Brooklyn Bridge

FACTSFact sheet

01The designer who did not see the work begin

John A. Roebling arrived in the United States in 1831, from Mühlhausen, Prussia, and spent more than two decades hanging bridges from cables: Pittsburgh, the Delaware River, the Niagara railway bridge, Cincinnati. In 1867, with the state law passed and the New York Bridge Company formed, he presented his plan for the East River crossing. According to the bridge's 1975 National Historic Landmark nomination, he wrote that it would be "the greatest bridge in existence" and "the greatest engineering work of the continent, and of the age".

On 28 June 1869, during a survey at the Fulton Ferry slip, a ferryboat struck the pier he was standing on and crushed the toes of his right foot. The toes were amputated. He died of tetanus on 22 July, before any excavation.

The job passed to his son, Washington A. Roebling, then 32. Work began in early January 1870, on the Brooklyn side. The father's estimate was $7 million, without land, and five years of work. It took more than twice as long.

02An upside-down wooden box on the riverbed

To support the towers, the builders had to reach firm ground beneath the riverbed. The method was the pneumatic caisson: an enormous bottomless wooden box, turned upside down and filled with compressed air to hold the water out. The men went down through airlocks and dug beneath the edges, and the box sank under the weight of the tower being built on top of it. The Brooklyn caisson measured 168 by 102 feet (51 by 31 m).

On 2 December 1870, according to the history of the bridge published by S. W. Green in 1883, a worker left a lit candle near a seam in the roof. The flame was drawn into the oakum caulking and the fire ran through the timbers, with no smoke visible in the chamber. After hours of steam, water and carbon dioxide, the fire department was called: 38 streams of water. The caisson was deliberately flooded and stayed underwater for two and a half days. The repairs delayed the job by almost three months. None of the sources records a death in the fire.

Washington spent that night inside the caisson. It was the first attack of the sickness that would later take him off the site. In March 1871, the Brooklyn caisson, stopped at 44 feet 6 inches (13.6 m) below high tide, where it had found firm soil, was filled with concrete.

03Almost 24 meters below the tide

The Manhattan caisson was a little larger, 172 by 102 feet, and came lined with iron plate because of the fire. Good ground lay much deeper. The lower the caisson went, the higher the air pressure inside: up to 34 pounds per square inch above atmospheric, according to Green; between 18 and 36, in the notes of the project's doctor. The shifts, which began as two of four hours, shrank at the bottom to two of two hours.

The doctor was Andrew H. Smith. Between 25 January and 31 May 1872, in that caisson alone, he counted 110 cases of illness caused by compressed air, and 3 deaths. John Myers died on his first day of work, 22 April. Patrick McKay, an Irishman of 50, stayed down half an hour longer and was found unconscious in the airlock on 30 April; Smith noted that he had advanced kidney disease and that the compressed air only hastened his death. A man surnamed Reardon, aged 38, went in on 17 May and died the next day.

The disease was not discovered there. Smith himself records the first cases in a coal mine in France, around 1841, and the study by the doctors Pol and Watelle in 1845; at the St. Louis bridge, whose foundations were dug at the same time, it killed more people than in Brooklyn. What Brooklyn gave it was the name: Smith called it "caisson disease". The workers called it the "Grecian bend". Why the men fell ill when they came up, nobody could explain.

On 18 May 1872, at 78 feet 6 inches (23.9 m), Washington Roebling ordered a halt. The caisson rested on compacted sand and gravel, without reaching bedrock. He judged the gravel to be as firm as rock. The 1975 nomination links the decision to the third death; the excavation stopped on the same day Reardon died.

04The bridge seen from a window

In the spring of 1872, Washington had his second attack, in the Manhattan caisson, and never went back to the site. In 1873 he took leave and went to Europe for treatment; afterwards he lived in Trenton, New Jersey. In the summer of 1877 he moved back to 110 Columbia Heights, in Brooklyn, to a house from which the bridge could be seen. Green's 1883 history says that he watched the progress "from a back bay-window with a telescope", and that until the opening he had not set foot on the finished structure.

