The Brooklyn Bridge, completed in 1883, is a suspension bridge that connects Brooklyn and Manhattan. It has stood, towering over New York City’s East River for more than a century. The Brooklyn Bridge is considered a great accomplishment of 19th-century engineering, one which has become an important icon for New York City and a National Historic Landmark. Even after 125 years, it still transports thousands of cars and people every day.
It took 14 years and $15 million (about $320 million today) to build the bridge. Many of the bridge workers suffered from decompression sickness, and at least 20 people lost their lives in the construction, including the project creator, John Augustus Roebling. Roebling invented a unique process for weaving wire cables, the most important structural element of the bridge designs.
Born in Germany, 1806, Roebling studied industrial engineering in Berlin before immigrating to Pennsylvania at 25. After that, he tried a career in farming but failed. Then he relocated to Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, where he worked as a civil engineer.
John A. Roebling was the forerunner of cable suspension bridges. He also built the Cincinnati-Covington bridge, one of his many suspension bridges, subsequently called the John A. Roebling Bridge.
Roebling died at the start of the Brooklyn Bridge’s construction when he tried to obtain a few last compass readings at the river in 1869. After removing the foot, he broke one of his toes in a boat accident and died of tetanus. This death left his son, Washington A. Roebling to take over as head engineer.
Work on the structure began on January 3, 1870. The workers laid sturdy foundations then dug with riverbed “caissons.” These caissons were sealed wooden containers with compressed air submerged in water. However, the caissons caused decompression sickness, affecting people when they exit compressed space too quickly and enter normal air.
Washington Roebling was one of the first to suffer the illness, crippled by decompression sickness; his wife, Emily Warren Roebling, ended up supervising the project for the next 11 years. Roebling, bedridden, managed operations from his apartment in Columbia Heights. He would monitor the construction with field glasses and transmit his instructions to the construction site.
The project met with many problems that made progress sluggish. One time a compressed-air explosion destroyed a pneumatic caisson. There were also reports of a serious fire in a caisson which smoldered for weeks. An incident of cable that broke free from its attachment point on the side of the bridge near Manhattan occurred. And a steel-wire contractor defrauded the operation, resulting in many replacing cables.
The Brooklyn Bridge opened to the general public on May 24, 1883. There was a large inaugural ceremony to mark the opening of the bridge. Emily Warren Roebling was the first person to cross the bridge. The event saw Mayor Franklin Edson of New York and President Chester A. Arthur cross from the New York end to the Brooklyn end, welcomed by celebratory cannon fire. Unable to attend the event, President Chester A. Arthur visited Washington Roebling at his house and congratulated him. The bridge was traversed by 1,800 cars and 150,000 passengers on its first day of operation.
