20
Yet the existence of evil in human life is a fact too patent to be ignored or to be denied. There is evil and plenty of it, the world over…
—JOHN A. ROEBLING
FROM his window the Chief Engineer watched the wind gather force through the early morning, driving snow almost horizontally and whipping up whitecaps on the river. New York was barely visible. By ten a regular gale was blowing and the effect on the bridge was tremendous. The wind, as he noted in a subsequent report, was up to sixty-five miles per hour. He could see the half-finished cables tossing about wildly, like a child’s skipping rope.
Roebling could pick out tiny dark figures moving up the footbridge from the Brooklyn anchorage and he knew what they were setting out to do, but from where he was he could not hear the sharp clashing of the strands striking against one another or the eerie moaning and whistling of the wires. Down by the bridge the noise was loud enough to be heard for blocks, and the cradle inland from the tower was slamming about so violently that people in houses below were terrified it might snap its lashing and come plunging down on them.
Farrington had detailed a force of men to go out and secure the wires as best as possible. “It was not a pleasant thing for them to contemplate,” according to one account, “and yet there was not a murmur of dissatisfaction.” Carrying the little boatswain’s chairs, they started up the footbridge, moving very slowly, almost bent double against the wind and snow. The bridge was swinging like a pendulum and the slats were sheathed in ice. But by hanging on to the handrail, they were able to keep their feet and eventually reached the tower.
For the next two hours they worked their way up and down the cable strands, lashing them together every fifty feet or so. The wind never let up during that time, and when two or three of them reached the middle of the river span, and caught the full brunt of the wind, it looked as though they might be carried off at any instant, their frail swings tossing about even more than the cable strands.
But they all came back and none of them complained. “Our men deserve credit for the way they do their duty on such occasions as this,” Farrington told a reporter. The bridge itself, he also pointed out, had held up just fine. The footbridge had not lost a single slat.
The storm struck on the last day of January and for the rest of the winter and on into spring the work proceeded without a hitch. The wire spinning was going faster than it had at Cincinnati, as Henry Murphy announced with pleasure, predicting the entire bridge would be finished by 1880.
In February Roebling reported to the trustees on plans for the bridge trains. Everything would be as his father had described it he said. The trains would be hauled by an endless cable, powered by a gigantic steam engine located on the Brooklyn side. “These two tracks, therefore, will be treated exactly like an inclined plane, an operation perfectly simple and perfectly well understood,” his father had written. “There is no novel feature and no experiment involved in its arrangement.” The elder Roebling had proposed an effective running speed of twenty miles per hour, but said that could be stepped up to thirty in the center of the bridge, or even forty, with absolute safety. Each train could have as many as ten cars, with each car fifty feet long and having seats enough for a hundred people. There were to be suspended sliding doors on opposite sides of the cars, one for coming in, the other for going out. These would be worked by conductors. As one train went over to New York, the other would be coming back, just as the carrier wheels worked.
It was possible too that the rope might revolve constantly, and to start or stop, the cars would simply catch on or let go of the rope. “An ingenious arrangement for attaching cars to a moving rope, devised by Col. W. H. Paine, has been successfully at work for more than a year on the Sutter Street Railways in San Francisco,” Roebling informed the trustees. The great virtue of Paine’s grip was that it took hold of the cable in such a way that the car did not start off with a violent jerk. The San Francisco cable car operated with perfect ease, and certainly, as Roebling said, the grades were considerably steeper than those of the East River bridge.
His father’s plans still appeared to be the best possible solution, Roebling said; “and I am now making every arrangement to carry them out substantially as indicated.” This he knew was in direct opposition to what Stranahan and some of the others had been talking about in recent months, and what Kinsella had begun hinting at in the Eagle. The scheme was for regular passenger trains on the bridge, linking up with Vanderbilt’s New York Central—so it would be possible to go to sleep in Brooklyn and wake up in Buffalo, as they put it. That Henry Murphy’s Coney Island line might also benefit from such an arrangement had also become a topic of conversation among Brooklyn businessmen.
