Washington
Roebling spent 14 year of his life designing and building the Brooklyn Bridge. Though originally conceived by his
father, John A. Roebling, almost every aspect of the bridge
conceived of and constructed from 1869 until it opened in 1883 was from the imagination and under the supervision of
Washington Roebling, the chief engineer.
A lot has been written
about the bridge. In Chief Engineer, Erica Wagner provides a broader picture of
Roebling’s life from his youth to his productive old age.
Roebling grew up in Pennsylvania. His boyhood home was still on the
frontier of settlement even in the 1830s. His formally schooling was varied, and much of his education came from assisting his father in
bridge building. Though John Roebling was a successful engineer and businessman, and immigrant success story, he was abusive to his wife and children. Washington Roebling grew up to be a
man who could bear hardship, but he long resented the abuse he, his siblings and especially his mother suffered in his father’s house.
Engineering was not
Roebling’s only area of success. He joined Union forces during the Civil War.
Though he joined a private, his engineering experience won him an
appointment and an officer and he eventually rose to the rank of colonel. His
rise to the officer corps did not remove him from danger in that bloody war. Antietam, Chancellorsville and Gettysburg were just some of the battles he was
part of.
The war
was hard on his health, but good in other ways. It was
during those years that he met his wife Emily, sister of General G. K. Warren. Emily was a vigorous, capable person
who proved to be a great partner to her husband and successful on her own.
The war was not as hard
on Roebling’s health as hard as the Brooklyn Bridge would be. Roebling spent a
lot of time in the caissons as they sunk deeper, seeking firm
foundations for the bridge towers. Prolonged work in compressed air damaged his
health, possibly permanently. Though he remained in charge of the bridge, his
health prevented him from being at the bridge during much of its above ground
construction. Emily became his secretary and agent during this time. She was
involved to such a degree that rumors spread that she was the actual engineer.
There no support for the rumors that Emily was a designer of the bridge, but it
is fair to say that Roebling leaned on her and her ability to organize and
communicate with tact and she made important contributions to the success of
the bridge.
Roebling lived a long
life, surviving Emily, two of his younger brothers and even some of his nephews. Though he left an active role in the
wire company his father founded, he eventually took over management of the
company when his brothers who ran it, Ferdinand and Charles, and later their sons died. He seemed to relish the work and the challenge
well into his eighties.
If you’re interested in
this book, you may also be interested in
Wagner, Erica. Chief Engineer: Washington Roebling: The Man
Who Built the Brooklyn Bridge. New York: Bloomsbury, 2017.
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