The Great Bridge (54 page)

In October a well-to-do New Yorker named Henry Beers, a spokesman for the so-called Council of Political Reform, announced that he was joining the cause to have the bridge stopped. It was nothing but a flagrant waste of public money, he contended, and a serious hazard to navigation, which was the same claim being made by a warehouse owner named Abraham Miller, who had decided to sue the Bridge Company. English law, said Beers, who was assisting Miller, always held rivers and oceans sacred to seamen.

But the old buildings kept coming down inland from the New York anchorage as the path for the approach pressed toward City Hall Park. And out over the river the carrier wheels, glistening in the sunshine, kept spinning along, faster than ever. Never had he seen such weather for bridgebuilding, C. C. Martin said. By November, twenty-two strands were in place. On the cradles, little sentry boxes had been built where the men could get out of the cold while waiting for the carriers to come by. In the sheds over the saddles, wood stoves had been installed and the men were wearing heavy mittens and shoes of buffalo hide.

On Thanksgiving Day one of the wires snapped. It was considered a small matter. Nobody was injured and the newspapers heard nothing of it, but Paine decided to send a section of the wire over to Roebling for him to take a look. “It is as brittle as glass,” Roebling wrote back to Paine. “…The first question arises is how much of this same brittle wire has been going into the cable without our knowledge and secondly what steps must be taken to prevent its reoccurrence. Is it due to a wrong system of inspection or what is the reason in your opinion?”

Roebling also broke off several pieces of the wire and put them in with a letter to Henry Murphy.

“This is what Mr. Kinsella is pleased to call the best,” he wrote angrily. “In reality it is worthless…and the most dangerous material that could be employed. How much of this poor wire has been going into the cables I do not know. Can I be held responsible for that? It is scarcely right that the engineers should have to be acting as detectives. I see but one way of preventing such wire being run out and that is to double the number of inspectors at the contractor’s works.”

If Murphy read Roebling’s letter to the members of the Executive Committee at their next meeting, or to the trustees, there is no mention of it in the official records.

Kinsella and Roebling were running head on once more.

Bessemer steel had become a bone of contention again, exasperating the engineers no end. No issue it seemed ever stayed resolved for very long. This time the argument was over the suspenders, the wire ropes that would hang down from the cables to the roadway. Roebling had decided that Bessemer wire would do perfectly well and that was what he specified, but at the last minute, at Murphy’s urging, he had had the word “Bessemer” scratched out of the printed specifications. Again “steel wire” was all that was called for. Kinsella had been furious, exclaiming in the editorial columns of the
Eagle
that cost was no factor here, that no chain was stronger than its weakest link, etc., etc. The engineers had no business deciding such matters alone, he said. And when John A. Roebling’s Sons, the lowest bidder for the suspenders, was awarded the contract, Kinsella wrote that it was solely because Washington Roebling wanted it that way and that the contract should have gone to a Brooklyn firm (unnamed).

Henry Murphy was quoted as saying that Roebling had nearly died when the earlier contract was awarded to Haigh and that he, Murphy, had no wish to see that happen again. “All of which is bosh,” responded the Brooklyn
Union and Argus.
“We have as much sympathy for Mr. Roebling as other people…But, we submit, that this work is entirely superior to any man or all of the men concerned in its construction, and it cannot, nor any part of it, be subordinated to the whims, fancies, or caprices of a sick man.”

The paper refused to let the matter drop, writing scornfully of Roebling’s power and of the stupidity of the “stupendous enterprise being wholly committed to a single brain, which is extremely liable at any moment to be stilled forever.”

The sick man, meanwhile, had had a powerful telescope mounted at his window and trained on the bridge. As for the things being said about him in the papers, he had no comment. He would not see reporters.

Late one Saturday afternoon, shortly before Christmas, there was a bad accident behind the Brooklyn anchorage. Masons were finishing up a series of arches, set on big, square brick piers, that would support the roadway of the approach inland from the anchorage. The foreman noticed a great crack in one arch, about twenty-five feet above the street, and immediately ordered the men down off the work. But one man standing below never heard the warning and when the arch gave way he was buried.

