3
He spoke our language imperfectly, because he had not the advantage of being born on our soil, but he spoke the genuine language of America at Cincinnati, Pittsburgh, and Niagara…
—THOMAS KINSELLA, in
The Brooklyn Eagle
CHAMPAGNE and sandwiches were served soon after Roebling came aboard. How late the little celebration lasted after that nobody said later. But at five the next morning, when he roused them all, there was no little grumbling. He was anxious, Roebling said, that nobody miss the sunrise over the Alleghenies.
By breakfast they were passing through Johnstown and he had everyone peering out at the steep, thickly wooded sides of Conemaugh Gap, a deep cleft in Laurel Hill that he and his railroad surveying party had first seen from a distant hill thirty years before. “There was our course!” he had written enthusiastically at the time.
The next town of any size was Greensburg, where the very first suspension bridge there is a record of was built over Jacobs Creek by a Scotch-Irish preacher, a Presbyterian named James Finley, in the year 1801, or before John Roebling was born. Finley had been a versatile and ingenious man. His “chain bridge” had a seventy-foot span, cost about six hundred dollars, and in the next ten years he built some forty more of them, including one over the Potomac above Washington. Perhaps Roebling told his traveling companions something about this, thereby getting a head start on their instructions in the history and theory of suspension bridges.
When the train pulled into Pittsburgh less than an hour later, he took them directly to their quarters at the Monongahela House, which stood at the end of his Smithfield Street Bridge. From the front door of the hotel, or possibly from their rooms, if they were on the river side, they had a perfect view of the pioneering work, now nearly twenty-five years old, that had started Roebling on his way. It had been built at a time when every floor beam had to be cut with a hand-pulled whipsaw, when screws were still turned on a lathe by hand, and steel, practically speaking, even in Pittsburgh, was regarded as a semiprecious metal. One of the Pittsburgh papers in 1846, the year the bridge was finished, had claimed “this admirable species” was “destined to supersede all others.” For Roebling, from then on, it had been the only type he would care anything about building, and in its rather antique fashion, the bridge still illustrated several fundamental points about his own particular manner of building—all of which he no doubt explained as he and his entourage went out for a first look.
Here again, as at the aqueduct, he had fixed his cables to a chain of iron eyebars buried in masonry anchorages. Here, for the first time, he had used his system of inclined stays to add strength and rigidity. Only here, he explained, he had used iron rods rather than the iron rope used on all his later bridges. The bridge was fifteen hundred feet long (or not quite as long as the river span alone of the bridge he had drawn up for Brooklyn). It had eight spans of about 188 feet each and short cast-iron towers. The wind had no effect on it, he said, and the vibrations produced by seven-ton coal wagons and their teams were no greater than on a wooden truss bridge with spans the same length. The total cost had been $55,000—“a very small sum indeed for such an extensive work,” according to the engineer.
But the real Roebling showpiece in Pittsburgh was across town at Sixth Street and there they all went first thing that afternoon. He had built the Smithfield Street Bridge largely to prove his engineering skill and the soundness of the suspension technique. He had been concerned with building an efficient structure at the least possible cost. But his Allegheny River Bridge, begun eleven years later, had been built with an ample budget. It had been his first real opportunity to display his gift for architectural design and he had had a splendid time with it. Among people who knew bridges, it was considered one of the handsomest in the country.
It stood downstream from where his aqueduct had been and connected Pittsburgh with the small neighboring city of Allegheny. Its total length (1,030 feet) was less than the bridge over the Monongahela. It had four spans and was supported by four cables hung from six highly ornamental iron towers, each with iron latticework for bracing and iron spires for decoration on top. “The bridge will be beautiful,” he had written when the towers were nearly finished. In truth it looked a little as though it had been designed to satisfy the aesthetic tastes of a Turkish sultan. This was also the first bridge he and his son had built together. “I am getting along well here,” he had written home to Trenton in the spring of 1858. “Washington is about the work.” As a matter of fact it was Washington who supervised most of the job thereafter and for whom numerous Pittsburghers had the most affectionate memories.
Once finished the Allegheny River Bridge was so sound that the owners—a private company—had not even bothered to take out insurance on it, and as a toll road, it had made money from the start—both points that must have been noted with interest by the delegation from the East. For about an hour they examined the bridge. There is no record of what was discussed during this time, but probably the cables were the main topic. These had been laid up, or “spun,” in place, unlike those on the bridge just visited, where the cables were smaller and the spans between towers were much shorter. There the iron wires had been spun on land first, to form individual cable sections that were then hoisted into position. But here, one can picture him explaining, the cables had been spun on the bridge itself by a traveling wheel that went back and forth, stringing the wire over the towers, from shore to shore, making fourteen hundred trips in all, and this was the way that he meant to build his cables over the East River.
Thomas Kinsella, the editor of the Eagle, would report in an article written afterward that the floor trembled very little as trolleys to and from Allegheny went clattering by and everyone in the party thought Roebling’s ornamental ironwork a feast for the eye. The remainder of the day was spent touring the ironworks of the young Carnegie brothers, where the manufacture and virtues of Bessemer steel were explained. Whether or not the wire in the new bridge would be of steel had still to be decided.
