Great Bridge (eBook)

Chapter 1 The Plan The shapes arise! Walt Whitman They Met at his request on at least six different occasions, beginning in February 1869. With everyone present, there were just nine in all -- the seven distinguished consultants he had selected, his oldest son, Colonel Washington Roebling, who kept the minutes, and himself, the intense, enigmatic John Augustus Roebling, wealthy wire rope manufacturer of Trenton, New Jersey, and builder of unprecedented suspension bridges. They met at the Brooklyn Gas Light Company on Fulton Street, where the new Bridge Company had been conducting its affairs until regular offices could be arranged for. They gathered about the big plans and drawings he had on display, listening attentively as he talked and asking a great many questions. They studied his preliminary surveys and the map upon which he had drawn a strong red line cutting across the East River, indicating exactly where he intended to put the crowning work of his career. The consultants were his idea. In view of 'the magnitude of the undertaking and the large interests connected therewith,' he had written, it was 'only right' that his plans be 'subjected to the careful scrutiny' of a board of experts. He did not want their advice or opinions, only their sanction. If everything went as he wanted and expected, they would approve his plan without reservation. They would announce that in their considered professional opinion his bridge was perfectly possible. They would put an end to the rumors, silence the critics, satisfy every last stockholder that he knew what he was about, and he could at last get on with his work. To achieve his purpose, to wind up with an endorsement no one could challenge, or at least no one who counted for anything professionally, he had picked men of impeccable reputation. None had a failure or black mark to his name. All were sound, practical builders themselves, men not given to offhand endorsements or to overstatement. With few exceptions, each had done his own share of pioneering at one time or other, and so theoretically ought still to be sympathetic to the untried. They were, in fact, about as eminent a body of civil engineers as could have been assembled then, and seen all together, with their display of white whiskers, their expansive shirt fronts and firm handshakes, they must have appeared amply qualified to pass judgment on just about anything. The fee for their services was to be a thousand dollars each, which was exactly a thousand dollars more than Roebling himself had received for all his own efforts thus far. Chairman of the group was the sociable Horatio Allen, whose great girth, gleaming bald head, and Benjamin Franklin spectacles gave him the look of a character from Dickens. He fancied capes and silver-handled walking sticks and probably considered his professional standing second only to that of Roebling, which was hardly so. But like Roebling he had done well in manufacturing -- in his case, with New York's Novelty Iron Works -- and forty years before he had made some history driving the first locomotive in America, the Stourbridge Lion, all alone and before a big crowd, on a test run at Honesdale, Pennsylvania. He had also, in the time since, been one of the principal engineers for New York's Croton Aqueduct and so was sometimes referred to in biographical sketches as 'the man who turned the water on.' Then there was Colonel Julius Adams of Brooklyn, a former Army engineer, who was usually described as an expert on sewer construction, and who, in truth, was not quite in the same league as the others. He had, however, a number of influential friends...