The link between the house and the job was his wife, Emily Warren Roebling. According to the historian David McCullough, all the written communication from the house to the bridge office went out in her handwriting. In the official opening speech, Abram Hewitt described her as the one through whose brain and fingers communication was kept up between those directing the construction and those carrying it out. Green wrote that her acquaintance with the work was "most minute and accurate".

In 1882, the board voted on a proposal to demote Washington to consultant. It lost 10 to 7, and he remained chief engineer to the end. According to McCullough, Emily was the first to cross the deck, by carriage, in early May 1883. The family used to say, years later, that she carried a live rooster as a symbol of victory.

05The wire that could not come out

The bridge's 4 cables are galvanized steel, not iron, and they were spun in place: a wheel traveled back and forth from one anchorage to the other, carrying the wire, until it formed 19 strands per cable. The wire contract was awarded in 1877 to J. Lloyd Haigh, a supplier from South Brooklyn, by the board's choice, against Roebling's preference.

Between June and July 1878, the assistant engineer William Paine and his aides, watching the factory, uncovered the scam. Wire approved by the inspectors received a certificate and, on the way to the site, was swapped in another shed for rejected wire, which went on with the good wire's paperwork. The good wire went back to be approved again.

When the fraud came to light, about 221 tons of rejected wire were already wound into the cables, and there was no way to remove it without taking them apart. The solution was to add wire: 8 more in each of the 19 strands, 152 per cable, bringing the total from 5,282 to 5,434. Haigh had to supply the extra wire free of charge. The safety margin ended up at about five times the load. The board did not make the case public, nor did it change suppliers.

Haigh did end up in prison, but for something else: in August 1880 he confessed to forging bank acceptances and got four years. In the same year as the fraud, on 14 June 1878, one of the strands broke loose during spinning and killed two men.

06Counting the dead

On opening day, W. C. Kingsley's official speech said that "twenty men lost their lives" in the direct work of construction. That is the number McCullough repeats, not counting John A. Roebling; adding the father brings it to 21.

Other counts reach 27. The number is attributed to the assistant engineer C. C. Martin, in an interview with the Brooklyn Daily Eagle on that same 24 May 1883, in which he admitted there had been no list: had they known so many would be hurt, they would have written it down. A list of names compiled later from newspapers and death certificates also has 27 names, including the designer. By that list, most died in falls and in accidents with derricks; three, of caisson disease.

The official reports do not help close the count. The chief engineer's 1877 report says that dangerous stretches went by without a single accident, while McCullough, drawing on the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, records two fatal falls from the Brooklyn tower in 1875. There is no reliable total, either of the dead or of the workers.

0724 May 1883, and what came after

The bridge opened on 24 May 1883, with President Chester A. Arthur. Washington did not go; he watched from his window. It cost about $15 million at the time, counting land. Green blames the budget overrun on deeper foundations than planned, on steel instead of iron, on a wider and higher deck and on land expropriations.

Six days later, on 30 May, a blockage at the top of a stairway on the New York side, with thousands of people on the bridge, turned into a stampede. People fell down the stairs and those behind trampled over them. 12 people died. According to the New-York Tribune, an hour later the word on 42nd Street was that the bridge had collapsed with a thousand people on it.

On 17 May 1884, P. T. Barnum's circus crossed the bridge to Brooklyn with 21 elephants, Jumbo among them, and 17 camels. According to The Sun, the toll collector charged the men and the horses and let the animals through for free. The Tribune noted that many people followed along to see whether Jumbo would make it across in one piece.

The bridge was the largest suspension bridge in the world until 1903. The cables with Haigh's wire inside are still in place, and in 2024 it carried an average of more than 100,000 vehicles a day.

MYTHSWhat people say and what the record shows

• What people say

  Emily Roebling was the real chief engineer and designed the bridge.

  What the record shows

  The design is John A. Roebling's, and the chief engineer was Washington to the end, kept on by a vote in 1882. Emily was the indispensable intermediary and gained real technical competence. The exaggeration already appears in 1883: an editorial in Frank Leslie's wrote that she had become "the chief director of the work", which no construction document supports.

• What people say

  The 1870 fire in the Brooklyn caisson killed six men.

  What the record shows

  Neither Green's 1883 history nor McCullough records any death in the fire. The caisson was flooded and repaired in almost three months.