The itinerary called for a stay of several days in Pittsburgh, but so unpleasant was the air, in the opinion of several in the group, and so unsatisfactory the accommodations at the Monongahela House, that a decision was made to leave the next day. “If you ever visit Pittsburgh,” wrote Thomas Kinsella for his Brooklyn readers, “and desire to stop at the best hotel…don’t.”
On the morning of April 16 they were again settled in their private car, “leaving Pittsburgh like a great sooty blotch behind.” The sun out, they “swept across into Ohio” at the grand speed of fifty-four miles per hour, an experience everyone would have enjoyed had not the parlor car started rocking so that it greatly interfered with a poker game. At Cincinnati some time after dark they checked into the Burnet House, where they enjoyed a “very fair supper,” after which, over cigars, the next morning’s schedule was discussed. “Slocum, never lacking pluck, had the courage,” Kinsella wrote, “to suggest that nine o’clock was, under the circumstances, a barbarous hour. He quickly won the majority over to his way of thinking, and the Untiring Old Man, Roebling, yielded an hour’s grace, and it was tacitly accepted that no one would be greatly disappointed if the party should not leave the hotel before ten o’clock. As we retired the blessed spring rain was falling against the windowpanes, and after the day’s fatigue sleep came as gentle as the dew.” (All this still being written for home consumption, in the pages of the Brooklyn Eagle.)
The following morning one of the party, a man named Cary, reported sick. He had made the mistake, he said, of drinking some of the local water, a glass of which was described as eating and drinking combined. But the rest were in excellent spirits and the day was spectacular. It was Saturday and the streets were already crowded with people enjoying the sunshine as Roebling led his group out of the hotel.
The first view of the bridge proved to be a far more stirring experience than anyone from Brooklyn had been prepared for. It was built on a line running due south, reaching over the Ohio to Covington, Kentucky. But because of the way the streets were laid out along the river front, there was no way to see the bridge until nearly upon it. “It then broke upon us all at once,” Kinsella wrote, “the stateliest and most splendid evidence of genius, enterprise and skill it has ever been my lot to see.”
Eleven thousand people a day were crossing it, he and the others were told, as they stood gazing at the long, graceful arc of its river span (“…it was indeed a work to excite amazement and wonder.”). For the next hour or more they walked back and forth from one end to the other (“…it seemed as solid and as stable beneath our feet as the earth on either side of the river.”).
This, they realized, was the nearest thing in existence to what Roebling planned to build over the East River. And if any of them was having trouble picturing the new bridge, he had now only to imagine something very like this one—only much bigger. * Here were the twin towers of stone standing foursquare and solid, a slender line of roadway stretched between them, slung on great cables and arcing the river with a single span. Here, as on the Pittsburgh bridges, were the inclined stays, slanting down from the towers like iron rays, angling across the suspenders that connected the cables to the roadway. The stays were the mark of a Roebling bridge, the traveling delegation had come to realize. But here the scale of the bridge was such that the combination of stays and suspenders looked like a gigantic web, or net, and the same effect at Brooklyn, it was understood, would be even greater.
Every diagonal stay, Roebling explained, formed the hypotenuse of a right triangle (the bridge floor and the tower forming the shorter sides) and thus provided tremendous stability, since, as he said, “The triangle is the only unchangeable figure known in geometry…” Altogether, cables, suspenders, stays, and bridge floor formed a kind of truss. The great horizontal stability of the bridge was due in large measure, he said, to such “bracing” of the cables. This was a proposition “readily comprehended by sailors, who are accustomed to stays on board ships.”
The “Biggest Bridge in the World” had been opened to the public on December 1, 1866, to the tune of a thundering cannonade. By sundown 46,000 people had crossed it, with no ill effects to the bridge or to any of them. But the following day, an uncommonly mild winter Sunday, 120,000 people had turned out to personally examine the wondrous work. Then, on New Year’s Day, 1867, the official opening, a big parade had marched over from the Covington side, led by Roebling and Amos Shinkle, the Cincinnati coal dealer who had been the principal organizer of the project, and who that sparkling spring morning in 1869 had come down to the bridge to greet Roebling and his new clients, some of whom had matters other than engineering on their minds. “Does the bridge pay, sir?” he was asked. “Yes, sir,” answered Shinkle, “handsomely.”
Roebling had first come to Cincinnati with plans for a bridge more than twenty years before, in 1846, and had felt very much at home in the brick city on the river, with its German theaters, its beer gardens and German newspapers. The Ohio was still the great dividing line between North and South then, between plantation slavery on the Kentucky side and in Cincinnati some of the strongest abolitionist sentiment in the country. (It was in Cincinnati then that stories told by slaves who had escaped over the river were making a deep impression on Harriet Beecher Stowe, the young wife of a local professor.) So there were reasons other than the mighty Ohio or the strenuous opposition of the steamboat interests for not building a bridge and it was nearly a decade later, and only when Amos Shinkle came on the scene, that anything began to happen.
But after Roebling had the work under way, he was hit by one of the worst winters on record in Ohio, the winter of 1856-57. In spring, when the ice broke up, the river flooded his foundations so badly that little could be accomplished for another six months. Roebling kept coming from Trenton to look things over, then headed home again. But it was a time of great productivity for him.
