THE BROOKLYN BRIDGE
Early in the fifties, when the Niagara accomplishment was more or less
the talk of two continents and communication under seas by cable had
helped to emphasize the possibilities of wire, John A. Roebling,
protagonist of the wire bridge idea, advanced a proposal to connect New
York and Long Island by a suspension bridge and release the people of
Brooklyn from a segregation which they had made a somewhat futile
pretense of enjoying. Habit dies hard. The crust of custom becomes
strangely indurated with long exposure, and Brooklyn residents had
fought the East River in profitable, if archaic, ferryboats too long to
be lured lightly into any liaison with iconoclastic Manhattan by way of
a wire bridge.
Roebling waited another decade, but he hustled while he waited. The
Brooklynites continued to make their uncertain ways across the river in
times of storm and tide and ice as the Lord gave them strength, and the
sacred ferryboats still paid dividends. The vicious winter of 1866-7,
coldest, bitterest, longest the cities have ever known, wrung forth at
last a cry for relief. They could wrap themselves up against the
weather, but no weight of woolens could turn the shafts of ridicule. It
was grand ammunition for the advocates of the bridge, when people
traveling by train from Albany actually reached New York sooner than
did the man who did business in New York, and left his domicilium in
Brooklyn at the same hour.
And besides, the Roebling cap had another feather in it now, in the
completion of the Ohio Bridge. He was building wire bridges everywhere,
and it began to look as though there was some body of truth in the
Western contention that New York was the most provincial city in
America, for all its self-approval.
At one of the many hearings that were held on the bridge question a
famous engineer who favored the wire type was asked what reason he had
for believing it would do the work.
"I believe it," he replied, "because Roebling says so."
[Sidenote: THE INITIAL CHARTER GRANTED]
The demand for the bridge rose to a clamor. In the month of May, 1867,
the initial charter was granted, and Mr. Roebling was appointed
engineer. Three months afterward he submitted his report and estimates,
which were examined and approved by a commission of engineers from the
United States War Department. Then he set about preparation for the
task.
[Sidenote: THE DEATH OF JOHN A. ROEBLING]
It was while fixing the location for the Brooklyn tower that he met
with the accident that caused his death. But his work had been well
done, and his son and associate, Col. Washington A. Roebling, took up
without delay the execution of the plan he had helped to create.
If the older Roebling encountered obstacles in bringing his great idea
to the point of acceptance, the pathway of his successor, called
without warning to take over responsibility for the greatest
engineering labor of the age, was not strewn with roses.
[Sidenote: THE WORK OF CONSTRUCTION BEGINS]
[Illustration: WIRE ROPE IN THE QUARRY]
It was in the summer of 1869 that John A. Roebling died. The second day
of January, 1870, saw the actual work of construction begun, when
laborers started to clear away to prepare for the foundations of the
Brooklyn tower. From that day forward, through a baker's dozen of
years, there was no rest, though there was plenty of interruption.
Until the job was ended Washington A. Roebling simply lived the
Brooklyn Bridge. It was a colossal job, punctuated with changes and
problems and complications, but it went forward. The landmarks of a
bygone age, old houses of historic memory on the water fronts of both
cities, vanished silently and where they had been, by and by there grew
piles of masonry to form the approaches. From the huge caissons over
against either shore rose the towers, tall and grim, which were to
carry the cables. In due time they stood complete, with their broad
bases welded to the rock by an ingenious bond of stone and concrete in
the river's bed, and their crests nearly three hundred feet above the
top of the tide. A hundred and nineteen feet--and three inches, to be
precise--above the water opened the two tall arches in each tower,
stretching upward one hundred and seventeen feet in air. It was through
these the bridge proper was to pass, with its gangways for horse and
foot and railway traffic.
[Sidenote: COULD THOSE SLENDER TOWERS CARRY THE GREAT LOAD?]
The hurrying people of New York and Brooklyn watched the thing grow and
wondered fearfully whether the slender towers would stand the strain.
