2

Man of Iron

We may affirm absolutely that nothing great in the world has been accomplished without passion.

—G. W. F. HEGEL

ANYONE from Trenton who happened to be standing nearby on the depot platform that lovely April evening would have known who he was, and very possibly why he was waiting there. Trenton was still a small town, for all the changes there had been, and Old Man Roebling, as the men at the mill called him, was Trenton’s first citizen. The whole town looked up to him and took pride in his accomplishments.

It was commonly said that he had done more in one life than any ten men. The town had seen him build the wire business from nothing, raise seven children, bury two others and one wife, then marry again when he was past sixty. He had survived hard times, fires, cholera epidemics, the hazards of bridgebuilding, accidents at the mill, and his own particular notions about maintaining good health, which to some may have seemed the surest sign of all that the man was indestructible.

John Roebling was a believer in hydropathy, the therapeutic use of water. Come headaches, constipation, the ague, he would sit in a scalding-hot tub for hours at a time, then jump out and wrap up in ice-cold, slopping-wet bed sheets and stay that way for another hour or two. He took Turkish baths, mineral baths. He drank vile concoctions of raw egg, charcoal, warm water, and turpentine, and there were dozens of people along Canal Street who had seen him come striding through his front gate, cross the canal bridge, and drink water “copiously”—gallons it seemed—from the old fountain beside the state prison. (“This water I relish much…” he would write in his notebook.) “A wet bandage around the neck every night, for years, will prevent colds he preached to his family. “A full cold bath every day is indispensable…” Illness he regarded as a moral offense and he fought it with the same severe intensity he directed to everything else he did in life.

The town knew all about him, or thought so. It was common knowledge, for example, that he was an inventor as well as an engineer, that he had designed every piece of machinery in the mill, that he was an artist, that he wrote prolifically for scientific periodicals, that he read Emerson and Channing and other freethinkers. At home he was writing his own “Theory of the Universe.”

When he first came to Trenton, he had played both the piano and the flute, but then he caught his left hand in a rope machine and was left with three immovable fingers. Not long after his first wife died, he had taken up spiritualism. There had been talk ever since of after-dark gatherings, of table rappings and the like, inside the big Roebling house. The old man, on top of his other achievements, was now said to be on speaking terms with the dead.

The bridges were what he was best known for, of course, but only a few people in Trenton had actually seen any of them, except perhaps for a view in Harper’s Weekly or one of the other picture magazines. Roebling the industrialist was the man Trenton people knew.

He was called a man of iron. Poised…confident…unyielding…imperious…severe…proud…are other words that would be used in Trenton to describe him. There had always been something distant about him; he kept apart and had no real friends in Trenton, but he had also been accepted on those terms long since and he in turn was always extremely courteous to everyone. “He was always the first to say good morning,” a man from the mill would tell a reporter after Roebling’s death. When he spoke they listened.

Roebling was sixty-three in 1869, but even when he was years younger, he had a special hold on men, it seems, with his commanding stares and wintry scowls, like an Old Testament prophet. His success in everything he turned his hand to was generally attributed to an inflexible will and extraordinary resourcefulness. “He was never known to give in or own himself beaten,” one of his employees would recall and another would quote a saying of his they all knew by heart, “If one plan won’t do, then another must.” Charles B. Stuart, an engineer and author who knew Roebling, would later write: “One of his strongest moral traits was his power of will, not a will that was stubborn, but a certain spirit, tenacity of purpose, and confident reliance upon self instinctive faith in the resources of his art that no force of circumstance could divert him from carrying into effect a project once matured in his mind….” It was a quality he had worked hard to instill in his children as well.

Time was something never to be squandered. If a man was five minutes late for an appointment with him, the appointment was canceled. Once, during the war, so the story went, he had been called to Washington by the War Department to give advice on something or other and was asked to wait outside the office of General John Charles Frémont, the illustrious “Pathfinder.” Roebling took out a pencil, wrote a note on the back of his card, and had it sent in to the general. “Sir,” the note said, “you are keeping me waiting. John Roebling has not the leisure to wait upon any man.”

In all his working life John Roebling had never been known to take a day off.

He had settled in Trenton twenty years before, in 1849, when he was forty-three, or past the age, he knew, when most brilliant men do their best work. He had had no money to speak of then and not much of a reputation. All that had come in the years since. How much was generally known in Trenton of his life prior to that time can only be guessed at, but the story was well known among his family certainly, and, for the most part, in the engineering profession.

He had been born on June 12, 1806, in Germany, in the province of Saxony, in the ancient walled town of Mühlhausen, where for about a thousand years more or less not very much had ever happened. Bach had once played the organ in the church where he was baptized and in the spring of 1815, when Roebling was nine, five hundred of his townsmen had marched off to fight Napoleon at Waterloo, but other than that no one in Mühlhausen had ever done much out of the ordinary.

His father, Christoph Polycarpus Roebling, had a tobacco shop and the accepted picture of him is of an unassuming, rather comfortably fixed burgher of good family, who had no desire to be anything more than what he was and who smoked up about as much tobacco as he sold. Roebling’s mother, however, was a fiercely energetic sort, with a mind of her own and some very fixed ideas about getting on in the world. It was their proud, determined, long-departed grandmother, Friederike Dorothea, John Roebling’s children were raised to understand, who scraped and saved to send their father to the famous Polytechnic Institute in Berlin, and who later was the first to support his decision to leave Mühlhausen, something no Roebling had done before.