The year before, he had done a sketch for a bridge to Brooklyn, a multispan bridge to cross by way of Blackwell’s Island, where the prison and poor asylum stood. In March of 1857 he wrote to Horace Greeley to propose “a wire suspension bridge crossing the East River by one single span at such an elevation as will not impede the navigation.” His Cincinnati Bridge, scarcely even under way, was only a preliminary work, as he saw it. This East River bridge would be “without rival,” its towers three hundred feet high. The letter appeared in the New York Tribune on March 27, 1857, and was Roebling’s first public declaration of his plan.
That same March, in his Trenton study, he produced drawings for three different kinds of towers for the East River bridge—one an elaborate Egyptian doorway with a spread-eagle gargoyle for a corbel; another a notably plain Roman arch; the third, again a Roman arch but drawn with a bolder, heavier pediment and then a Gothic arch, a second thought apparently, sketched in tentatively in pencil, very lightly, like a ghost of things to come. None of these suited him, but still enormously excited about the idea, he wrote to Abram Hewitt, head of Peter Cooper’s Trenton Iron Works. It was Peter Cooper who had first urged Roebling to locate in Trenton and helped him pick a site for his wire mill, probably figuring the engineer to be a fine prospective customer. In the time since, Hewitt had become Cooper’s son-in-law as well as his business partner. An energetic, self-assured young man, he was said to have a great future. Hewitt had Roebling’s letter printed in the Journal of Commerce, but did no more than that, which must have been disappointing to Roebling. Indeed Hewitt’s response would be barely worth mentioning were it not for the part he was subsequently to play.
The terrible Panic of 1857 burst upon the country that summer and Roebling had all he could do managing things in Trenton and at Cincinnati, where work on the bridge was shut down altogether, not to begin again until the early part of the Civil War, when a Confederate force under Kirby Smith, advancing into the Blue Grass Country to the south, threw all Cincinnati into a state of panic. Soldiers and citizens alike rushed to fortify the hills on the Covington side, discovering in the process how very advantageous a bridge would be, had there only been one. And beside the pontoon affair that was hastily assembled stood Roebling’s half-finished towers to remind everyone what might have been.
There never was a siege of Cincinnati, but once the threat of one had passed, the fortunes of Roebling’s troubled Cincinnati Bridge took an immediate turn for the better. Subscriptions to new stock poured into Amos Shinkle’s office, the work commenced once more and with no opposition. For Roebling the bridge was a symbol of confidence rising above the “general national gloom.” It proved, he said, that there were still men about “with unshaken moral courage and implicit trust in the future political integrity of the nation.” When his Irish laborers, who shared no such feelings for the bridge or for the Union cause, walked off the job demanding higher pay, Roebling fired every man and hired only Germans as replacements. “The Germans about here are mostly loyal, the Irish alone are disloyal,” he wrote. “No Democrat can be trusted, they are all disloyal and treacherous, more or less.”
Two years later, the war nearly over, Washington Roebling was released from the Army and went almost directly to Cincinnati, where, by then, there was no longer any question about the relative importance of his father’s bridge. “The size and magnitude of this work far surpass any expectations I had formed of it,” the young man wrote to the rest of the family back in Trenton. “It is the highest thing in this country; the towers are so high a person’s neck aches looking up at them. It will take me a week to get used to the dimensions of everything around here.” From that point on, though his official title was Assistant Engineer, he had been in complete charge of the work. All the cable spinning, the most exciting, difficult part of the work, was done under his direction, his father having concluded that he would henceforth “leave bridgebuilding to younger folks.”
The Cincinnati Bridge wound up taking a total of ten years to build and it cost just about twice what John Roebling had said it would. But no one had any complaints. It was unquestionably the finest as well as the largest bridge of its kind built until that time. Both structurally and architecturally it was a triumph.
Talking in retrospect, Amos Shinkle had nothing but praise for the manner in which it had been built. From an engineering standpoint everything had gone very smoothly. Only two lives had been lost during the entire time of its construction, a remarkable safety record, as the gentlemen from the East agreed. For the Roeblings, he had only the highest admiration, and especially for the redoubtable father, about whom, apparently, a few of the Brooklyn men had expressed some uneasiness. Getting along with him should prove no problem, Shinkle assured them. His advice was simple: “He is an extraordinary man and if you people in Brooklyn are wise you will interfere with his views just as little as possible. Give the old man his way and trust him.”
At eight that evening the Bridge Party departed for Niagara Falls, by way of Cleveland, where they stopped for the night and where several of them decided things could be livened up a bit if the word was spread that they were a group of wealthy lunatics being conducted on an outing. The joke worked quite well, it seems, causing a considerable stir in the hotel dining room. But when Thomas Kinsella’s account of such goings on appeared in the paper back in Brooklyn, it served mainly to substantiate what a number of people there had been saying right along, that the bridge was the scheme of madmen.
Spring was late arriving at Niagara Falls. The snowbanks had nearly all disappeared but the weather was sharp still and gigantic slabs of ice could be seen plunging down the river as Roebling led his group out to inspect what was generally conceded to be his masterpiece, a two-level suspension bridge over the great gorge.
This tour could have been arranged in the reverse order just as easily, with Niagara the first stop instead of the last, which would have made better sense in some ways, in that the Niagara Bridge was an earlier work than either the Cincinnati or Allegheny River bridges. But Roebling had saved Niagara for the last for good reasons.