Roebling explained that the grade of the bridge would be too great for any but heavy locomotives. The bridge had not been designed for such loads, he said. Possibly a narrow-gauge locomotive could be used, drawing a few light cars, but that would cut passenger loads to a sixth of what the cable system could handle. Moreover, according to his calculations, in a storm such as the one of January 31, narrow-gauge cars would blow right over. “Neither, must we overlook the effect of a puffing, snorting locomotive on horses already sufficiently startled by the novelty of a very elevated position,” wrote the engineer.
Kinsella seemed to take all this very graciously. If they had reached the point where all there was to argue about was the size of the doors on the passenger cars, then they had come a long way indeed. That was not the issue, of course, and the issue was still very much alive behind the scenes; but for now an atmosphere of peace settled over the bridge offices and morale among the men actually building the bridge was very high.
Early in March the full-rigged ship U.S.S. Minnesota, passing under the center of the bridge, clipped one of the cables with the tip of her topmast. The mast went down with a crash, taking flag and halyards along with it, but the bridge suffered no damage at all. Workmen on the footbridge cheered and waved their hats.
Ever since he returned from Spain Tweed had been telling people he wanted to die. On the morning of April 12, 1878, his wish began to come true.
A few weeks before, on his way from court back to the Ludlow Street Jail, he had caught a cold, which developed into pneumonia, complicated by heart disease. “They will be preaching sermons about me,” he had said. Gray, sunken-cheeked, actually gaunt now, he grew steadily weaker, virtually all alone. According to those few who were at his bedside, he died just as the Essex Market clock struck noon.
There would be some dispute later over just what his last words were. A lawyer who was there claimed Tweed said faintly, “I hope Tilden and Fairchild are satisfied now.” (Charles Fairchild was then the Attorney General of New York.) Some of the newspapers said Tweed had died talking of angels. But a man named S. Foster Dewey, who was Tweed’s secretary and at his bedside, denied this vehemently. “He never thought of angels in his life.” Dewey asserted that Tweed’s final words were these: “I have tried to right some great wrongs. I have been forbearing with those who did not deserve it. I forgive all those who have ever done evil to me, and I want all those whom I have harmed to forgive me.”
It was decided by the family that Tweed would be buried in Brooklyn, at Greenwood Cemetery. “If he had died in 1870,” said one old crony, “Broadway would have been festooned with black, and every military and civil organization in the City would have followed him to Greenwood.” As it was, the funeral was extremely modest indeed, attended by the family, a few friends, and maybe twenty politicians, among whom there was no one of consequence except “Honest John” Kelly. A procession of just eight carriages followed the hearse down Fifth Avenue and then Broadway, to the tip of Manhattan, where they took the Hamilton Avenue Ferry to Brooklyn.
At Greenwood, Tweed was laid to rest by twenty Freemasons, as he had requested, and wearing a white apron of lambskin—“the emblem of innocence.”
“Alas! Alas! young men,” cried the Reverend T. De Witt Talmage from his Brooklyn pulpit the following Sunday, “look at the contrast—in an elegant compartment of a Wagner palace car, surrounded by wine, cards and obsequious attendants, going to his Senatorial place at Albany; then look again at the plain box…behold the low-studded room, looking out upon a mean little dingy court where, a prisoner, exhausted, forsaken, miserable, betrayed, sick, William M. Tweed lies a-dying. From how high up to how low down! Never was such an illustration of the truth that dishonesty will not pay!”
But Godkin in The Nation commented, “A villain of more brains would have had a modest dwelling and would have guzzled in secret.” And young Chris Magee, Republican Boss of Pittsburgh, made a special trip to New York to spend several months studying the reasons for Tweed’s downfall and returned home to tell his associates that a ring could be made as safe as a bank, and he would do just that.
Asked by a New York reporter what he thought of Tweed and the part he had played launching Brooklyn’s bridge, the distinguished editor of the Eagle said, “Well, the Brooklyn people have no right to find fault with the Tammany Ring, so far as we are concerned…they favored the bridge project, and always acted fairly and liberally with us.”