In Berlin, he had studied architecture, bridge construction, and hydraulics. He also studied philosophy under Hegel, who, according to one biographical memoir, “avowed that John Roebling was his favorite pupil.” The renowned philosopher had been preaching a powerful doctrine of self-realization and the supremacy of reason to a generation of ardent young liberals hemmed in by an autocratic Prussian regime. The effect was pronounced, and not the least on Roebling. The contact with Hegel was a privilege and a calamity for Roebling, according to an old family friend in Trenton. Hegel had taught Roebling to think independently, he said, and to rely on the validity of his own conclusions, but the experience was a calamity “because it begat a pride and arrogance of opinion and a frigid intellectuality that came near putting the heart of him into cold storage.” But according to family tradition, it was Hegel who started the young man thinking about America. “It is a land of hope for all who are wearied of the historic armory of old Europe,” Hegel taught. There the future would be built. There in all that “immeasurable space” a man might determine his own destiny.

For three years after leaving Berlin, Roebling worked in an obligatory job building roads for the Prussian government. Once during a holiday in Bavaria, he had hiked to the old cathedral town of Bamberg, where he saw his first suspension bridge, a new iron chain bridge over the Regnitz and known locally as the “miracle bridge.” He walked about it, made a number of sketches, and it is the traditional story that he decided then and there on his life’s career.

In any event, not long afterward, in the spring of 1831, the year Hegel would die of cholera, Roebling returned to Mühlhausen and began organizing a party of pilgrims to leave for America, something that had to be done with caution just then since the government frowned on the immigration of anyone with technical training.

Talk of immigration was a common thing in Germany. Ever since the July Revolution of the previous year, there had been increasingly less personal freedom, less opportunity for anyone with ambition. Nothing could be accomplished, Roebling would write, “without first having an army of government councilors, ministers, and other functionaries deliberate about it for ten years, make numerous expensive journeys by post, and write so many long reports about it, that for the amount expended for all this, reckoning compound interest for ten years, the work could have been completed.”

In the first week of May there had been the farewell visits with school friends and aged aunts, the last Sunday at church, the final evening walks through the ancient cobblestone streets. Then on the morning of the 11th, with his older brother Karl and a number of others, he had set off. His determination now was to become…an American farmer! Having had no previous experience in agriculture, having nothing in his background, training, or temperament that would indicate any interest in or bent for such work, he would become a man of the soil, in a distant land he knew only by reputation. The architect, the scholar, the musician, the philosopher, the engineer, the burning liberal idealist, the twenty-four-year-old bachelor, would now plant himself, willfully, somewhere in the American wilderness. His ambition was to establish his own community, which if not utopian in the religious sense—like Harmony, Pennsylvania, or some of the other earlier settlements founded by zealous Germans—would at least provide the honest German farmer, tradesman, or mechanic, men good with their hands and accustomed to work, a place where they could make the most of themselves, which to Roebling’s particular way of thinking would be about the nearest thing possible to heaven on earth.

He never saw Mühlhausen or Germany again. In 1867, to prepare for the bridge at Brooklyn, he had sent his son Washington and his pretty, pregnant daughter-in-law back across the Atlantic. It was a journey he would have liked to have made himself no doubt. He could have returned in triumph. As it was, the young couple arrived at Mühlhausen to a rousing welcome, and in a small inn across the street from the old family home, his first grandson and namesake had been born. Later, he had sent the town a sizable gift of cash in gratitude.

In a bookshop in Mühlhausen in 1867, Washington Roebling found a rare printed edition of the journal his father had kept on route to America, which Washington carried with him on his own return voyage. Diary of My Journey from Muehlhausen in Thuringia via Bremen to the United States of North America in the Year 1831 it is titled. It is an extraordinary little document, a recognized classic of its kind, describing days of howling winds and high seas, and a steamboat—the first Roebling had been—laboring mightily by, and later, like a specter, a derelict hulk of an abandoned sailing ship, a huge brig with all sails gone, drifting on the horizon; then days of no wind and bad drinking water, the burial at sea of a child, and at last, on a night in July, the smell of land in a warm westerly wind. “The odor was strikingly distant and…would also indicate that the entire American mainland is covered with an almost uninterrupted forest and a great abundance of plants, whereby the atmosphere is saturated with aromatic particles, which the winds blowing away from land carry away to a great distance. This scent of land produced a beneficial effect upon all the passengers.”

His band of pilgrims consisted of fifty-three men, women, and children, most of whom had never laid eyes on salt water. Their ship was the August Eduard, a 230-ton American packet bound for Philadelphia, which, in all, took eleven weeks to make port, or longer than it had taken Columbus to make his first crossing.

Roebling himself was an immigrant of a kind the history books would pay little attention to, chiefly because they were so relatively few in number. He was seeking neither religious freedom nor release from the bondage of poverty. His quest was for something else. He came equipped with the finest education Europe could offer, he had a profession, and he was traveling first class, which meant he had one bed among four in a cabin he described as “very roomy” and “excellently lighted.” Between them, he and his brother were also carrying something in the neighborhood of six thousand dollars in cash, a princely sum, and he had come on board with a whole trunkful of books—thick geographies, works of physics and chemistry, a German-French dictionary, Euclid’s Elements,volumes of English literature and poetry, and one of English essays that opened with a favorite quote from Johnson: “No man was ever great by imitation.”

What the American captain and his crew thought of this spare, incredibly energetic young German can be imagined. He started right off, for example, by instructing them on how to build a proper privy for the passengers in steerage, whose only facility was the usual sailor’s seat perched precariously outside the stem of the ship, beside the bowsprit. Such an arrangement, Roebling announced, was altogether unacceptable for the women and children, or for anyone who might become sick or weakened by the voyage. He and the other cabin passengers, like the ship’s officers, were entitled to use a relatively comfortable, enclosed affair that protected its occupant from sudden waves washing across the deck. The same or better should be made available for all on board, Roebling declared. He explained how it could be done and it was done. “If one earnestly desires it,” he wrote, “everything will be brought to pass, even on board a ship…” The great thing, he believed, was getting people “to leave the accustomed rut.”