At Pittsburgh he had been able to show as solid, dependable, and handsome a piece of workmanship as he had ever built. The Allegheny River Bridge was a bridge everyone liked. It had caused nobody any headaches when it was being put up or in the time since. At Cincinnati, the unprecedented length of the single river span was the most important thing on display, from the technical point of view. But the bridge had also a grandeur of a kind rarely seen and his new clients had come away from it with a keener appreciation of monumental scale as well as engineering genius.
But the Niagara Bridge, or International Suspension Bridge, or just Suspension Bridge as it was called locally, was neither terribly solid-appearing nor especially large. Indeed, every bridge they had inspected so far was longer. Also, unlike any of the others, it had been built with two levels—carriages and pedestrians traveled the lower level, while the Great Western Canada Railroad crossed on the one above—and the whole thing trembled quite noticeably when traffic was heavy. For some people the experience of crossing by carriage was positively terrifying. “You drive over to Suspension Bridge,” wrote Mark Twain, “and divide your misery between the chances of smashing down two hundred feet into the river below, and the chances of having a railway-train overhead smashing down onto you. Either possibility is discomforting taken by itself, but, mixed together, they amount in the aggregate to positive unhappiness.”
Its single span was 825 feet, which was nothing exceptional any longer. Its four stone towers stood only about half as high as those at Cincinnati. It had not been the first suspension bridge over the gorge and it did not stand alone, unrivaled, the way the Cincinnati Bridge did.
The first bridge had been built downstream at Lewiston, New York, in 1851, by Edward Serrell, brother of the Serrell traveling with the Bridge Party. It had been a very light suspension bridge and was badly shaken by a storm in 1855, after which, at Roebling’s suggestion, it had been refitted with guy wires. But later when these wires were loosened by an ice jam, somebody neglected to tighten them. A spring storm tore the bridge floor to pieces and left the cables and suspenders dangling uselessly in mid-air. And there they were still, about as dramatic an example of what could happen to a poorly engineered suspension bridge as could be seen, short of an actual collapse.
The other bridge over the gorge was very much in view from where they stood, about two miles upstream, near the falls. It was a brand-new suspension span designed by a Canadian, Samuel Keefer. It had been opened just that January and was already an extremely popular attraction, being near the best hotels. But since it was only ten feet wide, or too narrow for carriages to pass one another, traffic had to cross it in turns, first one way, then the other, and long waiting lines built up. In years to come it would be remodeled extensively and become famous as the Honeymoon Bridge. But at this stage it was being publicized only as a greater span than the one at Cincinnati, which indeed it was in terms of length. It was more than two hundred feet longer, which meant it now held the world’s record.
It would appear then that the gentlemen from Brooklyn might have been somewhat disappointed with this, the final Roebling bridge on the tour. But not so. Like nearly everyone who ever stood there at the brink of the gorge, with the bridge before them, they looked upon it with nothing less than awe.
The site alone was enough to take a person’s breath away. Upstream were the falls, while directly beneath the bridge, deep in the abyss, was the first of a series of savage rapids that swept on downstream for a mile or better, ending in a tremendous whirlpool held in a looming rock basin. Past there the current veered to the right and disappeared through a narrow channel overhung by sharp cliffs and trees. It was an absolute no man’s land below, but here above it had been conquered, bridged, beautifully.
Once, not many years before, an excursion boat, the Maid of the Mist, had gone shooting by below to the utter astonishment of those who happened to be on the bridge at the time. The boat had been built upstream, between the rapids and the falls, to take sight-seers for a rather terrifying close-up view of the falls. But the boat had never been a financial success. The owner, a Captain Joel Robinson, got into debt and when he heard that the sheriff was on his way to confiscate the boat, he decided his only chance was to escape down the rapids, something nobody had ever done before and lived to tell the story. Two men volunteered to go with him. The people on the bridge saw the boat make one long leap down the rapids. Her funnel was knocked flat by the blow, the whole boat was underwater from stem to stern. Then she was up again and skimming into the whirlpool, where “she rode with comparative ease upon the water, and took the sharp turn around into the river below without a struggle.” Captain Robinson’s wife later said her husband looked approximately twenty years older when he came in the door that evening.
But the bridge seemed to make the whole breath-taking panorama all the more terrifying, all the more magnificent. It was one of those occasions when the hand of man had enhanced that already wrought by the hand of God.
To begin with, the bridge seemed so serene and refined against such tumultuous doings of nature. Its essential components were four plain towers sixty feet high, four cables ten inches in diameter, their suspenders and stays, and a straightforward timber truss joining the two levels of the one span, which over such a gaping cavity in the earth looked ever so much longer than 820 feet. The bridge looked to be exactly what was called for, no more, no less. It was as though it was the only possible bridge for the place.
Actually, of course, one uninterrupted span was the only kind that would have worked there, since supporting piers in the gorge itself would have been out of the question. But this bridge was not simply for carriages and pedestrians, like the one upstream, indeed, like every other suspension bridge in the world at the time. It carried a railroad. That thought alone was enough to command the respect of anyone who knew a little about bridge engineering or recalled when it had been built. But even if a person were ignorant of such things, the sight of a moving train held aloft above the great gorge at Niagara by so delicate a contrivance was, in the 1860’s, nothing short of miraculous. The bridge seemed to defy the most fundamental laws of nature. Something so slight just naturally ought to give way beneath anything so heavy. That it did not seemed pure magic. The reasons it did not were the very foundation of all Roebling’s work. And if his band of clients, consultants, and other interested parties could return to Brooklyn understanding this bridge, they would understand what his work was all about.
