It was the riveters driving the endless red-hot bolts that hold the
bridge together, driving them with hammers that you work with a trigger,
and aim like a fireman's hose, hammers with rubber pipes dragging behind
that feed in compressed air from an engine. Long past are the days when
bolts were driven by brawny arms and the slow swing of a sledge. Now the
workman, leaning his stomach against an iron club, touches a spring,
and, presto! the hard-kicking, pent-up air inside drives the darting
club-head back and forth, back and forth, quick as a snake strikes,
_br-r-r-r-r-ip-ip-ip-ip_, against whatever the steering arms may press
it. Driving rivets nowadays is something like handling a rapid-fire gun.
And how your body aches from the bruise of that recoil!
"We must get nearer to those fellows," said the artist; and presently,
after some mild hazards, we were safely over on the span, quite as near
as was desirable to a gang of riveters dangling twenty feet above us on
a swing. For presently, with a sputter of white sparks, a piece of
red-hot iron struck the girder we were straddling, and then went
bounding down--down--
"Nice, hospitable place, this!" remarked the artist, as we edged under
cover of a wide steel beam.
Crouching here, we watched another gang of riveters on the structure
opposite, where we had a better view, watched the forge-man pass along
the glowing rivets, and the buffer-man slip them through ready holes,
and the hammer-man flatten the flaming ends into smooth, burnished
heads. And presently a riveter in black cap and faded blue jersey
climbed down from the swing overhead, and explained things to us. He did
this out of sheer good nature, I think, although he may have been
curious to know what two men with derby hats and kodaks were doing up
there. We watched his descent in wonder and alarm, for it involved some
lively gymnastics, that he entered upon, however, with complete
indifference. First he swung across from the scaffolding to a girder,
the highest rail of the bridge, and along this walked as coolly as a boy
on a wide fence-top, only this happened to be a fence one hundred and
fifty feet high. Then he bent over and caught one of the slanting side
supports, and down this worked his way as a mountain-climber would work
down a precipice. Presently he stepped off at our level, never having
taken the pipe from his mouth.
[Illustration: WARMING THEIR LUNCHES AT THE BOILER-FIRE.]
[Illustration: A STRANGE WAY TO GO TO MEALS.]
When we asked how he dared go about so carelessly over a reeling abyss,
he said they all did it; they all got used to it, or else got killed.
Why, when the whistle blew we'd see men swinging and sliding and
twisting their way down like a lot of circus performers. That's how they
came to dinner; that's how they got back aloft. No, sir; they couldn't
use life-lines; they moved about too much. Besides, what good would a
life-line be to a man if the "falls" started at him with a ten-ton
load, yes, or a twenty-ton load? That man has got to skip along pretty
lively, sir, or he'll get hurt. Did he mean skip along over this web of
boards and girders? I inquired. He certainly did, and we'd see plenty of
it, if we stayed up long. The artist and I shook our heads as we looked
down that skeleton roadway, gaping open everywhere between girders and
planks, in little gulfs, ten feet wide, five feet wide, two feet wide,
quite wide enough to make the picture of a man skipping over them a very
solemn thing.
Our friend went on to tell us how the riveters often get into tight
places, say on the tower, where there is so little room for the
forge-man to heat his bolts that he has to throw them up to the
hammer-man, twenty or thirty feet.
"What!" exclaimed the artist. "Throw red-hot bolts twenty or thirty feet
up the tower!"
"That's what they do; and we've got boys who are pretty slick at it.
They'll grab a bolt out of the fire with long-handled nippers, and give
her a swing and a twist, and away she goes sizzling through the air
straight at the man above; and say, they don't miss him once in a
hundred times; and, what's more, they never touch a truss or girder. If
they did there'd be a piece of red-hot iron sailing down on the lads
below, and that wouldn't be good for their health."
"How does the hammer-man catch these red-hot bolts?" I asked.
"In a bucket. Catches 'em every time. That's a thing you want to see,
too."