His curiosity about all aspects of seamanship, navigation, ocean currents, rules for passengers, or the personal life history of the captain and each member of the crew seemed inexhaustible. He wanted to know the name of every sail, every stay, brace, bowline, halyard, every rope and how each one worked and he made diagrams to be sure he understood. He talked to the captain (“a very just, straightforward, and sober man”) about astronomy, meteorology, philosophy, history, about Isaac Newton and the American coinage system. He was the first one on deck in the morning and generally the last to leave at night, and once, when nearly every passenger was miserably seasick and lay groaning in his berth, Roebling, his head spinning, his stomach churning, was resolutely walking the deck. The malady, he rationalized, “involves no danger at all,” noting that “a cheerful carefree disposition and a manly, vigorous spirit will have great influence on the sickness.”

For his son there must have been places in the old diary where the youthful and impressionable narrator seemed a little difficult to identify with the father he had known. One entry, for example, was taken up almost entirely with a long, vivid description of waves. Apparently his father had stood at the bowsprit watching them for hours on end and to no particular purpose. In the account of phosphorescence after dark, as the sea rebounded from the sides of the ship, it was as though the writer had been caught up in a spell:

…then one perceives in the foam brightly shining stars, which appear as large as the fixed stars in the heavens. Along the entire side of the ship the foam has turned into fiery streaks. The spots of foam in the ocean, distant from the ship, which arise from the dashing together of the waves, appear in the dark night to the astonished eye as just so many fiery masses. In front of the bowsprit, where the friction is greatest, the scintillation is often so bright, that the entire fore part of the ship is illuminated by it.

For the moment—except possibly for the word “friction”—it was as if nature was not something to be explained endlessly or to be “rendered subservient,” as John Roebling would say in another time and place. And again, as the ship headed into Delaware Bay, there is a moment when the gifted young graduate of Berlin’s Polytechnic Institute reflects with sadness on the Indians who once lived on shore—“quietly on the property inherited from their ancestors,” long before “the sheltered loneliness of these wild surroundings was interrupted by the all-disturbing European.”

From Philadelphia, Roebling and his followers headed west across Pennsylvania, having decided to settle on the other side of the Alleghenies. At Pittsburgh he and Karl purchased some seven thousand acres located to the north, in Butler County, not far from Harmony (the price was $1.37 an acre, with a thousand dollars down and the balance to be paid in two equal yearly installments “without interest,” as he wrote home). And there he established his town, first laying out one broad Main Street exactly east-west, in the German fashion. He called the town Germania for a while, but then changed it to Saxonburg.

Roebling had concluded, his son Washington would write in jest, that western Pennsylvania was destined to be “the future center of the universe with the future Saxonburg as the head center, which then was a primeval forest where wild pigeons would not even light.”

“My father would have made a good advertising agent,” Washington would remark at another time. “He wrote at least a hundred letters to friends in and about Mühlhausen, extolling the virtues of the place—its fine climate—the freedom from restraint—the certainty of employment, etc. Many accepted and came. To each one was sent exact directions how to come, what to take—what to bring along, and what to leave behind. Most tools were to be left behind, because American tools were so much better, such as axes, hatchets, saws, grubbing hoes—nodody could cut down a tree with a German ax.”

The beginning is hard, Roebling had warned. But there were “no unbearable taxes,” no police commissioners. And finally: “If this region is built up by industrious Germans, then it can become an earthly paradise.” But the soil turned out to be mostly clay, the winters were bleak and bitterly cold, and the roads to Pittsburgh or to Freeport, the nearest point on the Allegheny River, were “atrocious.”

Among the early arrivals there were only two who knew a thing about farming. But according to one of the old histories of the town, they all “possessed to a remarkable degree the valuable attribute of industry, and, though many of their first attempts were ludicrous and miserable failures, they yet persevered until they became adepts at handling the ax and agricultural implements.” Every newcomer was heartily welcomed and encouraged to stay. Presently more and more did come and settle and the surrounding country, only sparsely settled earlier by Scotch-Irish, began filling up with Germans. “They have made good farmers,” an old Butler County history concludes, “succeeding, by patient industry and close economy, in gaining an independent condition where the people of almost any other nationality would have failed, in a majority of instances, to have secured more than a mere living.”

The first building to go up in Saxonburg was a plain two-story house built by Roebling at the head of Main Street. It was clapboard on the outside, but brick behind that, and like everything he ever built, it was built to last. Five years later Saxonburg, if not exactly paradise, was at least a going concern, populated by a weaver, a grocer, a blacksmith, a cabinetmaker, about six carpenters, a tanner, a miller, a baker, a shoemaker, a Mecklenburg tailor, a Mühlhausen tailor, one artist, one brewer, a veteran of Waterloo, and an increasing number of plain farmers with names like Emmerich, Rudert, Goelbel, Heckert, Graff, Schwietering, Nagler, and Helmhold. And in May 1836, in his own front parlor, Roebling married Johanna Herting, the oldest daughter of the Mühlhausen tailor.