In time to come, suspension bridges would not be used much for railroads, as Roebling expected they would. The Niagara Bridge was, in fact, the only noteworthy railroad bridge of its type ever built. The important thing, however, was that Roebling had demonstrated, at one of the most spectacular locations on earth, that the principles of suspension could be applied with perfect safety even to something so heavy as a locomotive and railroad cars, and this in turn had a profound effect on the whole evolution of bridge design, not to mention the acceptance of his own theories. At Niagara he had built the first truly modern suspension bridge.
The great appeal of the suspension bridge, apart from its beauty, was its economy. It required considerably less material than other kinds of bridges. But prior to the completion of Roebling’s Niagara Bridge in 1855, suspension bridges had a dubious reputation. In all America then there were only two engineers who had any firm belief in them or who had built any of consequence. Roebling was one. The other was Charles Ellet, Jr.
The reason for so much distrust of suspension bridges was simply that so many of them had come crashing down over the years, and frequently with tragic consequences. In England in 1831 a suspension bridge had collapsed under the feet of marching troops. (The bridge was the work of Sir Samuel Brown, whose suspension bridges came down about as fast as he put them up, one after another—at Berwick, Brighton, Montrose, and Durham.) In France in 1850 another wire bridge had failed under almost identical circumstances, killing two hundred men. In America a number of small suspension bridges had collapsed under droves of cattle, including one at Covington, Kentucky, over the Licking River, just a few years before Roebling commenced his Cincinnati Bridge.
Nobody understood quite why these things happened. In actual fact the bridges had either been inadequately built to begin with or badly maintained, but whichever the cause, it had generally gone undetected and a large body of distrust had built up about the suspension method in general. In Europe especially, few engineers had confidence in such bridges for spans of any appreciable length or for heavy traffic, and this despite the fact that the earliest suspension bridges approaching the size of those by Roebling or Ellet were built in Europe from about 1820 on.
The basic idea was of course nearly as old as man. In China, South America, and other parts of the world, crude bridges had been slung from vines over rivers and ravines since before recorded history. There was, however, an obvious and important difference between such bridges and those that began to appear in the early part of the nineteenth century. The latter-day variety had a stiff, level floor that did not curve or sway with the ropes that held it, but was—or was supposed to be—as stable as any other kind of bridge floor. Moreover, these were no longer simple footbridges, but big enough to handle carriages and wagons.
A wire suspension bridge was built over the Schuylkill at Philadelphia as early as 1816, or fifteen years after the Reverend James Finley put his historic little chain bridge over Jacobs Creek. But it was the brilliant Scottish engineer Thomas Telford who completed the world’s first great suspension bridge nine years later, in 1825, in Wales. It had two massive masonry towers and was hung on immense iron chains and it crossed the Menai Strait to the island of Anglesey, with a main span of nearly six hundred feet. It was the most famous bridge of its day and the prototype of all the great suspension bridges to came after it, including those by John A. Roebling.
Isambard Kingdom Brunel, the improbable little genius who would one day build the Great Eastern, the most colossal iron ship in history, also began building suspension bridges about this same time, as did the Swiss, the Germans, and the French. The Grand Pont, a suspension bridge built at Fribourg, Switzerland, in the 1830’s, was not only very large for its time (more than eight hundred feet), but it would stand for a hundred years.
But in 1845, when a proposal was made to use a suspension bridge to carry a railroad over the Niagara Gorge, most of the experts declared the scheme quite impossible. Vibrations set up by so heavy a moving load as a train would, it was said, quickly destroy any wire-hung bridge. Still, the idea of a railroad crossing at Niagara made a great deal of sense to the American and Canadian railroad people and they were encouraged by four engineers who not only thought the thing could be done but were anxious for the chance to do it. Of the four, interestingly, three would eventually span the gorge with bridges of their own design—Serrell, Roebling, and Keefer. But as fate would have it, none of them got the first chance.
The man who did was Charles Ellet, who in 1845 was the best-known bridgebuilder in America. He was also the most flamboyant, the most interesting, and Roebling’s one serious rival. Except for Roebling, he knew the most about suspension bridges and could turn on more fancy talk about them than anyone in the profession. Of all the American engineers of his time, Charles Ellet was the most impetuous and colorful, a genuine character of the sort who came and went with the nineteenth century.
Born in 1810, which made him four years younger than Roebling, Ellet had grown up in Pennsylvania, the son of a Quaker farmer. At seventeen he left home, worked on various canal jobs near home, taught himself French, and saved enough money to go to Paris to study at the Ecole Polytechnique. When he returned home after a year, he was the first native American with a European education in engineering. Almost immediately, he presented Congress with a plan for a thousand-foot suspension bridge over the Potomac at Washington and talked grandly of another over the Mississippi at St. Louis. Then he actually built one over the Schuylkill near Philadelphia in 1842, which was several years before Roebling had built anything. (Roebling had applied to build the same bridge himself, and when Ellet was chosen, Roebling wrote to commend him for so bold a plan. Thinking Ellet an older, more experienced man, Roebling applied for a job as his assistant. Ellet’s reply was quite formal and vague, so Roebling wrote again, this time generously including drawings and notes on his own ideas; but nothing more ever came of it.) Five years after that Ellet had begun his greatest work, over the Ohio River at Wheeling, the first really long suspension bridge on earth. With a center span of 1,010 feet, it was only forty-seven feet shorter than Roebling’s own bridge over the Ohio would be and Roebling’s bridge would not be completed for another twenty years.
