Authors: Gay Talese
Things quieted down when Ellet left Niagara, but John Roebling, in his methodical way, got the job done. "Engineering," as
Joseph Gies, an editor and bridge historian, wrote, "is the art of the efficient, and the success of an engineering project
often may be measured by the absence of any dramatic history." In 1855, Roebling's 821-foot single span was finished, and
on March 6 of that year a 568-ton train crossed it—the first train in history to cross a span sustained by wire cables. The
success quickly led Roebling to other bridge commissions, and in 1867 he started his greatest task, the Brooklyn Bridge.
It would take thirteen years to complete the Brooklyn Bridge, and both John Roebling and his son would be its victims. One
summer morning in 1869, while standing on a pier off Manhattan, surveying the location of one of the towers, and paying no
attention to the docking ferryboat that was about to bump into the pier, John Roebling suddenly had his foot caught and crushed
between the pier floor and piles; tetanus set in, and two weeks later, at the age of sixty-three, he died.
At the death of his father, Washington Roebling, then thirty-two years old and the chief engineering assistant for the bridge,
took over the job. Roebling had previously supervised the construction of other bridges that his father had designed, and
had served as an engineering officer for the Union Army during the Civil War. During the war he had also been one of General
Grant's airborne spies, ascending in a balloon to watch the movement of Lee's army during its invasion of Pennsylvania.
When he took over the building of the Brooklyn Bridge, Washington Roebling decided that since the bridge's tower foundations
would have to be sunk forty-four feet into the East River on the Brooklyn side and seventy-six feet on the New York side,
he would use pneumatic caissons—as James Eads had done a few years before with his bridge over the Mississippi. Roebling drove
himself relentlessly, working in the caissons day and night and he finally collapsed. When he was carried up, he was paralyzed
for life. He was then thirty-five years old.
But Washington Roebling, assisted by his wife, Emily, continued to direct the building of the bridge from his sickbed; he
would watch the construction through field glasses while sitting at the window of his home on the Brooklyn shore; and then
his wife— to whom he had taught the engineer's language, and who understood the problems involved—would carry his instructions
to the superintendents on the bridge itself.
Washington Roebling was the first bridge engineer to use steel wire for his cables—it was lighter and stronger than the iron
wire cables used by his father on the Niagara bridge—and he had every one of the 5,180 wires galvanized as a safeguard against
rust. The first wire was drawn across the East River in 1877, and for the next twenty-six months, from one end of the bridge
to the other, the small traveling wheels—looking like bicycle wheels with the tires missing—spun back and forth on pulleys,
crossing the East River 10,360 times, each time bringing with them a double strand of wire which, when wrapped, would form
the four cables that would hold up the center span of 1,595 feet and its two side spans of 930 feet each. This technique of
spinning wire, and the use of a cowbell attached to each wheel to warn the men of its approaches, is still used today; it
was used, in a more modern form, even by O. II. Ammann in the cable-spinning phase of his Verrazano-Narrows Bridge in the
1960s.
The Brooklyn Bridge was opened on May 24, 1883. Washington Roebling and his wife watched the celebrations from their windows
through field glasses. It was a great day in New York— business was suspended, homes were draped with bunting, church bells
rang out, steamships whistled. There was the thunder of guns from the forts in the harbor and from the Navy ships docked near
the bridge, and finally, in open carriages, the dignitaries arrived. President Chester A. Arthur, New York's Governor Grover
Cleveland, and the mayors of every city within several miles of New York arrived at the bridge. Later that night there was
a procession in Brooklyn that led to Roebling's home, and he was congratulated in person by President Arthur.
To this day the Brooklyn Bridge has remained the most famous in America, and, until the Williamsburg Bridge was completed
over the East River between Brooklyn and Manhattan in 1903, it was the world's longest suspension. In the great bridge boom
of the twentieth century nineteen other suspension spans would surpass it—but none would cast a longer shadow. It has been
praised by poets, admired by aesthetes, and sought by the suicidal. Its tower over the tenement roofs of the Lower East Side
so electrified a young neighborhood boy named David Steinman that he became determined to emulate the Roeblings, and later
he would become one of the world's great bridge designers; he alone, until his death in 1960, would challenge Ammann's dominance.