But in less than a year, with everything going about as well as he could have hoped, Roebling seems to have run up against the one problem he had not figured on. He had become bored. When he heard the state was in need of surveyors, he immediately wrote to Harrisburg. That was in 1837, the year he became a citizen, the year Karl died of sunstroke while working in a wheat field, the year Roebling became a father for the first time. In a letter to the chief engineer of the Sandy and Beaver Canal, he wrote, “I cannot reconcile myself to be altogether destitute of practical occupation…”

“So he took to engineering again, his true vocation,” Washington Roebling wrote, “and let my mother do the farming again, which she did very well when he would let her.” By the time the son was old enough to understand such things, the father’s agrarian dream, if indeed that is what it was, was long since over.

Roebling built dams and locks on the Sandy and Beaver, between the Ohio and the lakes, then on the Allegheny feeder of the Pennsylvania Canal near Freeport. In 1839 he began surveying a prospective railroad route east of Pittsburgh that would later be adopted, in part, by the Pennsylvania Railroad. Living in tents, working in all kinds of weather through the roughest kind of wilderness, he and a few assistants covered more than 150 miles, plotting a line through the Alleghenies. His work was such that he was made Principal Assistant to the Chief Engineer of the state, a man named Charles L. Schlatter, and his report to Schlatter included not only full details on the grades, embankments, bridges, and tunnels required, but a number of prophetic observations about the locale around the village of Johnstown, where one of the nation’s principal iron and steel industries would one day rise. “The iron ore on the Laurel Hill is only waiting for means of transportation to be conveyed to the rich coal basins below, where also limestone is to be had in quantity and, moreover, where an abundance of water power can be furnished by the never-failing waters of the beautiful mountain stream…and certainly capitalists could hardly find a more eligible situation for starting mammoth furnaces on the largest scale…”

At Johnstown he also became familiar with the workings of the newly built Portage Railroad, a system of long, inclined planes devised to haul canalboats up and over the Alleghenies, between Hollidaysburg at the foot of the eastern slope and Johnstown at the foot of the western slope. It was popularly thought to be one of the engineering marvels of the age and Roebling was fascinated by it. He also decided, after a good deal of study, that it could be greatly improved by dispensing with the immense hemp hawsers then in use. These were about nine inches around, more than a mile long in some cases and cost nearly three thousand dollars. They also wore out in relatively short time and had to be replaced or, as happened more than once, they snapped in two, sending their loads crashing down the mountainside. In one such accident two men had been crushed to death.

Roebling proposed to replace the hawsers with an iron rope just an inch thick, a product not made in the United States then, but which he had read about in a German periodical. Such a rope, he said, would be stronger, last longer, and be much easier to handle. Apparently he was the only one who took the idea seriously, but he was told to go ahead and try if he had such confidence in it—at his own risk and expense.

He began fashioning his new product at Saxonburg some time in the summer of 1841, using the old ropewalk system on a long level meadow behind the church he had built soon after finishing his house. The wire, purchased from a mill at Beaver Falls, northwest of Pittsburgh, was spliced inside a small building and wound onto reels for “running out.” Separate strands of wire were laid up first, then twisted into the larger rope by means of a crude machine he had devised, which, like everything else in the process, was powered by hand.

A six-hundred-foot rope finished “in the best style,” as he said, was tried out at Johnstown in September and it was a failure. Someone hired by the hemp rope interests had secretly cut it at a splice, with the result that it broke during the test. But the sabotage was discovered, Roebling was given a second chance, and his rope worked with such success that it was soon adopted for the entire Portage system. Orders began coming in from other canals with similar inclined planes. The rope was wanted for dredging equipment, for pile drivers, for use in coal mines. Roebling published an article on it in the Railroad Journal. “His ambition now became boundless,” his son would write. Production in Saxonburg picked up sharply, as “farmers were metamorphosed into mechanics and an unlooked-for era of prosperity dawned.”

“About eight men were needed for strand making,” according to Washington Roebling, “but sixteen or eighteen were required for laying up the rope. These were recruited for a day or two from the village and adjacent farm—quite a task—in which I took my full share. The men were always glad to see me because it meant good pay and free meals for days. Work was from sunrise to sunset—three meals, with a snack of bread and butter in between—including whiskey. Meals were served at the house. My poor, overworked mother did the cooking—all done on an open hearth.”

John Roebling could be sure, he was told in an admiring letter from Charles Schlatter, that before long he would be “at the head of the list of those benefactors to mankind who employ science to useful purpose.”

In 1844, at age thirty-eight, he got his first real commission as an engineer. A prize of one hundred dollars had been offered in a notice in the Pittsburgh papers for “the best plan for a wooden or suspension aqueduct” to carry the Pennsylvania Canal across the Allegheny River in place of a ponderous, inadequate structure built years earlier by the state. Roebling worked out a plan for the world’s first suspension aqueduct. He made a model and went to Pittsburgh to enter the competition, which he won, mainly because his bid was the lowest. He built the aqueduct in record time. He worked nine months nonstop and when he was finished, Pittsburgh, at a cost of $62,000, had a structure unlike any in existence.

From two iron cables seven inches in diameter, he had suspended a big timber flume, crossing the river with seven spans of about 160 feet each. The flume was sixteen and a half feet wide and eight and a half feet deep. It carried something over two thousand tons of water and a steady procession of canal barges that floated across high over the Allegheny, hauled by mules that walked a narrow plank towpath. ^* “As this work is the first of the kind ever attempted,” wrote the Railroad Journal, “its construction speaks well for the enterprise of the city of Pittsburgh.” But in 1861, after the canal had been put out of business by the Pennsylvania Railroad that Roebling had helped to lay out, the aqueduct was pulled down.