The men started digging frantically through the rubble and in about ten minutes they found him, so badly crushed that he would have been difficult to identify had they not known who it was. The body was covered with a sheet of canvas and carried to a tool house. A big crowd had gathered around by then. The area was one of seeming chaos even under normal conditions, with heaps of brick and stone all about, swinging derricks, and their countless ropes, cement machines, scaffolds, great half-dug pits, and sixty or seventy men busy at one task or another. But now things were out of hand. Somebody began saying the other arches were coming down. There was a panic and the crowd went surging in every different direction and nobody seemed to know what was happening. Then somebody was saying something about one more man trapped under the debris. So half a dozen volunteers started digging again and the crowd rushed back to watch, fully expecting to see the rescue workers buried next.

By this time, too, the news had spread over to Fulton Street that a lot of men had been killed and a crowd coming from that direction was so big that the police had trouble holding them back.

No more arches fell and no other bodies were found, but an investigation was immediately called for and there was great public sympathy for the victim and his family. He was Neil Mullen, a Brooklyn man and a widower with six children.

A coroner’s inquest established that the centering, the temporary wooden supports used under the arches, had been removed before the mortar had set properly. The Brooklyn approach was McNulty’s domain and McNulty, who testified at the inquest, looked to be pretty much at fault. Roebling was infuriated by the whole affair. It was exactly the sort of thing he might have prevented had he been on the job. “The brick arch fell because it had a right to fall,” he wrote bitterly to Henry Murphy, who felt, understandably enough, that he ought to have an explanation on hand from the Chief Engineer. “Every arch, be it round or flat, must fall if its thrust is not met by an adequate lateral support,” Roebling lectured. “…The real accident was not so much that this arch fell, as that the other one stood.”

McNulty had told Roebling he did not know why he had removed the centering. “Ambitious natures are apt to be overconfident and to shrink from asking counsel of more experienced persons for fear their infallibility might be impugned,” Roebling wrote Murphy. “Time and age cures all this.” But then he added that the real explanation might be simply that McNulty was overworked.

Roebling could appreciate the problem. He himself was doing more now than he had since the long, difficult winter before the Centennial. For a great many people it might have appeared that his real work was nearly done. The engineering involved, the planning, and the decision making ought to be all but over, it would seem, now that the towers were up and the wire was going across. But it was not that way. Nor did Roebling by any means have everything all figured out.

In the public mind he had become a thorough mystery, the tragic victim of his own wondrous creation, cursed perhaps, like his father before him, remote, hidden, maybe a little mad, seeing everything and yet never seen. It was said he was so crippled that his wife had to feed him, which was true partly. It was said the disease had affected his mind, which was not true. And still, from a chair behind a distant window he could raise towers of granite and spin steel through the sky.

But for the man himself every detail was a personal concern and no answers came easily, despite the things said about his genius. Nothing could be taken for granted, especially now after the accident. Nobody could be trusted, completely. Anybody might let him down, including his father.

At the moment he was wrestling with the design of the enormous truss that would stiffen the roadway and wondering whether to make it of steel, instead of iron as his father had specified. He was not sure either if his father had made the truss big enough. He delegated Paine to find out all he could on the latest advances in steel-making. He wrote to Hildenbrand, day after day, pouring out his own thoughts, his doubts and questions, for pages.

He was working toward another momentous decision. And he was feeling his way. But days like this were what he enjoyed most.

His concern for incidentals was perhaps the most extraordinary thing of all. For him there were no incidentals. Everything counted. Nothing could be left to chance or for someone else to decide. Hildenbrand, Martin, Paine, Farrington, all heard from him daily now. It seemed he wanted them to know his every thought.

The following is only an excerpt of just one of the letters Roebling wrote to his assistants during this time. It was to Farrington.