David Steinman at the age of fourteen had secured a pass from New York's Commissioner of Bridges to climb around the catwalks
of the Williamsburg Bridge, then under construction, and he talked to bridge builders, took notes, and dreamed of the bridges
he would someday build. In 1906, after graduating from City College in New York with the highest honors, he continued his
engineering studies at Columbia, where, in 1911, he received his doctor's degree for his thesis on long-span bridges and foundations.
Later he became consulting engineer on the design and construction of the Floriano-polis Bridge in Brazil, the Mount Hope
Bridge in Rhode Island, the Grand Mere in Quebec, the Henry Hudson arch bridge in New York. It was Dr. David Steinman who
was called upon to renovate the Brooklyn Bridge in 1948, and it was he who was selected over Ammann to build the Mackinac
Bridge—although it was Ammann who emerged with the Verrazano-Narrows commission, the bridge that Steinman had dreamed of building.
The two men were never close as friends, possibly because they were too close in other ways. Both had been assistants in their
earlier days to the late Gustav Lindenthal, designer of the Hell Gate and the Queensboro bridges in New York, and the two
men were inevitably compared. They shared ambition and vanity, and yet possessed dissimilar personalities. Steinman was a
colorfully blunt product of New York, a man who relished publicity and controversy, and who wrote poetry and had published
books. Ammann was a stiff, formal Swiss gentleman, well born and distant. But that they were to be lifelong competitors was
inevitable, for the bridge business thrives on competition; it exists on every level. There is competition between steel corporations
as they bid for each job, and there is competition between even the lowliest apprentices in the work gangs. All the gangs—the
riveters, the steel connectors, the cable spinners— battle throughout the construction of every bridge to see who can do the
most work, and later in bars there is competition to see who can drink the most, brag the most. But here, on the lower level,
among the bridge workers, the rivalry is clear and open; on the higher level, among the engineers, it is more secret and subtle.
Some engineers quietly go through life envying one another, some quietly prey on others' failures. Every time there is a bridge
disaster, engineers who are unaffiliated with its construction flock to the site of the bridge and try to determine the reason
for the failure. Then, quietly, they return to their own plans, armed with the knowledge of the disaster, and patch up their
own bridges, hoping to prevent the same thing. This is as it should be. But it does not belie the truth of the competition.
When a bridge fails, the engineer who designed it is as good as dead. In the bridge business, on every level, there is an
endless battle to stay alive—and no one has stayed alive longer than O. H. Ammann.
Ammann was among the engineers who, in 1907, investigated the collapse of a cantilever bridge over the St. Lawrence River
near Quebec. Eighty-six workmen, many of them Indians, who were just learning the high-construction business then, fell with
the bridge, and seventy-five drowned. The engineer whose career ended with his failure was Theodore Cooper, one of America's
most noted engineers—the same man who had been so lucky years before when, after falling one hundred feet into the Mississippi
River while working on James Eads' bridge, not only survived but went back to work the same day.
But now, in 1907, it was the opinion of most engineers that Theodore Cooper did not know enough about the stresses involved
in the cantilever bridge. None of them did. There is no way to know enough about bridge failure until enough bridges have
failed. "This bridge failed because it was not strong enough," one engineer, C. C. Schneider, quipped to the others. Then
they all returned to their own bridges, or to their plans for bridges, to see if they too had made miscalculations.
One bridge that perhaps was saved in this manner was Gustav Lindenthal's Queensboro Bridge, which was then approaching completion
over the East River in Manhattan. After a re-examination, it was concluded that the Queensboro was inadequate to safely carry
its intended load. So the four rapid-transit tracks that had been planned for the upper deck were reduced by two. The loss
of the two tracks was compensated by the construction of a subway tunnel a block away from the bridge—the BMT tunnel at Sixtieth
Street under the East River, built at an additional cost of $4,000,000.