On June 14, at about five minutes past twelve noon, people in Tweed’s old neighborhood surrounding the New York anchorage were suddenly startled by what many thought to be the report of a cannon, followed by a loud scraping, hissing noise that sounded, one man said, more like a skyrocket taking off than anything else he had ever heard. A candy vendor on South Street was nearly struck by stones falling about him. A telegraph pole was snapped in two and a chimney was clipped off a nearby house as something went caroming overhead and crashed out of sight over near the bridge tower. People rushed into the streets, including, it was noted in one account, “several harlots” from the Water Street dance halls who supposedly got down on their knees and commenced praying. A bridge cable had snapped, it was said, something had happened to the tower, the whole bridge was coming down, nobody knew what to believe.
Below the north side of the anchorage lay the body of a man, his chest torn open, his back, arms, and legs broken. He was unconscious but still alive. On top of the anchorage a dead man lay sprawled on the stone and two others were lying nearby, groaning pitifully. The only man on the anchorage who had not been hurt, except for a small scratch on one hand, was Master Mechanic E. F. Farrington.
Farrington had been supervising the “easing off” of the sixtieth strand, which had been finished a day or two before. Some thirty men had been working on the anchorage during the morning, but when the noon break came, he had kept only a few of them on to help lower the strand into position. Thomas Blake had been standing where the strand tied onto the shoe, near the pulleys, so he could see that everything went right at that end. Harry Supple and Farrington had been about four paces forward, on either side of the front ends of the anchor bars, at the point where the finished strands for the upstream cable were attached and where the new strand was to take its place. Two other men named McGrath and Arberg were just opposite Blake.
When everything was ready Farrington told Blake to remove the fastenings and the order was passed back to the hoisting engine to begin lowering away. The steel “fall rope” that held the strand began moving through the pulleys and the strand started forward. It had moved about four feet when one of the men cried out that a segment of the fall rope had parted. But the words were no sooner out of his mouth when the whole thing let go. The fall rope had snapped with a deafening report.
It was all over in an instant. Farrington, who had been knocked down by something, but not hurt, looked about to find that only the jagged ends of the fall rope remained. Blake was dead. McGrath and Arberg were bleeding badly and clearly in terrible pain. The remainder of the rope, the pulleys, and the strand had disappeared. And so had Harry Supple.
Blake, it seems, had been killed instantly, struck by the flying shoe more than likely. Supple had been hit by the rope and knocked off the anchorage, falling eighty feet into the yard. The rope had knocked Arberg down and it had caught McGrath by the feet, ripping open the soles of both his shoes, and throwing him as it had Supple, but in the other direction, twenty feet across the top of the stonework.
The strand, and everything it was dragging behind it, had shot away into the air. With one enormous leap it had landed in the bridge yard behind the tower, a good five hundred feet away. Except for the coping on one house, the telephone pole, and the chimney, it had struck nothing in its violent flight and harmed no one. At the bridge yard it had come down on top of a stone pile, shattering some rowboats lying there and barely missing a group of men who were sitting out in the sunshine enjoying their noontime meal. Instantly the great weight of the strand midstream had sent the free end shooting up over the top of the tower. And when the whole strand had gone plummeting into the river, the splash had shot fifty feet in the air and stretched from shore to shore, like a wall suddenly raised up. Passengers on the Fulton Ferry had been drenched, the strand had hit so close by, but nobody was hurt and no boats had been hit.
By the time all the excitement cooled off and it was clear what had happened, everyone realized what a miraculously close call it had been.
Harry Supple, the one who had performed such heroic high-wire feats two summers before, never regained consciousness and died in less than twenty-four hours. Several papers immediately charged that the rope that failed was made of Bessemer steel and that it had been manufactured by the Roeblings. Both claims were true.
There was no explaining what happened, Martin and Paine told reporters as they walked about the anchorage yard where Supple fell. Henry Murphy had rushed over from Brooklyn at first word of the accident and told the reporters they could go up on top of the anchorage to look about for themselves if they wished. The Bridge Company had nothing to conceal. But he refused to offer any possible explanations. The rope had been used maybe fifteen times before this for the exact same purpose and had been tested for a strength six times the load it had been carrying.