The winter he built the aqueduct had been the most trying, strenuous period in his life. Not only had he designed it himself, but he had directed and participated in every step in its construction, in freezing winds, sleet, snow, going back and forth over the spindly catwalk or swinging along one of the cable strands in a little boatswain’s chair. The cables had been strung in place, wire by wire, in much the way his subsequent bridges would be. He had also devised a novel technique for anchoring the cables, attaching them to great chains of iron eyebars embedded in masonry, a plan not used in any prior suspension bridge and the one he would use on every bridge he built thereafter.

He had finished in exactly the time he had said he would and no one was more keenly aware of the real importance of what he had done than he. Judged against his later work, the bridge was crude, small, and uninspiring. And probably he knew the day it was finished that its life-span would be brief. The significant thing was that he had demonstrated the immense weight that could be borne by a suspension bridge, not to mention his own skill and integrity as a builder.

In April of 1845, a month before the aqueduct was opened, more than half of Pittsburgh burned to the ground. “The progress of the fire as it lanced and leaped with its forked tongue from house to house, from block to block, and from square to square was awfully magnificent,” wrote one observer. Among the victims was an old covered bridge over the Monongahela at Smithfield Street and as a result Roebling got the chance to build his first real bridge, which was also to be the first bridge on the tour he was about to lead.

In 1848 he began four more suspension aqueducts, these on the Delaware and Hudson Canal, linking the hard-coal fields of eastern Pennsylvania with the tidewater of the Hudson. In the meantime he wrote articles on his theories and in 1847 presented a twelve-thousand-word paper before the Pittsburgh Board of Trade (it was read at two sittings) calling for the immediate establishment of “The Great Central Railroad from Philadelphia to St. Louis.” Like a magic wand, he said, the railroads were going to work a transformation over the land. A new nation was about to emerge and this would be the greatest of all railroads, “a future highway of immense traffic.” It was another of his visionary proclamations. As it was, the Pennsylvania would not be completed to Pittsburgh for five more years, which was longer than John Roebling could wait.

It is not known when he first began thinking seriously about leaving Saxonburg, but by 1848, the year after his “Great Central Railroad” speech, with no such railroad in sight, he had concluded that Saxonburg would not become the center of the universe in all likelihood, and that in any event it was no location for a wire business. Having analyzed the problem as thoroughly as he was able, he decided to relocate in the old colonial town of Trenton, New Jersey, which then had a total population of perhaps six thousand people.

So he had departed from Saxonburg, leaving friends, relatives, everything they had struggled for so many years to build, and went east, against the human tide then pouring across Pennsylvania bound for the still-empty country beyond Ohio. His wife and children were to follow on their own. “He was disgusted with Saxonburg,” Washington Roebling wrote, “and never revisited it. He was seized with a horror of everything Dutch and never alluded to it.” In Saxonburg it would be said, “The dumb Dutch stayed behind.”

It was a very changed man who was about to return now over that same route to Pittsburgh, to retrace his footsteps as it were, and review the best of his life’s work. The bridges had made him famous in the time since, world-famous, and the wire business had made him rich. The John A. Roebling who stood on the station platform that April evening in 1869 was worth more than a million dollars, as his will would subsequently reveal. But other things had happened, private things, of which only his immediate family and one or two others knew anything, and these had affected him more than either notoriety or wealth, both of which, one would gather, he always had every expectation of attaining.

In the decade before the war, his most productive time as an engineer, he had grown increasingly distant and impersonal in manner whenever he was home, which was seldom. One April, while writing to tell him how green and lovely everything looked about the house, his young daughter Elvira suddenly realized that never in her memory had he been home during the springtime. The day-to-day running of the mill he had left largely to Charles Swan, a German from Pittsburgh who had worked on the Allegheny aqueduct and who had shown such promise that Roebling brought him to Trenton. Swan had the “happy faculty” of being able to get along with Roebling, “an important matter,” as Washington commented knowingly. Swan also appears to have had no end of patience with his employer’s mania for detail and his essential distrust of anyone’s judgment other than his own. Time and again the two of them would ride down to the Trenton depot together, Roebling on his way to Niagara Falls or Cincinnati or some such place, and telling Swan as they went along how he was to have full authority to decide things. But it had never worked out that way. Swan heard regularly, almost daily, about what he was to do or not to do, and was expected to keep Roebling fully informed by return mail. Everything had to be done to the most exacting standards. If Roebling was dissatisfied with a clerk’s handwriting, Swan would hear about it (“He must take pains to improve and examine attentively well written letters which you receive and which may serve him as patterns…”) and a demonstration of the proper way to address a letter would be included. (“The direction should never be put up high in the upper part of the envelope, but rather below the center, else it looks uncommercial-like.”) Appearances were exceedingly important.

The letters to Swan numbered in the hundreds as time passed and were always strictly business communications. Despite all the years Swan had been with him and all that Swan had come to mean to the family, never once did John Roebling write a line to suggest there could possibly be a bond of friendship between them. If he was meeting interesting people in his travels, there is no mention of it. If he had feelings for the places he went, he said nothing of them. If ever he had a sense of humor, there is not a trace of it.

His preoccupation with work became almost beyond reckoning. He was living in a time characterized by extraordinarily industrious men, when hard work took up most of everyone’s life and was regarded as a matter of course; but even so, his immense reserves of nervous energy, his total devotion to the job at hand, whatever it might be, seemed superhuman to all who came in contact with him. If metaphysics was his only dissipation, as was said in Trenton, work seemed his one and only passion. Once, quite unwittingly, he revealed the extraordinary and rather ludicrous limits such preoccupation could reach. On New Year’s Day, 1855, his wife had been delivered of still another child, but this apparently came as a great surprise to the bridgebuilder when the news reached him at Niagara Falls. “Your letters of the 2nd and 3rd came to hand,” he wrote quite formally to Swan. “You say in your last that Mrs. Roebling and the child are pretty well. This takes me by surprise, not having been informed at all of the delivery of Mrs. R. Or what do you mean? Please answer by return mail.” Swan was to waste no money on a telegram, in other words.