There were so many things we wanted to see in this strange region! And
presently we set forth down the iron street, keeping in mind a parting
caution of the riveter not to look at our feet, but at the way before
us, and never to look down. As we edged ahead cautiously (no skipping
along for us, thanks, but pausing often, and holding fast to whatever
offered support), we saw that all the bridge-men come over the girders,
eyes straight ahead, in a shuffling, flat-footed way, without much bend
in the knees. Look, there comes one of them in from the end of a long
black arm that pushes out like a bowsprit over the gulf! He has been
hanging out there, painting the iron. In the pose of his body he is a
tight-rope walker, in the hitch of his legs he is a convict, in the
blank stare of his face he is a somnambulist. Really he is nothing so
complicated, but an every-day bridge-man earning a hard living; and his
wife would be torn with fears could she see him now.
Presently we came to the busiest scene on the structure, down where the
covered part ended and the iron roadway reached on, bare of framework,
to the tower. Here the "traveler" was working with a double gang of men,
raising a skeleton of sides and cross-beams that were pushing on,
pushing on day by day, and would finally stretch across the river. Once
on the "traveler's" deck, we breathed easier, for here we were safe from
fearsome crevasses, safe on a great wide raft of iron and timber, set on
double railroad tracks, a lumbering steam-giant that goes resounding
along, when the need is, with its weight of four locomotives, its
three-story derricks swinging out great booms at the corners, its
thumping niggerhead engines (two of them) for the hoisting, its
coal-bins, its water-tanks, its coils of rope, its pile of lumber, and
its mascot kitten, curled up there by the ash-box in a workman's coat.
They say the bridge has to wait when that kitten wants her dinner, and
woe to the man who would treat the little thing unkindly!
This "traveler," with its gangs, is a sort of gigantic sewing-machine
that stitches the bridge together; it lifts all the parts into place and
binds them fast, as it were, with basting-threads of temporary iron, to
hold until the riveters arrive for the permanent sewing. Five or six
tons is the weight of ordinary pieces handled by the traveler, but some
pieces weigh twenty tons, and, on a pinch, forty tons could be managed,
the weight of six elephants like Jumbo. Of course, when I say that the
traveler "stitches" these pieces together, I really mean that the
"traveler" gangs do this, for the big brute booms can only lift things
and swing things; the bolt-driving and end-fitting must be done by
little men.
[Illustration: "ITS MASCOT KITTEN, CURLED UP THERE BY THE ASH-BOX."]
When we arrived the "traveler" was bringing to one spot the massive
parts of a cross-section in our arbor-way. It was a stretched-out iron
W, flattened down between girders across top and bottom. This, we
learned, was a "strut," and it weighed sixteen tons, and it would
presently be lifted bodily overhead to span the roadway. We waited a
full hour to see this thing done--to watch another stitch taken in the
bridge; and it seems to me, as I think of it, that I can recall no hour
when I saw so many perils faced with such indifference.
First, the booms would drop down their clanking jaws and grip the
chain-bound girders from little delivery cars, then swing them around to
the lifting-place at the farther end of the traveler. Now we understood
what our friend down the way meant by "skipping along lively when the
falls come at you." He meant this boom-tackle and its load as they sweep
over the structure in blind, merciless force. And, indeed, they did skip
along, the bridge-men, as the traveler turned its arms this way and
that, and several times I saw a man slip as he hurried, and barely save
himself. A single misstep might mean the crush of a ten-ton mass, or a
plunge into space, or both. It seemed a pretty shivery choice.
"One of our boys got hit this morning," said a man.
"Hit by the falls?"
"Yes; he tried to dodge, but his foot caught somehow, and he got it hard
right here." He touched his thigh. "It flattened him out, just over
there where that man's making fast the load."
"Was he badly hurt?"
"Pretty bad, I guess. He couldn't get up, and we lowered him in a
coal-box with a runner; that's a single line. You see, it's very easy to
take a wrong step."
[Illustration: RIDING UP ON AN EIGHTEEN-TON COLUMN.]
Presently somebody yelled something, and this man moved away to his
task; but we were joined almost immediately by another bridge-man, who
told us how they ride the big steel columns from the ground clear to the
cap of the tower. Two men usually ride on a column, their duty being to
keep her from bumping against the structure as she lifts, and then bolt
her fast when she reaches the top. Of course, as a tower grows in
height, these rides become more and more terrifying, so that some of the
men who are equal to anything else draw back from riding up a column.
