Episode notes
John A. Roebling, a German immigrant engineer behind the Delaware Aqueduct, proposed in 1857 a bridge over the East River linking New York and Brooklyn, then separate cities that relied on ferries. His hybrid design combined suspension cables with diagonal stays, cleared 127 feet above mean high water, and was built six to eight times stronger than his calculations required because he feared the wind. In June 1869 a ferry crushed his foot while he surveyed the Brooklyn tower site, and within a month he died of tetanus, leaving his 32 year old son Washington Roebling as chief engineer.
Washington sank pneumatic caissons, giant upside-down wooden boxes pushed into the riverbed by the granite built on top, and fought a caisson fire in December 1870. Decompression, then called caisson disease, left him partly paralyzed and confined to his apartment, where he watched the work through a telescope. His wife, Emily Warren Roebling, taught herself mathematics, stress analysis, cable construction, and catenary curves, and ran the project day to day for 11 years. The bridge opened on May 24, 1883, as the longest suspension bridge in the world, and Emily rode in the first carriage across holding a rooster.
- The soda bottle analogy for how nitrogen bubbles form in the blood of caisson workers
- Boss Tweed and Tammany Hall taking early control of the bridge company's board
- Contractor J. Lloyd Haigh swapping inspected wire for rejected wire before delivery
- Why John Roebling's safety margin still left the bridge four times stronger than needed
- The 1882 Newport trustees' meeting where younger trustees tried to remove Washington