In all the world, perhaps, no place could have been found where the building of a simon pure “Suspension Bridge” would have been a more spectacular accomplishment than over Niagara Gorge, with the Falls thundering a little way upstream, and the waters lashing and fuming underneath; no place where its slender beauty could have had such stern and impressive background. The idea of carrying railroad trains over that turmoil of waters on a web apparently so frail, evoked a storm of protest from well-nigh all the foremost engineers of the time. But Roebling was a practical man as well as a stubborn one. After all, he was dealing with rock and wire and he knew what they would do. He built the bridge, the first of its kind to carry railroad traffic. All the world of that day knew, but most of it now has forgotten, how he flew a kite across the gorge to get his first wire over, and from that built up his cables. On March 16, 1855, the first train passed over it. With one remodeling it continued to carry increasingly heavy loads until nearly half a century later it was replaced by a larger structure, better calculated to bear the burden of modern equipment.
THE “SUSPENSION BRIDGE” PROVES ITSELF
“Suspension Bridge” not alone proved itself in point of service, but it demonstrated the soundness of Mr. Roebling’s claims for the wire structure. The Ohio structure, which followed, outdid Suspension Bridges in length of span; in economy of material, in simplicity and charm of outline it clearly foreshadowed the still greater work, the designing of which was to be the crowning accomplishment of his life. He was working with a practiced hand now. The doubts, if he ever had any, were behind him. Behind him, also, was a producing plant tuned to turn out at speed the materials he needed, with certainty of their quality.
He had proved that the making of big bridges with wire was feasible, and that it was simple, as most great things are after they have been done. There were only three basic parts to a suspension bridge after all—towers, cables and anchorage. Suspending the roadway, which to the average man seems the vital part of the creation, is, from the engineering standpoint, only an accessory work. John A. Roebling had concentrated his life’s effort, not on mere methods of commercial production, but rather on the proving of his contentions. He needed the right kind of wire rope to prove them, so like a wise man he made it himself.
He came to the summit of his achievement with the acceptance of his plans for the building of the Brooklyn Bridge, and then, his faith vindicated, his theory, which he had fought so hard to sustain, endorsed by boards of noted engineers and acclaimed by the public, starting out on the realization of his long dream—the building of the Eighth Wonder of the World, a comparatively slight accident, the bungled docking of a ferryboat, which crushed his foot and brought on tetanus, put out the steady candle of his life.
It was the very whimsy of fate. His work was done. He had created, out of imagination and energy, the finished designs for a wonder fabric, ready for the labor of an intenser age. He did not live to see the spider structures hung like wisps of gossamer above the restless waterways of New York, but his name is woven into the very steel of them.
CHAPTER III
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.