In another couple of days the engineers had completed their investigation and solved the mystery, to their satisfaction at least. The rope, they said, had somehow slipped out of place as it was running through one of the pulleys and the sharp edge of the pulley had cut into it, damaging it badly enough to cause the break. Blake, the dead man, should have seen this, but obviously he had not. The steel rope was not to blame, perhaps even Blake was not wholly to blame. The consensus was that it was one of those chance things that happen.
Still the episode had put a scare into people that they would not soon forget and made a number of those who had some say in bridge matters even more skeptical than they had been before. The work went right on. Farrington was back seeing to other things that same afternoon. But the critics would grow increasingly louder now, and more numerous, and Roebling’s burden of worry, which was supposed to be lessening as the final phases of the work grew nearer, became greater than ever.
Only a week or so before, the New York World had questioned in big headlines whether the bridge was a failure. For some nine millions of dollars, the paper claimed, the people of New York and Brooklyn had acquired nothing but a lot of disgusting scandal and two stone towers with a few wires dangling between. The Times had joined in saying that for all the money poured into the bridge, the ferries could have been offered free to the people for a lifetime.
But of far greater seriousness was the hostility growing in that old seedbed of bridge enthusiasm, Tammany Hall. Anxious to disown any previous connection with Tweed, Connolly, and Sweeny, and reportedly exercised over how much the bridge was costing, the new boss of the Tammany, “Honest John” Kelly, was letting it be known that the city of New York just might refuse to spend anymore money on the bridge. The move was seen by many as nothing more than a political maneuver to replace some of the bridge trustees with Tammany men and to subjugate Boss McLaughlin. No one had taken Kelly very seriously at first. But an installment from New York of half a million dollars was already three months overdue. (Brooklyn had met its obligation of one million dollars right on schedule.) Kelly, regarded as “a warm advocate” of the bridge only a few years before, was now making public remarks about withholding New York’s payment until he was sure the bridge was being managed competently, and sensational accidents killing innocent laborers only aggravated his “grave concern.”
Kingsley, Stranahan, and Henry Murphy claimed no knowledge of Kelly’s motives, nor did they care even to speculate on the subject. But if he persisted, Henry Murphy said, they would take him to court, since the law required that New York meet its financial obligations. Part of the problem, Murphy said, was that too many people still failed to comprehend the sort of bridge this was going to be and were listening to a lot of baseless nonsense from second-rate engineers whose only motivation was publicity. “It will not sway from side to side nor rock up and down,” he said. It was to be “a great street,” he said, solid and stationary. Kelly claimed to have heard from reliable sources that another immense pier would soon be needed to prop up the center span of the bridge. Besides, Kelly said, he was listening with increased interest to the arguments of Abraham Miller and others who were predicting that the bridge would destroy commerce on the East River.
Perhaps in his quiet room overlooking the river, Washington Roebling recalled something his father had written when the same issue was raised at Cincinnati. “I have no fears of those who honestly believe the bridge to be injurious to the navigation,” John Roebling had said, “the opposition of cavilers I most dread.”
By the end of June, New York had still not met its payment. July came and went and still there was no money from New York. By the first week in August, when the trustees convened for their monthly meeting, it was obvious that something would have to be done soon. There was virtually no cash on hand.
At the close of the workday, Saturday, August 10, Murphy took what he viewed as his only course of action. He shut the work down except for the strand making. Approximately a hundred men were kept on. Some six hundred were laid off.
Times were still hard, jobs scarce, and the idea of six hundred men suddenly idle and a great and costly public work standing unfinished was not going to be very well received by the public, as Murphy fully appreciated. The decision, he said, was entirely his own. He did not want to bankrupt the Bridge Company by carrying on, and he did not wish to see Brooklyn spend any more of its money until this trouble with New York was straightened out once and for all.
Kelly said he was now convinced the bridge would do New York little good anyway and that it had been a great mistake for the city to get so financially involved in the first place. And since the costs were running ahead of what had been projected in the original agreements, then New York was no longer legally bound to its side of the bargain. As far as he was concerned, he would be very happy to settle the issue in court. So he held out, as tempers in Brooklyn kept mounting.
With another accident to explain away and “Honest John” Kelly testing his newly gained power, Henry Murphy appeared to be coping with about all the trouble one man could handle during that summer of 1878. And yet this was but part of the story. For on July 22 he had been presented, privately, with what must have appeared to be the most devastating piece of news in all his nine years of administering the business affairs of the bridge.