These fears were justified just at the last on the New York tower, and a
man named Jack McGreggor had an experience that might well have blanched
his hair. They had reached the 325-foot level, and were placing the last
lengths of column but one, and McGreggor was riding up one of these
lengths alone. It was a huge mass twenty-five feet long, square in
section, and large enough to admit a winding ladder inside. It weighed
eighteen tons. As the overhead boom lifted the pendent length (with
McGreggor astride) and swung it clear of the column it was to rest on,
the foreman, watching there like a hawk, wiggled his thumb to the
signal-man on a platform below, who pulled four strokes on the bell,
which meant "boom up" to the engine-man. So up came the boom, and in
came the column, hanging now in true perpendicular, with McGreggor ready
to slide down from his straddling seat for the bolting.
Now the foreman flapped his hand palm down, and the signal-man was just
about to jerk two bells, which means "lower your load," when
rip--smash--tear! Far down below a terrible thing had happened: the
frame of the engine had snapped right over the bearing, and out pulled
the cable drum that was holding the strain of that eighteen-ton column,
and down came the falls. It was just like an elevator breaking loose at
the top of its shaft. The column started to fall; there was nothing to
stop it; and then--and then a miracle was worked; it must have been a
miracle; it is so extraordinary. That falling column struck squarely,
end to end, on the solid column beneath it, rocked a little, righted
itself, and stayed there! Which was more than Jack McGreggor did, for he
came sliding down so fast--he came with a wild, white face--that he all
but knocked the foreman over; and the foreman was white himself. And
what that eighteen-ton column would have done to the bridge, and the
boys on it, had it crashed down those three hundred and twenty-five
feet, is still a subject of awed discussion.
All this time a dozen men have been swarming over the strut, hammering
bolts, tightening nuts, hitching fast the "falls," making sure that all
parts are rigid and everything ready for the lifting. At the front of
the traveler two foremen, "pushers" they are called, yell without
ceasing: "Hey, Gus! Hey! Hey, Jimmie! Put that winch in! Slack away them
falls! What the mischief are you doing? Hey! Hey!" And they shake their
hands and dance on their toes, for all the world like a pair of mad
auctioneers.
The men work faster under this vigorous coaching. Four or five are
stretched flat on their stomachs along the top girder, as many more
cling to steep slanting braces, and some hang fast to the uprights, with
legs twisted around them like Japanese pole-climbers. No matter what his
position, every man plies a tool of some sort--wrench, chisel, or
sledge, and presently all is ready.
Now the niggerheads start with a pounding and sputtering that make the
bridge quiver. The big spools haul fast on the ropes, the falls stiffen,
the booms creak, and with shouts from every one, the strut heaves and
lifts and hangs suspended. The "pushers" yell at the niggerheads to
stop. The men swarm over the load, studying every joint, then wave that
all is well, and come sliding, twisting down just as the engines start
again, all but two men, who sit at the ends and ride along with the
hoist. Meantime the others are racing up the side frames, from slant to
slant to the top of the truss, where they wait eagerly, yelling the
while, at the points on either side, where presently the strut-ends must
be adjusted and then bolted fast.
It seems like some mad school-boy game of romps. Now we'll all swing
over this precipice! Whoop-la! Now we'll all run across this gulf! Wow!
wow! wow! Every man in that scrambling crew is facing two deaths, or
three deaths, and doing hard work besides. Look! There comes the strut
up to its place, and nearly crushes Jimmie Dunn with its sharp edge, as
a strut _did_ crush another lad not so long ago. And see that man hang
out in a noose of a rope, hang out over nothing, and drive in bolts. And
see this fellow kick off on the free pulley-block and come sliding down.
Hoooo! And there are the others jumping at the falls after him, and
coming down with a rush, laughing. Risking their lives? One would say
they never thought of it.
"Why, that's nothing!" said one of them; "we used to slide down the
falls from the top of the tower. But you've got to know the trick or the
ropes'll burn through your trousers. It's a great slide, though."
"Aren't you ever afraid of falling?" I asked a serious-faced young man
who was running one of the niggerheads.
[Illustration: ON THE "TRAVELER." HOISTING A STRUT.]
"I'll tell you how it is," said he; "we're not afraid when a lot of us
do a thing together, but each one might be afraid to do it alone. In
our hearts I guess we're all afraid."