• What people say

  Caisson disease was discovered at the Brooklyn Bridge.

  What the record shows

  Cases had been recorded in France since around 1841, and it had killed workers at the St. Louis bridge. Brooklyn gave it the name: "caisson disease", from Andrew H. Smith, the project's doctor.

• What people say

  The Manhattan foundations reached bedrock.

  What the record shows

  The caisson stopped on 18 May 1872, at 78 feet 6 inches (23.9 m), on compacted sand and gravel. Washington Roebling decided not to go any deeper.

• What people say

  The official death toll for the construction is 27.

  What the record shows

  The only number stated at an official ceremony was 20, in W. C. Kingsley's speech in 1883. The 27 comes from another count, attributed to the assistant engineer C. C. Martin on the same day as the opening, and he himself admitted that nobody kept a list.

QUESTIONSFrequently asked questions

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SOURCESSources

1. Andrew H. Smith, The Effects of High Atmospheric Pressure, including the Caisson Disease, Brooklyn, Eagle Print, 1873 — digirepo.nlm.nih.gov
2. Opening Ceremonies of the New York and Brooklyn Bridge, May 24, 1883, Brooklyn, 1883 — archive.org
3. S. W. Green (comp.), A Complete History of the New York and Brooklyn Bridge, New York, 1883 — archive.org
4. Washington A. Roebling, Report of the Chief Engineer of the New York & Brooklyn Bridge, January 1, 1877, Brooklyn, 1877 — archive.org
5. James B. Armstrong (HAER), The Brooklyn Bridge, National Register / National Historic Landmark nomination, 1975 — npgallery.nps.gov
6. NYC Landmarks Preservation Commission, designation LP-0098, 1967 — s-media.nyc.gov
7. Historic American Engineering Record, HAER NY-18, Library of Congress — loc.gov
8. NYC Department of Transportation, Brooklyn Bridge — nyc.gov
9. Frank Griggs Jr., Brooklyn Bridge, Part 2, STRUCTURE magazine, 2016 — structuremag.org
10. T. R. Witcher, New York's Brooklyn Bridge is an engineering marvel, Civil Engineering (ASCE), 2022 — asce.org
11. Frances Williams Browin, When They Built the Big Bridge, American Heritage, 1956 — americanheritage.com
12. David McCullough, The Great Bridge, 1972
13. Linda Hall Library, Scientist of the Day: Washington A. Roebling — lindahall.org
14. Richard Howe, review of Erica Wagner, Chief Engineer: Washington Roebling (2017), Gotham Center, 2018 — gothamcenter.org
15. New-York Tribune, Fatal panic on the Bridge, 31 May 1883 — chroniclingamerica.loc.gov
16. The Sun (New York), 18 May 1884, p. 2 — chroniclingamerica.loc.gov
17. Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper, 9 June 1883 — archive.org
18. Christopher Klein, Construction of the Brooklyn Bridge Took 14 Years—And Multiple Lives, History.com, 2019

Images

• Fig. 01 — The Brooklyn Bridge seen from above, with the Manhattan Bridge in the background. Photo by Jet Lowe (Library of Congress): Jet Lowe (Library of Congress) · Public domain
• Fig. 02 — The towers already built, with the first ropes of the cable-spinning stage, in a period stereograph (left half of the card): Unknown author (Robert N. Dennis collection, NYPL) · Public domain
• Fig. 03 — The Brooklyn caisson in cross-section, with the masonry above. Harper's Weekly, 17 December 1870, two weeks after the fire: Harper's Weekly, 17 December 1870 · Public domain
• Fig. 04 — The temporary footbridge of the cable-spinning stage, attached to the tower. Period stereograph (left half of the card): Unknown author (Robert N. Dennis collection, NYPL) · Public domain
• Fig. 05 — One of the 4 main cables and a suspender connection, in 1982. Photo by Jet Lowe for the Historic American Engineering Record (HAER NY-18): Jet Lowe (HAER NY-18, Library of Congress) · Public domain
• Fig. 06 — The fireworks on opening night, 24 May 1883. Lithograph by Currier & Ives: Currier & Ives (Library of Congress) · Public domain