He was informed by the Chief Engineer that J. Lloyd Haigh, contractor for the cable wire, had been perpetrating a colossal fraud.
The deception had been suspected by the engineers as early as mid-June, but they had had no real proof until July 5. Four days later, when the whole pattern was clear, Roebling had written a long letter to Murphy disclosing what had been going on, but then put off sending it for two weeks, to be absolutely certain his case was solid. So the letter Murphy received on the 22nd was dated July 9 and it told the following story.
“From the known reputation of this man [Haigh], I deemed it necessary from the first to test every ring of wire made by him…” (instead of every tenth ring or so, as had been planned). Roebling had also warned Paine and the others that Haigh would probably try to bribe the inspectors, which was exactly what Haigh had done, without success.
But as Roebling expected he might, Haigh then tried another maneuver. Inspection of the wire was carried on by Paine and his assistants at Haigh’s big brick mill at Red Hook, near the Atlantic Docks. Once the wire was passed, it was loaded onto wagons and hauled up to the bridge. But in June it was found that rejected wire was also getting to the bridge. Wire that had been accepted, but held in the mill overnight, would be replaced before morning by rejected wire, which then went off to the bridge. The trick was discovered by secretly marking the good wire. Haigh was informed of the discovery and given a strong warning. Paine was assured there would be no more of that, but he remained suspicious. The rule from then on was that no more wire was to be inspected than could be delivered on that same day.
But a little later it was noticed that the great pile of rejected wire, instead of increasing as it should have, with rings failing to pass inspection every day, was growing steadily smaller. The bad wire was going somewhere obviously and the assumption was that it was going to the bridge. But how, since all departing wagonloads were being carefully watched to see that they carried good wire only? The solution, the engineers decided, had to be that wagonloads were being switched on route, somewhere between Red Hook and the bridge.
“A watch was therefore set on the morning of the 5th of July,” Roebling wrote, “and the trick discovered. The wagonload of wire as it left the inspector’s room, with his certificate, in place of being driven off to the bridge, was driven to another building, where it was rapidly unloaded and replaced with a load of rejected wire, which then went to the bridge with the same certificate of inspection.”
When these rings reached the bridge—eighty in all—they were immediately tested. Only five out of the total were up to standard.
Two days later the Haigh people were caught trying the same thing again. This time Paine and three others, concealed behind a fence, had watched a wagonload of good wire being unloaded, then replaced with rejected wire, which was all very carefully weighed to be sure the weight of the shipment tallied exactly with what it had been when it left the mill. The good wire was then returned to the mill, where it was submitted to an inspector once more, who, supposing it to be new wire, tested it all over again, gave it another certificate of approval, and sent it on its way, only to go through the same routine.
“The distressing point of this affair,” Roebling told Murphy, “is that all the rejected wire which has come to the Bridge has been worked into the cables, and cannot be removed.” How long Haigh had been practicing his little scheme, Roebling could not say. “We know that it has been going on for two months, and the probability is that it extends as far back as last January.” According to the inspectors’ books, nearly five hundred tons of wire had been rejected to date. Most of this, Roebling suspected, had gone into the cables. To determine the precise quantity would be extremely difficult he said. “An engineer who has not been educated as a spy or detective is no match for a rascal.”
For the time being he had ordered that a man on horseback accompany each load of wire from Haigh’s mill to the bridge and he had instructed Paine to withhold his signature to Haigh’s monthly estimates and thereby prevent Haigh from receiving any more money until the extent of the fraud had been more thoroughly investigated.
This, Roebling said, was the first instance of deliberate, incontrovertible fraud that had come to his notice in the nine years he had been Chief Engineer and he urged the trustees to make it known publicly without delay. But in the brief covering note to Murphy that he included with the letter, Roebling made a rather different point: “…in case a want of strength shall in the future be found in the cables I wish the responsibility to rest where it belongs, with the Board of Trustees.” And this appears to have troubled Murphy about as deeply as the fraud itself.