The war and Lincoln’s murder had been terribly hard on Roebling. “I for my part wished the blacks all good fortune in their endeavors to be free,” he had written when he first arrived in America. Slavery was “the greatest cancerous affliction” in an otherwise ideal land. When Lincoln called for volunteers after the attack on Sumter, Roebling had sat gravely silent at his end of the dinner table, then turned abruptly to his son Washington, “Don’t you think you have stretched your legs under my mahogany long enough?” And the young man had enlisted the very next morning. “When a whole nation had been steeped for a whole century in sins of inequity, it may require a political tornado to purify its atmosphere,” he wrote in his private notes. But as the years of the war dragged on he had worried incessantly about his son and the news of Lincoln’s death fell on him like a massive personal tragedy. Bitterly he wrote, “We cannot close our eyes to the appalling fact that the prominent events of history are made up of a long series of individual and national crimes of all sorts, on enmity, cruelty, oppression, massacres, persecution, wars without end.”

But the most shattering blow had been the death of Johanna Roebling in the final year of the war. In the years since Saxonburg they had seemed ill-matched. From her wedding day until the day she died, she served him faithfully and with love, but he had become increasingly preoccupied with his studies, his books, his work. She had had almost no education and understood very little about the things he considered so important. He was away most of the time, traveling always “in the first society.” She went nowhere. Her world was scarcely broader than what she could see from her doorstep. Only in her last years would she feel enough at ease in English to get along in the most ordinary daily conversation.

“A purer-hearted woman or one gifted with warmer affections than my mother you will seldom meet,” Washington Roebling had written in a letter to Emily Warren, who was shortly to become his wife. “It is therefore plain to you that before long my father outstripped Mother in the social race and she was no longer a companion to him in a certain sense of the word. A gifted woman like yourself would no doubt have suited him better from 40 to 50, but upon the whole he could not have had a better or truer helpmate for life. A man of strong passions and impulses he could only get along with a yielding and confiding woman.”

That Johanna Roebling never understood, and therefore never fully appreciated, the range and fertility of her husband’s mind or the extraordinary beauty of what he built seemed self-evident to almost everyone who did have a feeling for such things. But as his children knew full well, the failure of appreciation worked both ways, until it was too late. He was in Cincinnati when she died, but after the funeral the Man of Iron had taken down the family Bible and on a single blank page wrote the following:

My dearly beloved wife, Johanna, after a protracted illness of 9 months, died in peace with herself and all the world, on Tuesday the 22nd November, 1864, at 12:30 P.M.

Of those angels in human form, who are blessing the Earth by their unselfish love and devotion, this dear departed wife was one.—She never thought of herself, she only thought of others. No trace of ill will toward any person ever entered her unselfish bosom. And O! what a treasure of love she was towards her own children! No faults were ever discovered.—She only knew forbearance, patience and kindness. My only regret is that such a pure unselfishness was not sufficiently appreciated by myself.—

In a higher sphere of life I hope I meet you again my Dear Johanna! And I also hope that my own love and devotion will then be more deserving of yours.

Always intensely philosophical, he now began filling hundreds upon hundreds of sheets of lined blue paper with his own private visions and speculations on man, matter, truth, and the nature of the universe. The words slanted across the paper as though in a tremendous hurry, heavy on the downstrokes, leaving no margin at all. Truth, he said, was “harmony between object and subject” and “the final idea, the absolute idea, which includes all other ideas.” Truth was something that should appeal to every man “whose inner Self-consciousness is not yet worked out, whose spiritual manhood and mental integrity are yet asserting supremacy.” He declared, “Existence has a cause.” Life itself he saw in terms of a torrential, twisting stream “rolling along, ever driven by its own gravitating tendency towards the great Ocean of Universality.”

The words sounded most impressive, but what he was getting at was sometimes very hard to tell, and apparently the few people he permitted to read his “Truth of Nature” and other essays found them extremely rough going. The afterhours philosopher seemed such a far cry from the clear, precise, no-nonsense person they knew. It was as though some impenetrable Teutonic mysticism had surfaced from a deep recess in his past. One friend of the family said he had never been invited to read any of John Roebling’s philosophy, but from what he had heard, he prayed he never would be.

Still there were moments of great clarity. “We are born to work and study,” he wrote at one point, which fitted him perfectly. “True life is not only active, but also creative,” he asserted. And another time: “It is a want of my intellectual nature to bring in harmony all that surrounds me. Every new harmony is to me another messenger of peace, another pledge of my redemption.”

Not for years had he taken an active interest in organized religion. Raised a Lutheran, he had joined the Presbyterians after arriving in Trenton, but for some time now the Roebling pew had been used as the visitors’ pew. He made an appearance every so often, accompanied by one or more of his sons, and all eyes would be on them as they came down the aisle. But he held that spiritual communion with the Creator was more likely to be achieved through a vigorous life of the mind. “Human reason,” he wrote, “is the work of God, and He gave it to us so that we can recognize Him.”

He had been swept up by the teachings of Swedenborg, the brilliant Swedish physicist of the previous century, who rejected the dogma of original sin and eternal damnation and wrote of a spiritual evolution for the individual. And like Swedenborg he had embraced spiritualism.