Ellet looked like an actor, with dark, brooding eyes and a lithe, athletic build. And all of his other talents aside, nobody made a better show of bridgebuilding. At Niagara he had a stage magnificently suited for the most thrilling performance of his career, and the last one, as it happens.
One of the first problems to be faced at Niagara was how to get a wire over the gorge and its violent river. Ellet solved that nicely by offering five dollars to the first American boy to fly a kite over to the Canadian side. The prize was won by young Homer Walsh, who would tell the story for the rest of his days. Once the kite string was across, a succession of heavier cords and ropes was pulled over, and in a short time the first length of wire went on its way. After that, when the initial cable had been completed, Ellet decided to demonstrate his faith in it in a fashion people would not forget. He had an iron basket made up big enough to hold him and attached it to the cable with pulleys. Then stepping inside, on a morning in March 1848, he pulled himself over the gorge and back again, all in no more than fifteen minutes’ time, and to the great excitement of crowds gathered along both rims.
“The wind was high and the weather cold,” he wrote, “but yet the trip was a very interesting one to me—perched up as I was two hundred and forty feet above the Rapids, and viewing from the center of the river one of the sublimest prospects which nature had prepared on this globe of ours.”
Ellet appreciated the historic significance of his feat—he was the first man to cross the gorge—but he was not quite through. Several weeks later, after a plank catwalk had been strung across, he chose to demonstrate its strength in an even more memorable fashion. He leaped into a small carriage, gave his horse a slap of the reins, and went rolling headlong out onto the little bridge, which as yet had no guardrails and which swayed fearfully beneath horse, carriage, and Ellet, who drove standing up, like a charioteer. Everyone watched aghast, women fainted it is said, and Ellet and his bravado became a legend that would last longer at Niagara Falls than anything he built there.
In less than a year he had an angry falling out with the men who were paying for the job. He had finished the catwalk the summer of 1848 and opened it to the public. Very quickly it became a surprisingly lucrative property. Tolls collected came to five thousand dollars before a year had passed and a dispute arose as to whom the money belonged. Feelings between Ellet and his clients got so bad that Ellet drew up cannon at both ends of the bridge, proclaimed it was his, not theirs, and threatened to flatten anybody who came near. There had followed a few tense days at Niagara. Then, inexplicably, Ellet walked away from the greatest opportunity of his career, never to come back, leaving everything he had accomplished swinging uncertainly in the winds of the gorge.
Two years later Roebling commenced his own bridge at the same spot. In temperament and behavior he and Ellet were about as different as two men passionately committed to the same idea could possibly be. Where Ellet talked like a rain maker, Roebling was eloquent but precise, never promising more than he could deliver. Where Ellet was bold, impulsive, dramatic, Roebling was painstaking, methodical, working out every detail in advance. And once he had settled in his mind that he could do a thing, Roebling stuck to it. “Before entering upon any important work, he always demonstrated to the most minute detail its practicability…and when his own judgment was assured, no opposition, sarcasm, or pretended experience could divert him from consummating his designs, and in his own way.”
Roebling started his bridge in 1851 and it took him four years. He worked carefully, steadily, and there were no hair-raising escapades anyone would remember later. For Roebling the excitement of the work, the drama of building a bridge, were chiefly matters of the intellect and spirit. Physical dangers were part of the job, inevitably, but to be taken as they came, or, better still, avoided entirely if a safer way could be figured. The bridge he built was a thorough demonstration of theories he had been perfecting and preaching for a decade and more. “The only real difficulty of the task,” he wrote, “appears to be its novelty.”
Put in its simplest form, Roebling’s fundamental belief about suspension bridges was that the stiffer and heavier the roadway could be made, the more stable the bridge. To many this seemed contrary to common sense, since the weight of the roadway and its superstructure would seem to jeopardize those very elements that made a suspension bridge a suspension bridge—the cables.
Roebling was not the first to recognize the importance of a heavy, stiff roadway, just as he was not the first to use anchor stays or to spin his cables in place, all things he would be credited with initiating and reverently praised for by some of his more ardent admirers. James Finley had used stiffening beams and railings before Roebling was born and he knew the purpose they served. The scowling little Brunel, trudging about his bridges in a stovepipe hat, had directed that tension cables be attached to counteract the action of the wind. The French engineer Seguin wrote in 1824 that rigidity of the bridge floor was the surest means to prevent the “vacillations arising from moving loads of any considerable mass” and said the best way to achieve that rigidity was an arrangement of strong trusses.