Murphy took three days to answer Roebling. His concern was very great, clearly enough, but so too was his instinctive caution. No action ought to be taken he said until they had a better notion of the real damage done and until he was clear on the technical remedies Roebling might have in mind. It was a lawyer’s letter. “I have waited with much anxiety for the report of Col. Paine,” he wrote, in regard to the wire on hand and not used, which he has been engaged in retesting, since the suspicions arose in regard to the action of Mr. Haigh, and to the possible extent to which any rejected wire has been foisted upon us in the cables…. It is manifestly proper, before any definite course be taken by us, that we should know the nature and extent of the injury, and that so far as the work itself is concerned, we should have your distinct recommendation in the premises.” In the meantime, he wanted to know what possible responsibility Roebling could conceive of resting with the trustees.
“The responsibility of any weakness that may be found in the cables,” Roebling answered, “rests with the old board of trustees, because they awarded so important a contract as the cable wire to a man who had no standing, commercially or otherwise, and the same responsibility must be assumed by the present board if they fail to at once put an end to Mr. Haigh’s contract…” Out of tact, perhaps, or out of sympathy for the position Murphy was in, Roebling did not remind Murphy that he had warned him about Haigh, quite explicitly, well before the wire contract was awarded.
Given a week’s notice, the Cleveland Rolling Mill or Washburn’s of Worcester could supply all the wire needed to finish the cables, Roebling assured Murphy. The price would be about the same and the quality could be relied upon. As for Haigh, a committee of trustees and an engineer should be appointed to assess the damage to the cables and fix the value of the condemned wire. That sum should then be deducted from the money currently being withheld from Haigh as security. “This,” said the engineer, “is a straightforward way of dealing with a dishonest contractor.”
But the trustees chose not to do that. The trustees, in fact, decided not to do anything at all about Mr. Haigh. The whole unfortunate affair would be very neatly and quietly swept beneath the carpet.
…They gathered for their regular monthly meeting on the afternoon of August 5, and the record states that the president read letters from Engineer Roebling “relating to alleged frauds practiced by the contractor for cable wire”—no more. And nothing on the matter was released to the press. Several years later, however, William Marshall, the one trustee who had voted against granting Haigh the contract in the first place, said Paine appeared before the board that afternoon and told the entire story of what Haigh had been up to. “I was in favor at the time,” Marshall said, “and so said in the Board, of giving the whole history of the matter to the public, but was overruled.”
According to an item in the Eagle, there was a meeting of the Executive Committee immediately following the board meeting. “The executive session lasted until 6 o’clock, but the subject matter under discussion was not divulged by the members,” the paper reported. But Marshall said Haigh himself appeared at this session and that Haigh denied any intention of trying to deceive the bridge people, professing to be wholly uninterested in any money that might be in question. “All I am anxious about,” he said, “is lest the trustees may entertain a poor opinion of me.” That they certainly did, responded several men in the room. “I am sorry for that,” declared Haigh. “Do you know that is what I was afraid of? Indeed, it was the only thing I was afraid of.” Haigh spoke the whole time, Marshall said, “with imperturbable coolness.”
Interestingly, the record kept by the Bridge Company carries no mention of an executive session being held that afternoon.
The following morning Roebling wrote once again to Murphy to answer several questions Murphy had sent along. Most of the letter was taken up with technical explanations of current cable strength, assuming, as Roebling now did, that some 221 tons of rejected wire had actually been laid up. But in closing, Roebling reminded Murphy that the cables had been designed to have a margin of safety of six, that is, they were six times as strong as they had to be. And he recalled for Murphy that his report of January 1877 had stated specifically that such allowances would have to be made “for any possible imperfection in the manufacture of the cables.” So even with Haigh’s bad wire hanging up there, the cables had a safety margin of at least five, Roebling concluded, and that he regarded as perfectly safe, provided no more bad wire was used.
Roebling’s say on the matter was quite comforting for Murphy and for the other trustees apparently. The whole unpleasant business could now be very conveniently forgotten. Wasting no time, they reconvened the next day, August 7. When the meeting adjourned, the president had been directed “to continue the contract with Mr. Haigh for the wire required to complete the large cables, on such conditions and terms as he deems proper under the circumstances.”