For some twenty years and more, spiritualism had been gaining converts among educated people on both sides of the Atlantic. The Fox Sisters and their much-publicized “Rochester Rappings” had marked the start of it in America. And in the time since, it had become an intensely serious body of beliefs that had a strange, powerful appeal to a surprising number of intensely serious people. For those of a doubting analytical turn of mind, it seemed to offer proof of the existence of a spiritual realm. To practical men of learning, whose faith in traditional doctrine had been shaken by the revelations of science, it seemed at least an alternative. Why Roebling turned to it he never explained. But in the final years of his life he believed devoutly in a “Spirit Land” and in the possibility of mortal communication with its inhabitants. Specifically, he believed in the afterworld described by Andrew Jackson Davis, “The Poughkeepsie Seer,” a pale, nearsighted son of an alcoholic shoemaker, who in Roebling’s estimate was one of the great men of all time.

Davis had become a clairvoyant, healer, and overnight sensation in 1844, at age seventeen, when he took his first “psychic flight through space” while under hypnosis in Poughkeepsie, New York. For the next several years he traveled up and down the East delivering hundreds of lectures, taking his own attendant hypnotist along with him—to “magnetize” him for each performance—as well as a New Haven preacher who took down everything he uttered while under the spell, all of which was turned into books. (One such book ran to thirty-four editions.) His preachments were a strange mixture of occult mystery, science, or what passed for science, progressive social reform, intellectual skepticism, and a vaulting imagination. For Roebling the impact of all this was momentous. It was as though he had been struck by divine revelation. He wrote at length to Horace Greeley, proposing the establishment of an orphanage in which a thousand children would be “perfectly educated, physically and mentally” according to the Davis vision of the good life. An “earthly paradise” was still possible after all.

The hereafter as pictured by Davis was a complicated hierarchy of life spheres, successive states of consciousness, all worked out geometrically, that existed above, and concentric with, the earth’s surface. Apparently, in terms of what Roebling knew of physics and astronomy, this made more sense than anything else he had heard of, and besides, there was the rich mystical language of Davis, which for Roebling seems to have reached farther even than reason could take him.

For the benefit of his family Roebling would expound on such things endlessly at the dinner table, using Davis or some philosophical discourse he had read as his text, his voice gaining strength as he went on and on, with no concern whatever that his small, respectful audience understood almost nothing he was saying, but just sat there, blinking like young owls in the sunshine, as Washington Roebling would say. Washington was old enough to remember when that “life force” his father liked to talk of had surged through the man with such vitality and there were scenes that would live on with the young man as long as he would: father at his drawing table at Saxonburg, before he needed spectacles to read, working long into the night, his books and things all about him; father in Pittsburgh before the war livid over some latest piece of political news and vowing to go straight home and fire every Democrat in the mill; father up and out of the house before breakfast, an old fur cap on his head, walking the fields with a stick and a dog, getting up an appetite as he said; father with strap in hand about to lay on terrible retribution for some childish misdeed, a burning, unforgettable fury in his eyes.

But in the years since Johanna’s death he had seemed ever more engrossed in the spirit world and talk of sickness and death. His back bothered him. He suffered from indigestion. For those of his children still living at home it had been a disturbing, unpleasant time, and particularly for Edmund, the youngest, who had been his mother’s favorite. When she was gone, his father, as always, had been too busy to give him any time. When his father married again, in 1867, the boy had been packed off to a boarding school, where, Washington would write, “he was subjected to evil influences of so galling and insidious a nature that he ran away—was caught, brought back, and nearly beaten to death by a brutal father, and sent back.” The boy escaped a second time and vanished. For nearly a year the family agonized over his whereabouts. But then he was found, quite by accident, by a Trenton man who happened to be inspecting a prison in Philadelphia. “He had had himself entered as a common vagrant,” Washington would explain, “to get away from his father, and was enjoying life for the first time.”

The whole affair was kept very quiet. None of the family would ever speak of it. There was nothing said in the papers. Except for a private memorandum written by Washington years later, there would be no record of the incident. But in his philosophical notes, under the heading “Man. Conscience,” John A. Roebling wrote the following at about the time Edmund was back home again.

A man may be content with the success of an enterprise; he may have succeeded in overcoming obstacles; in vanquishing his adversaries and enemies; in achieving a great task; solving a great mental problem, or accomplishing work, which was previously pronounced impossible and impracticable. The hero is admired and proclaimed a public benefaction; observed of all observers, he feels himself elated, and in his own estimation a great man. Retiring for one calm moment within the recesses of his own inner self, he reviews his past deeds, his thoughts and motives of action. And before the stern judgment of his own conscience, he stands condemned, an untruth, a lie to himself. But nobody knows! Does he himself now know? Who can hide me from myself?…

Had their mother lived, Washington believed, none of this would have happened. And then one night she returned.

“The latest sensation we have had here are spiritual communications from Mother,” Ferdinand Roebling, John Roebling’s second son, wrote on November 12, 1867, to his brother Washington, then in Europe. A cousin, Edward Riedel, was the medium. He and Roebling’s draftsman, young Wilhelm Hildenbrand, had been sitting in their room on a Saturday night when they heard three knocks under Riedel’s chair. “He did not know what to make of it,” Ferdinand said, “so they examined the room and the next room and porch and all around, the knocks still followed Ed, always under him, they then asked some questions.” Was it a bad spirit? No answer. Was it a good spirit? Three knocks. After repeating these same two questions several times, they asked if perhaps they ought to give up and go to bed, and the response was three sharp knocks.