In Harper's Magazine for May, 1883, now itself yellowed by age, is an
exhaustive article concerning the Brooklyn Bridge, in which one is told
at length and with an engineer's exactness, the steps by which the
achievement was brought, after thirteen laborious years, to proud
completion.
Even to the curious layman the details are no longer of insistent
interest. One thing is emphasized, however, which well as we know it
now can never cease to hold the mind in a certain wonder--that all the
weight and solidity and massiveness are in the towers, the foundations
and the long expanses of stone work, which stretching inland nearly a
thousand feet, serve to guard and strengthen the anchorage for the
cables which are the working force. The rest is wire, for the most
part; wire, slender by contrast and against the background of the sky,
but endowed with great strength by care and skill in fabrication. John
A. Roebling and his son had staked their name and their future on the
strength and quality of Roebling wire.
In that long ago story of the Brooklyn Bridge, there is written the
lesson that clear thinking and courage and perseverance can accomplish
the seemingly impossible. What traveler over those high-hung roadways
ever stops to ask himself how those great round cables, stretched in
long, inverted arches above the surge of the river traffic, were ever
put in place? They are today simply a part of the stage setting of a
busy life, like the river itself.
[Sidenote: HOW THE GREAT CABLES WERE MADE]
Each of these cables consists of nineteen strands of about two hundred
and seventy-eight No. 8 B. W. G. wires each, and each wire is
continuous in its strand, like the yarns in a skein, traveling
eternally to Brooklyn and back, up over the top of one tower, down in a
long curve above the tideway, up to the other tower and down again, to
be gripped and carried by links, like a chain, down to the everlasting
clutch of the rock and concrete-bound anchorage. Each skein is a
million feet long--nearly two hundred miles--and still men talk of
"Oriental patience."
There is no twist in these ponderous cables, as there is in a wire
rope. Every reach of wire lies flat and separate, and when all were in
place they were laboriously bound together, first the strands, then
when all the strands were up, the whole fabric, into cylindrical form.
There are other strange things about these cables; one is that they
make practically no strain on the towers save to sustain their weight.
Another is that the long storm cables that radiate downward from the
top of the towers to the bridge floor, for a space of four hundred feet
inside and outside each tower, are themselves calculated to sustain, if
need be, the imposed weight for that distance. So that the margin of
safety in this seeming web-like structure is far in excess of what
timid imaginations have pictured. That was a cardinal feature in all
John A. Roebling's plans. He left a safety margin many times greater
than the load. It has been an open secret for years that the Brooklyn
Bridge has been unwisely taxed, but he knew it would be.
[Sidenote: STRINGING THE CABLES ACROSS THE EAST RIVER]
Before the cables were in place, New York and Brooklyn stared up at the
river-wide space between the bare towers and wondered by what wizardry
a bridge could ever be swung across it. The beginning was simple--as
simple and prosaic in a way as the hitching of a horse--in principle.
It began with wire rope. A scow with a coil of three-quarter inch rope
was moored alongside the Brooklyn tower, and the end of the coil was
hoisted up the face of the masonwork, passed down on the land side and
then carried back.
[Illustration: HELPING TO RELIEVE THE FREIGHT CAR SHORTAGE BY QUICK
LOADING]
Next, suspending the river traffic for the necessary time, the scow was
towed across the river, paying out as she went, and the rope carried
over the New York tower, then wound on a huge drum till it hung high
above the river and clear of the tallest topgallant. A second rope was
run in the same manner and the two were joined around huge driving
wheels or pulleys at each end. An endless belt or "traveler," revolving
by steam power, now stretched from city to city, and on a day in
August, that lives yet in the memory of every man who was there, E. F.
Farrington, the master mechanic of the project, who was a veteran of
Niagara and the Ohio Bridge, set out to show the workmen, who on this
slender aerial were to begin the long labor of hanging the cable, that
it was easy if you only thought so. In a "bosun's chair" he shot out
from the top of the Brooklyn tower, down the long sag in the traveler
and up to the New York side, while a million people craned their necks
from the streets and docks and housetops and boats along the river, and
swallowed hard at their hearts.