It was just as though nothing had happened. The papers carried no mention of any of this. The public remained ignorant of the entire affair.
The Chief Engineer, however, after a great deal more thought on the problem, ruled that the contractor would have to supply additional good wire for the cables, at his own expense, to make up for the calculated deficiency of the bad wire already in place. As a result each of the cables would contain some 150 more wires than originally planned.
From Washington Roebling’s private day journals, kept by his wife, a few further pieces of information emerge to complete the picture. Haigh’s original samples of crucible steel wire were made by somebody else, while a good percentage of the wire he delivered was of Bessemer steel after all, but sold to the Bridge Company at the crucible price. Roebling estimated that Haigh netted $60,000 on this bit of deception alone and that he had also cheated his supplier out of several hundred thousand dollars. In all Haigh’s illegitimate profits came to $300,000.
Some years later, after the bridge was finished and the story of Haigh’s swindle had leaked out, the radical economic theorist Henry George, who had set out to resolve the paradox of progress and poverty, wrote of the bridge as a prime example of the good and evil of the age.
We have brought machinery to a pitch of perfection that fifty years ago could not have been imagined; but in the presence of political corruption, we seem as helpless as idiots. The East River Bridge is a crowning triumph of mechanical skill; but to get it built a leading citizen of Brooklyn had to carry to New York sixty thousand dollars in a carpet bag to bribe a New York alderman. The human soul that thought out the great bridge is prisoned in a crazed and broken body that lies bed-fast, and could only watch it grow by peering through a telescope. Nevertheless, the weight of the immense mass is estimated and adjusted for every inch. But the skill of the engineer could not prevent condemned wire from being smuggled into the cable.
Come what may the Brooklyn Eagle would not be diverted from its main theme—accomplishment.
The thousands who daily cross the ferries and look up to the lofty towers that rise on either hand above the water, and note the strands that stretch across the intervening space, hardly realize that the cable making of the great structure is nearing its completion. But such is the fact, and with a fair degree of success, by the time the cold weather sets in we shall see the four great cables completed and ready for the superstructure or roadway of the bridge. It has been steady and patient work—wire upon wire and strand upon strand—through heat and cold and storm and calm, and now this branch of the great enterprise nears the end, and another department of the work of construction appears in the near future.
Nothing belied talk of political scheming, bankruptcy, labor unrest, vicious rumor, or plain despair quite so much as the great work itself.
Progress on the cables was in truth very far along. Seventy strands had been completed, which meant there were only six more to go.
An explanation offered at the time to show the interested layman how the strands were arranged to form a cable was to take seven nickels, place one at the center with six around it, all touching, and then twelve more around the outside of the six. This illustrated the pattern quite rightly, but it was somewhat misleading in that it implied that the first strand put into position was the center one—the middle nickel—then six more were compacted about it, and twelve more around that. The system did not work that way, however. The strands were being laid up in four different tiers and these were arranged in a most ingenious pattern, so that they stacked one on top of the other, like building blocks, rather than being built outward from a center strand, and still they wound up forming the cylindrical shape wanted for the cable. The first tier, consisting of five strands, had three strands forming a bottom row (the middle strand of these three was the first strand put in place) and two put on top, forming half of the next row. The next tier, of five more strands, placed one at each end of the second row (making four strands to that row) and three more on top. Then tier three, also five strands, added one more strand to each end of the third row, two more on top in the middle, and one on top of those. The fourth and final tier consisted of the last four strands stacked two to each side of the three upper strands of tier three.
The arrangement was quite ingenious and it was entirely Roebling’s doing. “It has pleased the average penny-a-liner,” his wife would write, “to remark that there is nothing new in the East River Bridge and that Colonel Roebling only copied his father’s plans. The fact is there is scarcely a feature in the whole work that did not present new and untried problems.” His arrangement for the strands was a perfect example, she said, comparable to the water-shaft system he had worked out for the caisson, or his use of double tiers of anchor bars, which had been necessary to handle the number of strands required for such large cables (the earlier bridges had had only seven strands to a cable, not nineteen).
