The Great Bridge (25 page)

The first civil engineer to work with compressed air of any substantial magnitude, however, was a Frenchman named Triger, who in 1839, or thirty years before Eads and Roebling built their caissons, used compressed air inside an iron tube to hold back water while sinking a mine shaft through quicksand. The technique had worked quite successfully, but before the job was completed, Triger observed a number of unexplainable reactions among his men and put down in his notes what are thought to be the earliest recorded cases of caisson disease, or “the bends.” Two of his men, Triger wrote, had been hit quite mysteriously by sudden sharp pains in the arms and knees about half an hour after coming out into the open air.

Later in France there would be more serious cases. Men would be seized at home, long after coming out of compression. Sometimes the pain was accompanied by chills and vomiting. Other symptoms were recorded: a great dullness of mind, an incoherence of speech or stammering, nosebleeds, a distressing itching of the skin, tottering gait, an increased flow of urine, even pain in the teeth. One supposedly scientific study noted that Hungarians and French suffered least, while Italians, Germans, and Slavonians were said to have had by far the worst time. It was also known for a fact that one or two men had died of the experience.

The first signs among Eads’s men had been occasional muscular paralysis in the legs. But there was no pain connected with it, the men said, and the sensation passed off in a day or so. But as the caisson went deeper more and more of them began having trouble. In some cases now the arms were affected, as well as the bowels and sphincter muscles. Men complained of severely painful joints and sudden, excruciating stomach cramps. Still, nine out of ten of those affected felt no pain whatever, they said, and so long as the phenomenon remained painless, it would not be taken very seriously. Indeed, according to one account, “A workman walking about with difficult step and a slight stoop was at first regarded as a fit object for jokes, and cases of paralysis and cramp soon became known popularly by the name of ‘Grecian Bend.’”

To ward off trouble the men rubbed themselves with an “Abolition Oil” that was said to work like a charm. Some of them began wearing bands of zinc and silver about their wrists, arms, and ankles, and such were the claims of success that Eads decided to thus outfit every man on the force at the company’s expense, only now the protective armor, as the men called it, was worn about the waist as well, and even under the soles of the feet. Still instances of the unaccountable malady continued to increase.

When one of his foremen got sick, Eads decided to shorten the shifts inside the caisson. The men would stay down for four hours only, then rest for eight hours before going back for another four. The caisson was at forty-two feet by then. By February 5, when it was at sixty-five feet, Eads again altered the schedule, to three two-hour shifts, with rests of two hours in between, none of which was very popular with the men, since with every change of the shift they had to make a long climb out of the caisson, up a spiral stairway. For those who felt no adverse reaction from the compressed air, the new routine was just one more big inconvenience, while for those who did, the climb was only added torture. As the official history of the bridge states dryly, “The fatigue of ascent added not a little to the distress and prostration of those affected with cramp.” At seventy feet, on February 15, with the air pressure in the chamber at thirty-two pounds per square inch, or more than double that of normal atmospheric pressure, one man was in such pain that he was sent to the hospital.

Severe cases grew a lot more common after that. One man became unconscious and did not speak for three hours. Nobody considered the thing a joke any longer. But even so, as Eads would tell visitors, many of his men, the majority in fact, had been affected in no way at all. He had taken hundreds of visitors down into the caisson, even “delicate ladies,” he said, without any of them experiencing ill effects. There was no doctor who could explain it satisfactorily for him. Some doctors said a slower transition from the abnormal to natural pressure would prove less injurious; others claimed the contrary, that the trouble came from passing too rapidly from natural into compressed air. But Eads argued that neither could be correct since none of his air-lock attendants had been hit. It was the amount of time spent under compression that caused the trouble, he maintained, plus the general physical condition of the individual.

He pointed out that most of the men who had been struck down were new hands, unaccustomed to the work, that they had been thinly clothed and poorly fed to begin with, or, in some cases, alcoholic. So as the caisson continued its descent, Eads ordered that only men in prime physical shape be hired for the work.

Then on Saturday, March 19, which happened to be the same morning the Brooklyn caisson was launched, Eads reported the first death. The man’s name was James Riley. He had worked the first shift, just two hours in the chamber, came up feeling fine so far as anyone knew, then fifteen minutes later gasped for breath and fell over on his face. He was the first American to die of the mysterious disease. But at least fifteen more would die at St. Louis before Eads finished his bridge, and more would be crippled for life.

About three thousand people turned out to watch the launching of the Brooklyn caisson. The Kings County Democrats, to no one’s surprise, took the opportunity to make it a day of speeches and band music. People had trouble thinking of a suitable way to describe the main attraction, but most eventually concurred that it looked “more like a huge war leviathan or battery for harbor defense than any other thing.” And as the
Eagle
observed, a very large number of them had turned out chiefly because they doubted it could ever be launched.

The top, or deck, of the caisson was strewed with tackle and various odd-looking pieces of machinery. A number of lines were connected to a steamboat standing by in case of trouble going down the ways, and at the rear of each way, heavy wooden rams had been rigged, to be worked simultaneously, to get the huge structure started. Inside, a temporary airtight compartment had been built on the forward wall to buoy up that side as it hit the water, and a full complement of crabs, winches, and 150 wheelbarrows had been stowed away, battened down with strips of wood.

The launch took place at ten thirty and was in every respect a great success. As soon as the last block was split out, the giant mass began to move. It went down straight and even, with no need of assistance. It struck the river with just enough speed to overcome the resistance of the water and the air chamber worked to perfection, keeping the front side from sinking. The deck never even got wet.