There were others, too, including an English engineer named Rendel, who wrote the following before John A. Roebling had built a bridge:
In the anxiety to obtain a light roadway, mathematicians, and even practical engineers, had overlooked the fact that when lightness induced flexibility and consequently motion, the force of the momentum was brought into action and its amount defied calculation. The author has long been convinced of the importance of giving to the roadway of suspension bridges the greatest possible amount of stiffness…
But unlike most every builder of suspension bridges then, and some much later, Roebling not only understood these ideas, he applied them, his system of inclined, or diagonal, stays being an excellent case in point. “I have always insisted that a suspension bridge built without stays is planned without any regard to stiffness, and consequently is defective in a most important point.” And equally important, he did not apply some of the other theories in circulation at the time, many of them very bad theories, that were often taken seriously by the supposed experts. So if he cannot be honestly credited with originating all he preached, he at least was the one engineer who was practicing it properly.
In his original letter of proposal to the railroad men, Roebling had written that his bridge over the Niagara Gorge would stand up under a moving train because he would make it stiff enough to do so. He designed the two floors of the bridge and the open timber trusswork that was to bind them together as one enormous “hollow straight beam.” The timber would be well seasoned, well painted, and the upper floor, where the trains would cross, would be caulked and painted as thoroughly as a ship’s deck, and serve thereby, like the roof of an old-fashioned covered bridge, as a protective shelter for the lower floor and the trusswork.
To make the wire cables sufficiently strong to carry such a structure, as well as the trains, was, he said, “a matter of unerring calculation.” So he had calculated (unerringly, he knew) and he had proceeded to build. Few other engineers gave him any hope of success. The most frequently quoted remark was one made by the great English engineer Robert Stephenson, builder of the famous Britannia railroad bridge, a tubular iron bridge, over the Menai Strait (the trains ran through a succession of enormous iron boxes set on stone piers). Stephenson wrote to Roebling from England: “If your bridge succeeds, then mine have been magnificent blunders.”
Roebling had not a doubt in the world that Stephenson was wrong and said so. As far as he was concerned no Englishman, not even Telford, had ever built a suspension bridge worthy of the name; and to his way of thinking there was only one individual who had, or who really understood the subject, and that of course was John A. Roebling.
Then in May 1854 came the news from Wheeling that Ellet’s Ohio River bridge had gone down. It had lasted just five years. As might be expected, the news created a great stir at Niagara Falls. Roebling especially was anxious to know exactly what had happened.
The details were provided in this vivid account published in the Wheeling Intelligencer:
About 3 o’clock yesterday we walked toward the Suspension Bridge and went upon it, as we have frequently done, enjoying the cool breeze and the undulating motion of the bridge…We had been off the flooring only two minutes, and were on Main Street when we saw persons running toward the river bank; we followed just in time to see the whole structure heaving and dashing with tremendous force.
For a few minutes we watched it with breathless anxiety, lunging like a ship in a storm; at one time it rose to nearly the height of the tower, then fell, and twisted and writhed, and was dashed almost bottom upward. At last there seemed to be a determined twist along the entire span, about one half of the flooring being nearly reversed, and down went the immense structure from its dizzy height to the stream below, with an appalling crash and roar.
For a mechanical solution of the unexpected fall of this stupendous structure, we must await further developments. We witnessed the terrific scene. The great body of the flooring and the suspenders, forming something like a basket swung between the towers, was swayed to and fro like the motion of a pendulum. Each vibration giving it increased momentum, the cables, which sustained the whole structure, were unable to resist a force operating on them in so many different directions, and were literally twisted and wrenched from their fastenings…
From the description Roebling understood perfectly what had gone wrong. In a letter to the railroad officials describing his plans for the Niagara Bridge, Ellet had written “…there are no safer bridges than those on the suspension principle, if built understandingly, and none more dangerous if constructed with an imperfect knowledge of the principles of their equilibrium.” Ellet’s own knowledge had turned out to be imperfect, plainly enough. What Ellet had underestimated, Roebling knew, was the importance of building great rigidity into the bridge floor. A heavy floor would be less likely to move in a high wind, but weight alone was not enough. In fact, it was the weight of Ellet’s bridge that had destroyed it, which Roebling later explained in his final report on the Niagara Bridge.
The Wheeling Bridge “…was destroyed by the momentum acquired by its own dead weight, when swayed up and down by the wind…A high wind, acting upon a suspended floor, devoid of inherent stiffness, will produce a series of undulations…[which] will increase to a certain extent by their own effect, until by a steady blow a momentum of force may be produced, that may prove stronger than the cables. * And although the weight of the floor is a very essential element of resistance to high winds, it should not be left to itself to work its own destruction. Weight should be simply an attending element to a still more important condition, viz: stiffness.”
The best way to achieve such stiffness was with a strong truss, in this case of timber, composed of a combination of triangles. After the Wheeling news reached Niagara, Roebling straightaway reviewed all his plans and decided to build his trusswork stronger still. (To attain the necessary stability for his bridge over the East River, he had designed iron trusses twelve feet high to run the entire length of the suspended floor, from anchorage to anchorage.)
No lives were lost in the Wheeling catastrophe, but it aroused again all the old fears of suspension bridges, fears that would be a very long time dying. Later it would be said that Roebling went to Wheeling to rebuild the bridge properly. That was not what happened, however. Ellet rebuilt the bridge himself, just prior to the Civil War, using inclined stays the way Roebling would have. The bridge still stands.