Regulating the strands was found to be the most tedious and time-consuming task of all. The strength of the finished cable would depend on getting each strand into its exact, particular position, and since those positions were at different heights within the cable (there was a difference of about fifteen inches between the first strands, say, and those in the top tier), the length of the strands therefore had to vary. “Each must hang in its own peculiar length and curve to a mathematical nicety,” as one magazine article explained; “for if left but half an inch too long or too short for its true position, it will be too slack or too taut for its fellows, and it will be impossible to bind them solidly in one mass, and make them pull equally together.”
In the abstract this was simply a matter of mathematics. But in practice there were a number of variables to contend with, just as there had been when stringing the individual wires. Temperature was again a prime factor. Even ordinary temperature changes during a day were such that the length of a strand was seldom the same from one hour to another. And to further complicate the problem, one span could be affected more than another, depending on how the sun was striking it. One strand might be in shadow, while another was taking the full glare; one might be exposed vertically to the sun, while the other was at a more oblique angle. So periods of strong sunshine, like days when the wind was up, were not the easiest times to regulate strands. The best progress was made when the weather was calm and a little overcast or between the first light of day and sunrise.
Studies made by the engineers showed that the deflection of the cable strands from the towers at a temperature of 50 degrees was 127.64 feet, while at 90 degrees it was 128.64 feet—which was a variation of nearly a third of an inch for every degree of temperature. So it was not uncommon to find the cable strands varying as much as half a foot in height in the course of a single day.
The way things were going, the two downstream cables would be laid up several weeks before the other two in order to give the men some practice with the wrapping machinery. To bind the strands of each cable into one compact unit required that the cable be tightly wrapped from end to end with iron wire. The work would begin at the towers, with wrapping machines proceeding down the cables toward the center of the river span and toward each anchorage. So ultimately there would be sixteen machines in operation.
First a powerful iron clamp would be used to bring the strands into an exactly cylindrical shape. This was composed of two semi-circles that placed together formed a ring the prescribed diameter of the cable. The clamp would be screwed up tightly to compress the strands and directly behind it would come the wrapping machine, an iron cylinder—about sixteen inches long and cast in halves that were bolted together about the cable—encircled by a reel of wire that wound off the drum through a hole in the rear end of the cylinder where it passed with one turn around a small roller attached to a disk and then to the cable. The reel had handles around it, like a ship’s wheel. Men riding on a “buggy,” a small platform hung to the cable by big trolley wheels, would turn these handles, thereby revolving the reel and winding the wire onto the cable as tight and close as thread on a spool. Once the wrapping machine reached the clamp, the clamp was moved forward and the machine then advanced again, and the process would be repeated until the entire cable was clamped and wrapped. After that the cables would be oiled and a coat of white paint would be applied.
The system worked well and without mishap except for one close call when the captain of an outward-bound full-rigged ship neglected to trim his top masts. The men in one of the buggies, working over the center of the river, did not see the ship until she was nearly upon them. Then they scrambled out onto the great cable above them and the ship clipped the buggy an instant later, sending it spinning and knocking a shower of tools into the air.
Now there was a great push on to get the cables finished and wrapped before winter. It was expected that the job would take three months. The next step would be to hang the suspender cables from which the roadway was to be hung.
In September, as directed by Henry Murphy, the contract for the wrapping wire, awarded to J. Lloyd Haigh at the start of the summer, was quietly changed and awarded to John A. Roebling’s Sons. No explanation was given for the change. No voices were raised about the Chief Engineer having a conflict of interest. The Eagle remained silent. Abram Hewitt remained silent.
On October 5, 1878, at 4:45 P.M. by the clock on City Hall, the last wire went over, one year and about four months after the cable spinning had begun, or eight months sooner than Roebling had expected. “This desirable event,” wrote E. F. Farrington, “was marked by no demonstrations, save the sounding of a steam whistle, and the raising of a United States flag on the Brooklyn tower.” The greatest length of wire laid up in one day had been eighty-eight miles. The white carrier wheel, which had crossed the river some twenty-three thousand times, would be crossing no more. “The end, then, is near at hand,” announced the Eagle. But a month later, the cable wrapping not half finished, Henry Murphy declared that the work would have to be shut down entirely. “Honest John” Kelly was still holding out on New York’s quota and the money was all gone.