Insight into construction of Brooklyn Bridge
The story of the iconic feat of human engineering after his father who conceived the idea of Brooklyn Bridge died. In 1883, when the building of the Brooklyn Bridge was one of the great feats of the 19th century civil engineering, a bridge that has stood for over 130 years and is now as much part of symbolising New York City’s landmark, as the Statue of Liberty or the Empire State Building, an epic work of stone and steel spanning 1600 ft across the East River.
Erica, born in Manhattan, in her teens, walked across the bridge one Christmas and had a sudden realisation of poetry, with its miles of quivering steel wire hanging improbably from two massive granite towers. Soon the bridge became an obsession for Erica, even after she relocated to the UK to become the literary editor at the Times.
This bridge was the product of a remarkable partnership between father-son. Washington Roebling was the man who supervised the physical construction of the bridge, but his father John Augustus Roebling, an immigrant from Germany, migrated to Pennsylvania in 1831 to become a farmer and came up the genius idea in the first place, and capitalised an opportunity to apply the principles of rope-making to wire rope, took out a patent, and build a major enterprise from Trenton, New Jersey. Later he transformed himself from wire making to building bridges like Niagara Falls in Cincinnati.
He marshalled his son Washington and six other children ferociously. Washington, however, was delighted to exchange the rigours of family life for the battlefield, as soon after graduating he enlisted in the Union army when American civil war broke out, and fought battles of Antietam to Gettysburg where he had a narrow escape as bullets hit his hat and horse but left him unscathed.
He was promoted from Private to Colonel, as his wartime service included hot air balloon as a battlefield spotter, as well as building bridges.
Though John had thought the idea of building the Brooklyn Bridge before the war, only now he could raise the funds and political support to progress the project as Erica Wagner puts it “ symbol of nineteenth-century ideas of progress”.
At the age of 32, Roebling first built the stone towers using pneumatic caissons, massive hollow structures, 170 ft wide and over 100 ft long. With the help compressed air pumped to keep the river out and men would climb and dig the foundations and them erected thousands of miles of wire that binds the bridge together and it took 14 years before the bridge was opened to the amazement of millions.
The Chief Engineer sheds new and intimate details on the man, bridge and the age.
Chief Engineer: Washington Roebling, The Man Who Built the Brooklyn Bridge by Erica Wagner, Bloomsbury £25 /$28 384 pages.