Roebling was told the next morning. That night they formed up in a circle in his office but got no response until Riedel, having lost hope apparently, went to his room and pulled off his boots. Suddenly he heard the knocks, coming from the kitchen. Roebling was called and they all quickly gathered there. “They then used the Alphabet and found out whose spirit it was. No answer could be given to anyone but Ed.” Everyone was extremely excited, it seems, and Roebling especially, one would imagine. He suggested a few questions, but “none of any account,” according to Ferdinand, and about the only important piece of information communicated by the spirit was that she would return two weeks hence—which she did, and this time Roebling was ready with a long list of questions carefully thought out in advance. If this was to be his first real chance to converse with “the other side,” he would come to it as he had tried to come to every turning point in life, thoroughly prepared.

Having determined at the start of the séance that the spirit was indeed that of his wife, Roebling asked for Willie and Mary, their two dead children, for his own mother and father, and for Frederick Overman, a renowned German metallurgist from Philadelphia who appears to have been the one real friend he had ever had time for since leaving Saxonburg. Overman, dead for fifteen years by this time, once told Roebling that life was a result of movement and death only a change of movement and it had made a lasting impression on the bridgebuilder.

Then Roebling started down his prepared list.

“Do you remember, my dearest, the conversations I have had with you about the Spirit Land and Spheres? You remember the opinions and view taught by Andrew Davis on the subject?” Having been convinced he could talk again to his beloved wife after three years, his whole line of questioning was designed strictly to verify his own set of beliefs. Was Davis correct on the whole, he wanted to know. Yes. In detail? Yes. And so it went, through the rest of that session and in the eleven others that were to follow. On the night of January 25, 1868, for instance, the conversation had run this way:

“After your spiritual birth, did you feel like a new being, young, energetic and full of life?”

“Yes.”

“Did you find that all disease had left you, and that your new spiritual body was free from pains, rejoicing in youth and vigor?”

No answer.

“Do you attend public lectures?”

“Yes.”

“Who is your favorite lecturer? Will you spell out his name?”

“C-H-A-N-N-I-N-G.”

“Are you taught religion?”

“No.”

“Have you got a Bible there?”

“No.”

“You are taught without books?”

“Yes.”

“Is it taught by your teachers that inspired truth and the truth of nature cannot be at variance?”

“Yes.”

“The Christian Bible, the Jewish Scriptures, the Turkish Koran, and all the other books, which lay claim to divine origin and divine inspiration, are all human compositions, therefore liable to error. Is this view correct?”

“Yes.”

“Every man has a spark of divine principle within himself, which alone can save him and elevate him, is this so?”

“Yes.”

He was getting all the answers he wanted. On the night of March 22, he had a total of sixty-one questions prepared for her. Their discourse should always be “serious,” he said at the start; he should not waste time on trivial talk. Yes, she answered. It was truth he should be in search of, he said. Yes, she answered again.

Soon she was bringing a number of other spirits along with her, at his request. On the night of June 14, Willie and Mary, Grandmother Herting, Overman, Roebling’s brother Karl, another brother, and three others besides Mrs. Roebling were present, making ten in all. Still Roebling took no time for personal exchanges with any of them, the line of questioning continued exactly as before. But the atmosphere in the dark room remained highly charged. At one point young Edmund exclaimed that he could see Grandmother Herting’s face and that she was reaching out to touch him. Whether or not the new flesh-and-blood Mrs. Roebling was invited to sit in on any of these sessions is not known.

Had it not been for the bridge, such gatherings with the dead might have gotten to everyone in the household. But by this time the bridge had become the overriding passion of Roebling’s life. It was the summer of 1867, the summer before the séances began, that he had drawn up his plans. In just three months, working at a fever pitch, he had produced the drawings, location plans, preliminary surveys, taken soundings, worked out his cost estimates, and written his proposal, nearly fourteen thousand words in all. Some would say later that it had been as though he knew how little time he had left, which seems unlikely, even though the subject of death, his own included, remained very much on his mind, as his oldest son would disclose.

Washington had been the one member of the family ever to go off and work with John Roebling at bridgebuilding. He knew the different man his father became then, out in the open air, a hundred men or more at his command, his bridge the talk of everyone who came to watch. More than anyone he could appreciate how long a shadow the old man cast. Moreover, he appears to have been the one person Roebling confided in, telling him things he had not said to anyone. He had unlimited confidence and pride in the young man and had agreed to begin the new bridge only with the understanding that the two of them would be working together.

And it would be Washington, later, in things he said and wrote, who would describe another change that had come over his father, something more than his remoteness or the ill temper of advancing age or his forays into the spirit world. It was a deep melancholic disillusionment growing out of what John Roebling thought he saw happening to the country since the war. The great dynamic of America, he had always said, was that every man had the opportunity to better himself, to fulfill himself. Now the great dynamic seemed more like common greed. It was not so much contempt for Germany that had brought him to America, he had told his children, but that in this new country a man was free to make the most of his abilities. If he had “personal energy and power of will,” there were few limits to what a man might attain. Moreover, like numerous others of his day he had long equated works of monumental engineering—and his own work especially—with national grandeur. “The idea of an epoch always finds its appropriate and adequate form,” his teacher Hegel had written. The steamboats, canals, highways, railroads, and bridges he himself had seen on first arriving in America were, he had written, the direct result of the “concerted action of an enlightened, self-governing people.”

But now he had his doubts. Now he had seen men making the most of abilities he had no stomach for and self-government made a mockery. And lately he had seen his own work contribute to that kind of degradation. It had troubled him so deeply that he had talked seriously with his son of washing his hands of the entire affair in Brooklyn.

But now, dressed in a light topcoat and a soft felt hat, he stood waiting to join the Bridge Party. Whether any of his other sons, his wife, or perhaps the faithful Charles Swan had come to the depot with him, to keep him company or to listen to any last-minute instructions, is not known. Washington, however, had left Brooklyn with the others and would be at the door of the parlor car to greet him when the train stopped.