A great roar went up from the crowd. An air pump on the deck was at once set in motion and in a few hours the water was all out of the work chambers, thus proving to Roebling’s satisfaction that the thing was airtight. Later on the air inside was allowed to escape and the top of the caisson settled to within seventeen inches of the water, which, Roebling noted with pleasure, happened to agree exactly with his previous calculations.

But the difficult work of dredging the site for the caisson was running far behind schedule. It would be another month before everything was ready there and nothing much could be done to speed things up. So apparently Roebling decided this would be an excellent time for him to go to St. Louis and see how Eads was progressing. The Bridge Company agreed and funds were provided for Horatio Allen to go along too.

Eads had a regular routine for handling visitors and it appears that Roebling and Allen received the same treatment when they arrived in St. Louis in early April. Eads would go over the plans first, explaining things, then set out in a tender to the spot mid-river where a flotilla of barges and derricks hovered over his submerged caisson. The functions of the various workboats would be described, after which Eads would lead his guests down the narrow spiral stairway, through the air lock, and into the caisson proper.

Roebling, as he would write later, had the highest admiration and respect for Eads and “his remarkable inventive talent.” Roebling also said later that Eads was extremely courteous to him during his two days in St. Louis and one man who was on hand at the time, a friend of Eads’s, said Eads took special pains to explain each and every detail to the younger engineer. So if there was any friction between them at this point in the story, there is no evidence of it.

Roebling appears to have returned to Brooklyn confident he was proceeding along the best possible course, and although he must have heard a great deal about the caisson sickness in St. Louis, most of those he talked to, including Eads, were convinced that whether a man got hit or not was largely a matter of luck and to judge from things he said later Roebling had arrived at about the same conclusion. Certainly Eads then knew no more than Roebling did about how to prevent the trouble, or how to cure it, as must have been obvious to both of them. Men were still suffering, more of them were dying.

Eads would keep plunging ahead with his work, sure that solutions could be improvised somehow should the problem grow still worse. In his place Roebling probably would have done the same. The great tragedy was that both of them were almost totally ignorant of what others had already learned about the effects of compressed air. They were both unaware, for example, that the surest, fastest remedy for caisson sickness was already known.

Possibly things might have gone differently for each of them had they compared notes as time went on, or had they been in touch with the few others there were working on similar problems. But they were living in an age when communication among professional colleagues was, by later standards, frequently at the most superficial level. Engineering then, like nearly every other line of work, was intensely competitive. An organization such as the American Society of Civil Engineers was striving with some success to encourage an open exchange of professional information and there were several reputable journals publishing valuable technical material. Still there was as yet no strong tradition along these lines and in some quarters not even an inclination. The railroads, the biggest clients for engineering talent, as well as the training ground for a very large number of engineers, were not the sort of institutions to foster an open exchange of valuable ideas. Minding one’s own business was considered among the basic rules of business. There were trade secrets in other words, and the sharp rivalry men had to live with frequently gave rise to the worst kinds of professional jealousies and animosity. Roebling’s own father, for example, had once written to Charles Swan to warn him not to hire a certain man simply because he had once worked for Ellet. “I do not want any news carried between myself and Mr. Ellet,” John Roebling had said.

There were exceptions, to be sure, but even then, often as not, it was because the party sharing his special knowledge stood to gain financially thereby. Carnegie had so agreeably granted Eads the benefit of Linville’s experience only when a large contract for the Keystone Bridge Company was involved. Eads’s own first instructions on caissons had been given by the French bridgebuilder Moreaux largely because Moreaux happened to be chief engineer for a leading French ironworks that, like the Keystone company, wanted to do the superstructure for Eads’s bridge.

Perhaps, after Roebling returned to Brooklyn, he and Eads simply felt they had little more to say to each other, or little to gain by saying more than they already had. Or possibly for all their courtesies, things did indeed go sour at the start, simply on personal grounds. Eads, after all, was an exceedingly proud person who knew most all the answers always and was forever on his guard with anyone who might try to prove otherwise. He viewed his bridge, and none other, as the single most important engineering event of the century. Roebling almost certainly felt the same about the bridge he was about to build but, unlike his father, never once would he say so. Quite possibly Eads considered Roebling a threat and he was not about to stand in the shadow of any man. Maybe he simply saw Roebling as a nuisance.

It is also understandable that a man who had achieved so much on his own, against all odds and despite the doubters, might be reluctant to go out of his way to help a young man who appeared to have been handed quite enough already, and who so far had done little to prove himself particularly worthy of all that. Furthermore, Eads at best was a difficult person.
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But on top of everything else there was the prevailing belief of the time that a stiff spirit of independence was in itself a very good thing. And both Eads and Roebling were exactly the sort of men others would have pointed to as shining examples.

So they would each go their own way, alone, set apart by half a continent and, in time, open hostility.

On May 3, in the early afternoon, the Brooklyn caisson made its maiden voyage, which, of course, was also its final voyage—four miles down the East River to the site beside the Fulton Ferry slip. The chambers were again fully inflated, the air pumps were kept running, and the gigantic box was now riding with its deck a full nine feet above the water. (This inflation was essential, since in one part of the river there would be only a foot of space between the river bottom and the lower edge of the caisson.) Half a dozen tugboats took it in tow and proceeded out into the current at about quarter to two, “creating a great sensation among all whose good fortune led them to view one of the wonders of the nineteenth century,” which was so soon to be “hidden from the gaze of mortal eyes.”

Roebling, Kingsley, Horatio Allen, Bell of Webb & Bell, and three or four others went along for the ride, standing forward on the long, flat deck. And any doubts Eads may have planted about the caisson staying afloat were quickly forgotten. In the words of one witness, it came down the river “as placidly as a swan upon the bosom of an inland lake.”