In November of 1940, when the Tacoma Narrows Bridge fell into the waters of Puget Sound in the state of Washington, O. H.
Ammann was again one of the engineers called in to help determine the cause. The engineer who caught the blame in this case
was L. S. Moisseiff, a man with a fine reputation throughout the United States.
Moisseiff had been involved in the design of the Manhattan Bridge in New York, and had been the consulting engineer of the
Ambassador Bridge in Detroit and the Golden Gate in California, among many others, and nobody had questioned him when he planned
a lean, two-lane bridge that would stretch 2,800 feet over the waters of Puget Sound. True, it was a startlingly slim, fragile-looking
bridge, but during this time there had been an aesthetic trend toward slimmer, sleeker, lovelier suspension bridges. This
was the same trend that led David Steinman to paint his Mount Hope Bridge over Narragansett Bay a soft green color, and to
have its cables strung with lights and approaches lined with evergreens and roses, costing an additional $70,000 for landscaping.
There was also a prewar trend toward economizing on the over-all cost of bridge construction, however, and one way to save
money without spoiling the aesthetics—and supposedly without diminishing safety—was to shape the span and roadway floor with
solid plate girders, not trusses that wind could easily pass through. And it was partially because of these solid girders
that, on days when the wind beat hard against its solid mass of roadway, the Tacoma Narrows Bridge kicked up and down. But
it never kicked too much, and the motorists, far from becoming alarmed, actually loved it, enjoyed riding over it. They knew
that all bridges swayed a little in the wind—this bridge was just livelier, that was all, and they began calling it, affectionately,
"Galloping Gertie."
Four months after it had opened—on November 7—with the wind between thirty-five and forty-two miles an hour, the bridge suddenly
began to kick more than usual. Sometimes it would heave up and down as much as three feet. Bridge authorities decided to close
the bridge to traffic; it was a wise decision, for later it began to twist wildly, rising on one side of its span, falling
on the other, rising and falling sometimes as much as twenty-eight feet, tilting at a forty-five-degree angle in the wind.
Finally, at 11 A.M., the main span ripped away from its suspenders and went crashing into Puget Sound.
The factors that led to the failure, the examining engineers deduced, were generally that the tall skinny bridge was too flexible
and lacked the necessary stiffening girders; and also they spoke about a new factor that they had previously known very little
about: "aerodynamic instability."
And soon, on other bridges, on bridges all over America and elsewhere, adjustments were made to compensate for the instability.
The Golden Gate underwent alterations that cost more than $3,000,000. The very flexible Bronx-Whitestone Bridge in New York,
which Leon Moisseiff had designed—with O. H. Ammann directing the planning and construction—had holes punched into its plate
girders and had trusses added. Several other bridges that formerly had been slim and frail now became sturdier with trusses,
and twenty years later, when Ammann was creating the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, the Tacoma lesson lived on. Though the lower
second deck on the Verrazano-Narrows was not yet needed, because the anticipated traffic could easily be accommodated by the
six-lane upper deck, Ammann made plans for the second deck to go on right away—something he hadn't done in 1930 with his George
Washington Bridge. The six-lane lower deck of the Verrazano will probably be without an automobile passenger for the next
ten years, but the big bridge will be more rigid from its opening day.
After the Tacoma incident, Moisseiff's talents were no longer in demand. He never tried to pass off any of the blame on other
engineers or the financiers; he accepted his decline quietly, though finding little solace in the fact that with his demise
as an influential designer of bridges the world of engineering knowledge was expanded and bigger bridges were planned, bringing
renown to others.
And so some engineers, like Leon Moisseiff and Theodore Cooper, go down with their bridges. Others, like Ammann and Steinman,
remain high and mighty. But O. H. Ammann is not fooled by his fate.
One day, after he had completed his design on the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, he mused aloud in his New York apartment, on the
thirty-second floor of the Hotel Carlyle, that one reason he has experienced no tragedy with his bridges is that he has been
blessed with good fortune.