantage by the substitution of steel for iron. In the high truss with rods through two panels the section is hardly sufficient to make it worth while to change. This therefore would be one argument in favor of again reducing the weight of the intermediate truss and leaving the rods in all the trusses within one panel. This includes the two central trusses even if they are arranged with a square bar in the middle of two flat ones outside.
He was working toward another momentous decision. And he was feeling his way. But days like this were what he enjoyed most.
His concern for incidentals was perhaps the most extraordinary thing of all. For him there were no incidentals. Everything counted. Nothing could be left to chance or for someone else to decide. Hildenbrand, Martin, Paine, Farrington, all heard from him daily now. It seemed he wanted them to know his every thought.
The following is only an excerpt of just one of the letters Roebling wrote to his assistants during this time. It was to Farrington.
I want you to help me get out a specification for all the timber planking for our bridge floor, and it must be done by the first of April or sooner. There is a tremendous quantity of it to be got out, and most of it has to be planed, all of which takes time. It should also season for a while. You know we cannot hang up any of the ironwork unless we have planking to follow right along, so there is no time to lose.
The bulk of it is yellow pine. First: There is the planking for the promenade; next, the planking on the wagon tracks; then the longitudinal stringpieces under the tramway, and also under the regular rails on the Rail Road track. Then a lot of short pieces of bridgings of yellow pine between the floor beams and lastly short oak planking laid crossways where the horses walk, of different thickness, and also some spreaders between the safety rails on the railroad track. Our flooring here differs from the Cincinnati flooring in having only one thickness of plank. I don’t propose to treat or preserve or tar this lumber in any way, because I am pretty well convinced, judging from past attempts on previous bridges have cost more than they are worth and have often done positive harm. And as our planking is of but one thickness it can season from above and below. By the introduction of the light intermediate floor beam I have been able to reduce the thickness of the floor beam such that is from 6 to 5 inches.
First of all I want you to go down to the back office and consult with Hildenbrand and Paine about the best means of fastening down this planking and securing the ends to the floor beams. As there is but one thickness generally it is more difficult to do. The track stringers should all be spliced by halving them at the ends. They can be [illegible] down to the top chord of the floor beam by either one or two light bolts and a cross plate underneath. I want your opinion as to whether it will pay to splice the 5” planks or only butt them. The promenade plank will be too thin for splicing. I think the Cincinnati plan of fastening will answer best. That is a little round-headed bolt having on one side a square washer underneath which catches under the flange of the 6” channel. The head of the bolt can be sunk in pretty well and the hole filled with hard cement. This will answer very well on the wagon tracks where much is covered. But it will make a nasty-looking promenade. Yet I hardly see how I can help it. You know we have on the promenade alternately a double channel and an I beam for floor beams. Now it occurs to me that we could fill in between the double channels with a pine filling piece and fasten the planking into that with wooden nails. To the I beam we fasten with little bolts.
I believe yellow pine won’t warp as badly as oak. The promenade planking must be very long and very narrow—nothing over 4” wide. The other planking can be 5 x 5 or 5 x 6 as the space demands. (Would it pay to caulk it? Hardly I guess?) The ends must butt over the center of the floor beam. Shall we therefore order them exact lengths or make allowances and saw the butts here? How much allowance for waste? Must everything be planed? These stringers could be let in 3/8” on the floor beams. The bridging can be ordered in long lengths and then cut to suit. The promenade suspenders run through the floor. Here we must have two 5” streaks of plank because 4” would be too narrow.
In regard to length of planking, stringers and so on, it must run from 3 panels to 5 panels in length…The timber must be good sound clear stock free from sap, cracks, splits, shakes, wind shakes, slivers and wavy edges, knots, black-knots, work holes. No bush timber or dry-rotted timber or dead timber, etc., etc. The timber must be planed up true, full and square with sharp edges…
And the letter continues on in the same fashion for pages. Twice Emily, who was taking it down, had to sharpen or change her pencil. The letter must have taken a good hour to dictate, perhaps longer considering his condition. Only three words in the whole thing were crossed out. The rest was put down with total certainty and no second thoughts.
On January 8 the Executive Committee held its first meeting of the new year, during which a request from J. Lloyd Haigh was considered. According to the record of the meeting, “Mr. Haigh, the contractor for furnishing the steel wire for the cables, applied to be allowed to substitute the personal obligation of Messrs. Cooper and Hewitt in place of the percentage retained under his contract, amounting now to $29,277, in order to save himself interest upon it.” Mr. Haigh’s proposition was declined. This bit of information appeared in several newspapers the next day, along with a report on various other items taken up at the meeting.
If any of the bridge officials or trustees had been ignorant of Abram Hewitt’s interests in the fortunes of J. Lloyd Haigh and his wireworks, they were no longer. But yet there is nothing in the record to indicate that any of them thought this the least bit out of the ordinary, nor did the papers in either city make any editorial comment on it. Nothing was said either of Haigh’s generally unsavory personal reputation. Abram Hewitt made no comment.
The Union and Argus did, however, pick up another item concerning certain legal fees authorized by the committee. “Of course more or less legal information is required by the bridge trustees,” wrote the paper, “It does seem as if there might be something more than coincidence in the twin facts that law costs the bridge $7,500 a month, and that the cheapest establishments at which the article is purveyed are those of E. M. Cullen and H. C. and G. I. Murphy. Inasmuch as H. C. Murphy is the President of the Board, the effect of the figures is an impression that the gentleman in question is overduly given to taking counsel of himself and pays a little highly for his soliloquies.”
H. C. and G. I. Murphy were Henry Murphy’s sons. They were doing as competent a job as could be done and were charging no more for their services than would any other reputable firm, or so said Henry Murphy by way of explanation.