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.
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.”
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.