"Ever have an accident yourself?"
"No," he said, "but--" He hesitated, and then explained that he had been
standing near the day "Chick" Chandler fell from the Brooklyn tower. It
hadn't been a nice thing to see, and--
Finally I got the story. Chandler, it seems, was the first man killed on
the bridge, and he died for a jest. He was working that day on the
one-hundred-and-ten-foot level; he was an experienced man and counted
sure of foot. It had begun to sprinkle, and the men were looking about
for their rain-coats, when Chandler, in a spirit of mischief, started
across a girder for an oil-skin that belonged to a comrade. And so
interested was he in this little prank that he forgot prudence, perhaps
forgot where he was, and the next second he was falling, and presently
there was the shock of impact far below, and then a red No. 1 was
branded on the ugly black bridge.
III
WHICH TELLS OF MEN WHO HAVE FALLEN FROM GREAT HEIGHTS
THERE is this to note about falls from bridges, that the very short ones
often kill as surely as the long ones. They told me of one case where a
man fell eight feet and broke his neck, while other men have fallen from
great heights and escaped. A workman of the Berlin Bridge Company, for
instance, fell from a structure in New Hampshire, one hundred and twenty
feet, and lived. And I myself saw Harry Fleager on the East River
Bridge, New York, and from his own lips heard his remarkable experience.
Fleager is to-day a sturdy, active young man, and when I saw him he was
running a thumping niggerhead engine on the end-span. Nevertheless, it
was only a few months since he had fallen ninety-seven feet smash down
to a pile of bricks.
"It happened this way," said he. "One of the big booms broke under its
load just over where I was standing, and the tackle-block swung around
and caught me back of the head. That knocked me off the false work, and
I went straight down to the ground. Just to show you the force of my
fall, sir, I struck a timber about thirty feet before I landed; it was
eight inches wide and four inches thick, and I snapped it off without
hardly slowing up. After that I lay for a week in the hospital with
bruises, but there wasn't a bone broken, and I've been at work ever
since."
Several times while I was seeking permission to go up on the structure I
was treated to stories like this and to mild dissuasion. It was too
dangerous a thing, they said, for a man to undertake lightly. And I did
not succeed until I met the engineer in charge, Charles E. Bedell, a
forceful, quiet-mannered man, who, after some talk, granted my request.
He did not dwell so much on the danger as the others had, although he
did say: "Of course you take all the risks."
"Do you think they are very great?" I asked.
"Not if you use ordinary caution and are not afraid."
Fear was the fatal thing, he said, and he told me of men who simply
cannot endure such heights. Every day or two some new hand would start
down the ladders almost before he had reached the top, and come into the
office saying he couldn't stand the job.
"But you go ahead," said Mr. Bedell; "you'll come through all right.
Just take it easy and be careful." Then he handed me a permit.
[Illustration: Handwritten:
South Kent St & Kent Ave
Permit Mr. Moffett to visit the work at any time
until further notice.
Charles E. Bedell]
We have seen how I fared on the bridge; let me show now what befell this
brilliant young engineer a couple of months later, and observe how his
own case illustrates the paralyzing effect of fear upon a man. For
months he had gone over the structure daily, as sure of himself at those
giddy heights as on the ground. He never took chances, and he never
felt afraid. But one day a workman fell from far above him and was
crushed to death right before his eyes, and this was more of a shock to
him than he realized.
How much of a shock it had been was shown weeks later, when the hour of
peril came. It was a pleasant day in September, and the bridge was
singing its busy song in the morning sunshine. The engineer in charge
had made his round of inspection, and was standing idly on the false
work under the end-span. He was just over the street, and could look
down upon his own office, a hundred feet or so below. Every timber and
girder here was familiar to him. Rumbling along on the trestle track
came the big "traveler," its four booms groaning under their iron loads.
The "traveler" came on slowly, as befits a huge thing weighing one
hundred and fifty tons. The engineer was whittling a stick. The
"traveler" came nearer, with one of its booms swinging toward Bedell,
but lazily. He had plenty of time to step aside. One step to the right,
one step to the left, one step forward was all he need take. Of course,
he would not think of taking a step backward, for there was
destruction--there yawned the gulf. It was inconceivable to the man on
the "traveler" that his chief, who knew all about everything, would take
a step backward.