When the war came, Ellet took command of a fleet of steam rams of his own design, on the Mississippi. Badly wounded at the battle of Memphis, he lingered on in great pain for several weeks, then died in June of 1862.
At Niagara, in June of 1854, Roebling had his cables finished and work had begun on the deck structure. “My bridge is the admiration of everybody,” he wrote; “the directors are delighted. The woodwork goes together in the best manner. The suspenders require scarcely any adjustment at all.” In January, in a letter to Trenton, he said, “We had a tremendous gale for the last 12 hours; my bridge didn’t move a muscle.”
The bridge was completed in March 1855. Its span was nearly twice that of Stephenson’s Britannia Bridge and was able to carry even heavier loading, and yet it had taken only one-sixth as much material in proportion to length. On Friday the 16th the first train rolled over. It was a triumphant moment for Roebling. The train, made up specially for the purpose, was as heavy a freight as could be assembled. The engine weighed twenty-eight tons and it pushed twenty double-loaded cars. As it started over from the Canadian side, it soon covered nearly the whole length of the upper floor. “No vibrations whatever,” Roebling noted. “Less noise and movement than in a common truss bridge.”
A few days later a passenger train made the crossing, going the other way. It was only three cars long, but people were packed into every available bit of space and some were perched on top as well. They went over in “fine style,” Roebling wrote. After that, trains kept crossing at a rate of about one every hour, and to get an idea of the vibrations such traffic might be causing, he climbed to the top of one tower and sat there for some time. It shook less, he said, than his own house at Trenton whenever an express went by. “No one is afraid to cross,” he wrote his family. “The passage of trains is a great sight, worth seeing it.”
For those who stood with him now, the sight must have been no less stirring, even for the engineers—perhaps especially for the engineers. There was, after all, something quite special about a bridge, almost any bridge. Very few were ever outright ugly, and when built right, with everything in harmony, with everything superfluous done away with, with all elements doing exactly what they were supposed to, then a bridge was a thrilling thing to see, with its own kind of graceful majesty, something quite apart from the practicalities of engineering. This was that sort of bridge.
Of course for a nation so recently torn apart by civil war, a bridge was a particularly appealing symbol. But beyond that a bridge seemed such a magnificent example of man’s capacity to master the forces of nature, and that, according to the preponderant wisdom of the day, was what the whole age was about. Building a bridge seemed such a clean, heroic thing for a man to do.
At a dinner given in Roebling’s honor on the last night at Niagara Falls, General Henry Slocum was asked to give a toast, which he did, saying to great applause that he would gladly forfeit his war record for the bridge at Niagara—“to have been the engineer of that bridge.” The general, whose political ambition was very large, sometimes said things he did not quite mean, but his toast would be repeated widely in Brooklyn, and it struck everyone present as a fitting tribute to end the tour on—his impressive war record being the most publicized in Brooklyn. (A general at thirty-three, he had commanded a wing of Sherman’s army on the march through Georgia.) The war was past; the time had come to concentrate on “legitimate enterprise”—that seemed the true spirit of the day. A momentous new Age of Progress was dawning and for most of those who raised their glasses to toast John Roebling, as for most Americans, nothing was taken as such proof of that spirit as the works of engineers—”…the great achievements of the present…the strong, light works of engineers…”
In Egypt the French had nearly finished the Suez Canal. In Europe the Mont Cenis Tunnel, then the longest on earth, was being blasted beneath the Alps. But nowhere was there so much happening as on the continent of North America. The Union Pacific was laying track at a rate of eight miles a day by this time. In Massachusetts a hole was being bored nearly five miles through the solid rock of Hoosac Mountain, just to slice a little time off the railroad run from Boston to Albany. Boston itself was being doubled in size by filling in Back Bay swamp. In New York Cornelius Vanderbilt was erecting a very grand new Grand Central Depot, the train-shed roof of which, an immense vault of glass and iron, would contain the largest interior space in the country. There was a new tunnel under the Chicago River, a first bridge over the Missouri at Kansas City, and at St. Louis a river captain named Eads had begun building a railroad bridge over the Mississippi.
That such outsize, unprecedented efforts frequently involved watered stock, political jobbery, kickbacks for contractors, and not a little human suffering was either not altogether apparent as yet or of minor concern. So much good was going to come out of so comparatively little evil, it was generally felt, that the evil seemed a reasonable price to pay, and probably inevitable in any event. What really counted was that things were being accomplished at last on a scale in keeping with the commonly held vision of the future. Man the killer, man the destroyer, would be man the builder for now—now and here, on the infinite, seemingly inexhaustible landscape of America. It was the time and place to be intensely, boldly constructive.
In less than a month, when a much publicized golden spike would be driven with humorous difficulty at Promontory, Utah, the completion of the transcontinental railroad would be hailed as “one of the victories of peace.” In his way Slocum was saying the same thing. The real glory of American achievement lay ahead, as always. But the true heroes now would be those who made possible such victories of peace—the builders. One of the greatest of them, the architect Louis Sullivan, would later write of his own feelings as a boy at about this same time: “The chief engineers became his heroes; they loomed above other men…he dreamed to be a great engineer. The idea of spanning a void appealed to him as masterful in thought and deed. For he had begun to discern that among men of the past and of his day, there were those that stood forth solitary, each in a world of his own.”