The bands played, the cannon tore the air, the multitudes yelled
themselves hoarse, the steam whistles of the harbor shrieked to the sky
the tidings that, though nobody then understood it, "Greater New York"
was on the way.
* * * * *
This was six years and a half from the time when Washington A. Roebling
had begun the work of construction. Seven other years followed, years
full of troubled effort, of planning and replanning and replanning, of
battling with the twin devils of Contraction and Expansion. The
tensions all had to be secured in absolutely uniform weather. A
determination made when the sun was shining on one part of the bridge
and not on another might have thrown the whole calculation awry. Sun
and wind played pranks with the work in the summer and in the winter
snow and ice coated the wires and running gear so that work was often
impossible. Deflection varied a third of an inch for every degree of
temperature.
"In short," says the writer of that time, "the ponderous thing, while
neither small nor agile, has a trick in common with the minute and
lively insect which when you put your finger on him isn't there."
[Sidenote: THE FABRIC GROWS TOWARD COMPLETION]
But in due time the great cables were in place, and bound. Then the
suspender bands were set, from which suspender cables hung to hold the
frame of the roadway. And so the fabric grew toward completion, hung
practically in two sections, which all the world nowadays doesn't know,
with an expansion joint connecting them in the middle to absorb the
expansion and contraction of the metal. Even the rails at this section
are split in half lengthwise, to permit them to slide back and forth
with the changes in temperature.
There were accidents and drawbacks and political complications, as
there are always bound to be in public works; there were believer and
unbeliever, booster and knocker, as now, but the work went on to its
completion and in 1883 the day of realization came. Wire was king.
Doubters and malcontents murmured for a time, but little by little
subsided. The opening of the bridge was one of those memorable days of
which New York has had so many in her brief history, a day when
President and Governor and many lesser dignitaries, who have now passed
from the stage, strutted their little hour to hail the passing of a
milestone, and there were "fireworks in the evening."
[Sidenote: THE BEGINNING OF A NEW ERA]
A new era had now definitely begun. There was a recognized agent in the
world strong enough, with engineering guidance, to shoulder its most
staggering burdens, and the name of Roebling began to weave itself in
letters of wire through the whole web of modern industry. Thirty-seven
years have come and gone since the Brooklyn Bridge was finished and
thrown open to the swarming people. Even when they saw they wouldn't
believe it; many of them mounted to its span with their hearts in their
mouths. There had been a world of carping and prophecy of disaster. A
public that clutched at novelty as an addict does for stimulant could
not assimilate the idea that there could be safety in wire where such
enormous weight was laid upon it. Its frailty of appearance fooled
them. For years after the Bridge had taken up its load and was carrying
without protest or misbehavior the traffic of two cities, there came
periodical alarms regarding the discovery of strange faults in
construction, or disintegration of the wires caused by vibration. It
was the one dependable theme for the alarmist and sensational writer.
But the proof was in the using. The slender span has stood the test of
time and tide and wind and wear, and stood them all so well that it has
fixed for a century at least the type of the super-bridge.
[Sidenote: TWO MORE BRIDGES TO BROOKLYN]
Wire bridges have become a familiar thing in the lives of cities. Two
more have come to give the crowding population of New York freeway over
the East River, as the city's life has spread northward. For the
Williamsburg the Roebling firm furnished the wire and installed the
cables. In the Manhattan Bridge it had no part save the making of the
wire, not a trivial task, since in the cables alone there are
12,000,000 pounds.
These bridges are bigger than the Brooklyn Bridge with which the
troublesome river was first overcome, but it will be many a day before
the glamour that surrounded the earlier creation will have worn away,
or people the world over cease to speak of it with wonder and a certain
measure of awe. Anybody, perhaps, can build a wire bridge now; perhaps,
too, somebody some day can build one with more of simple grace and
slender beauty, but it is certain nobody ever has.