Still the engineer in charge did not move. The boom swung nearer. Still
he whittled at his stick. His thoughts were far away. The man on the
"traveler" shouted, and Bedell looked up. Now he saw, and the sudden
fear he had never known surged in his heart. He had still time to step
aside, but his mind could not act. The boom was on him. Up went his
right arm to clutch it, and back reeled his body. His right hand missed,
his left hand caught the stringer as he fell, caught its sharp edge and
held there by the fingers--the left-hand fingers--for five, six, seven
seconds or so, legs swinging in the void. Down sprang the man on the
"traveler," and leaped along the ties to his relief, and reached the
spot to find the fingers gone, to see far below on the stones a broken,
huddled heap that lay still. So died the man who had been kind to me (as
they say he was kind to every one), and who had warned me to "take it
easy and be careful."
Despite the constant peril of their days, the nights of bridge-builders
are often spent in gaiety. The habit of excitement holds them even in
their leisure, and many a sturdy riveter has danced away the small hours
and been on his swing at the tower-top betimes the next morning. They
are whole-souled, frank-spoken young fellows (there are few old
bridge-men), and to spend an evening at their club, on West
Thirty-second Street, is a thing worth doing.
On the street floor is a cafe, not to say saloon, where the walls are
hung with churches and bridges and towering structures, monuments to the
skill of the builders who have passed this way. And if you will join a
group at one of these tables and speak them fair you may hear enough
tales of the lads who work aloft for many a writing. And up and down the
stairs move lines of bridge-men, all restless, one would say, and some
pass on crutches and some with arms in slings (there is a story in every
cripple), and you hear that New York has half a dozen one-legged
bridge-men still fairly active in service. It's once a bridge-man always
a bridge-man, for the life has its fascination, like the circus.
As I sat in a corner one evening with Zimmer and Jimmie Dunn and some of
the others, there came down from overhead a racket that almost drowned
our buzz of talk and the frequent ting of the bar register. The
bridge-men were in vigorous debate over the question whether or not the
interests of the craft call for more flooring on dangerous structures.
Some said "yes," some "no," and said it with vehemence. More flooring
meant less danger. That was all right, but less danger meant more
competition and less pay. So there you are, and the majority favored
danger with a generous wage.
"What kind of men make bridge-men?" I inquired.
"All kinds," said one of the group who was drinking birch-beer, "Some
come out of machine-shops, some out of locomotive works, I was a
'shanty-jack.'"
"Lots of 'em come from farms," added another. "I know one fellow tried
it who'd been a tailor. Said he changed for his health."
This struck the company as highly amusing.
"There's lots of 'em try it and quit," remarked Jimmie Dunn, who is one
of the oldest and also one of the youngest men in the guild. I had seen
him nearly killed a few days before by the sudden up-swing of a
sixteen-ton strut. "I knew a telegraph-pole climber who said he didn't
mind any old kind of a tower; he'd go up it all right and work there.
Well, he got all he wanted the first morning. Came down white as that
paper. Said he wouldn't stay up half an hour longer if they'd give him
the whole blamed bridge. Why, it gets _us_ fellows dizzy once in a
while."
"I'll bet it does," agreed the shanty-jack man. "I saw an old hand once
start to ride up a barrel of water one hundred and seventy feet on a
bridge over the St. Lawrence. The barrel was swung on a 'single runner,'
and you ought to have seen it spin with his weight tipping it lopsided!
Ain't any bridge-man going could have kept his head there. 'Twas a fool
thing to do, and the only way this fellow got up alive was by dropping
plumb into the barrel of water and shutting his eyes."
"Talking about close calls," spoke up Zimmer, "I can beat that. It was
out in Illinois. We were riveting on a high building, where the roof
came up in a steep slant from each side to a ridge at the top. There
were about twenty of us on this roof, and the way we'd work was in
pairs, one man on one side and his partner on the other side, with a
rope between 'em, reaching over the ridge, and the two men hung at the
two ends, each one balancing the other, like two buckets down a well. We
had to get up some scheme like that, or we couldn't have stuck on the
roof; it was too steep.