Favorite extracts from The Great Bridge by David McCullough

Favorite extracts from The Great Bridge by David McCullough…

Summary:  John Roebling, a German immigrant who pioneered suspension bridge design and wire cable manufacturing, envisioned and sketched a bridge across the East River from Brooklyn to Manhattan.  Roebling had his toe crushed by a boat pushing up against a New York pier and died from tetanus.  His son Washington (“young Roebling”), a Civil War hero, completed the design and supervised construction of the bridge between 1869 and 1883.  Washington Roebling was almost killed and suffered decades of impairment to his personality and lifestyle by a case of decompression illness or “the bends”.  He ended his days managing the family’s very successful wire and cable manufacturing business.

Who should read this book:  Anyone contemplating SCUBA diving on compressed air, which is much more likely to produce the bends than breathing Nitrox underwater (see my personal story); people interested in the history of New York City and the development of American politics (Boss Tweed figures prominently in the book); bridge nerds (though the book could be a lot more technical, even for a lay audience).

Page 154, on the education young Roebling received at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute: In three years’ time he had also to master nearly a hundred different courses, including, among others, Analytical Geometry of Three Dimensions, … Calculus of Variations, Qualitative and Quantitative Analysis, Determinative Mineralogy, Higher Geodesy, …, Orthographic and Spherical Projections, Acoustics, Optics, Thermotics, Geology of Mining, Paleontology, Rational Mechanics of Solids and Fluids, Spherical Astronomy, … Machine Design, Hydraulic Motors, Steam Engines, Stability of Structures, Engineering and Architectural Design and Construction, and Intellectual and Ethical Philosophy.

A century later, D.B. Steinman, a noted bridgebuilder and professor of civil engineering, would write, “Under such a curiculum the average college boy of today woul be left reeling and staggering.  In that earlier, era, before colleges embarked upon mass production, engineering education was a real test and training, an intensive intellectual discipline and professional equipment for a most exacting life work.  Only the ablest and the most ambitious could stand the pace and survive the ordeal.

… Of the sixty-five students who started out in [Roebling’s class], only twelve finished.  And among those who did not finish there had been some rather severe breakdowns, it appears, and one suicide.

Page 260: … the Executive Committee would grant to each of the families of the deceased [men killed building the bridge] payments of $250, or a little better than three months’s wages.

Page 522:  [Asked to compare the Brooklyn Bridge to the Great Pyramid of Cheops, young Roebling wrote] To build his pyramid Cheops packed some pounds of rice into the stomachs of innumerable Egyptians and Israelites.  We today would pack some pounds of coal inside steam boilers to do the same thing, and this might be cited as an instance of the superiority of modern civilization over ancient brute force.  but when referred to the sun, our true standard of reference, the comparison is naught, because to produce these few pounds of coal required a thousand times more solar energy than to produce the few pounds of rice.  We are simply taking advantage of an accidental circumstance.

It took Cheops twenty years to build his pyramid, but if he had had a lot of Trustees, contractors, and newspaper reporters to worry him, he might not have finished it by that time.  The advantages of modern engineering are in many ways over balanced by the disadvantages of modern civilization.

Page 554:  When [young Roebling] felt well enough, he traveled with [his wife] … to Martha’s Vineyard, which he liked, to Nantucket, which he did not …

Page 556:  To the surprise of almost everyone, he married again [five years after the death of Emily], [in 1908, at age 75].  She was a widow of about his own son’s age. … He who had weathered everything just lived on interminably, forever “bearing up,” people said.  His teeth were pulled, one by one, and in his lettes to John he complained repeatedly of physical tormet and in particular of excruciating pains in his jaw.  … “And yet people say how well you look,” [Washington Roebling] wrote, “I feel like killing them.”

Page 557:  “When the income tax came along in 1913, it was as though the country was coming apart at the seams.  “It means 100,000 spies to snoop into everybody’s business and affairs.”  When war broke out in Europe he shuddered at the fate of mankind.  “It has come to this pass, that for an extra German to live, he must kill somebody else to make room for him.  We can all play at that game.  It means perpetual universal war.”

Page 559:  [In 1917, at age 84 and after the death of younger members of the family] Roebling ran the company for the next five years and the business prospered exceedingly. … He got up each morning at about seven thirty, had his breakfast, then, like the men in the mill, took the trolley to work, accompanied by his dog.  His day was the full eight hours, the same as everyone.  He had no secretary. … He decided to change all the mills over to electric power, instead of steam, a momentous and costly move.  An entirely new department for the electrolytic galvanizing of wire was set up under his direction and the contract for the cables of the Bear Mountain Bridge, over the Hudson River–among other bridges–was taken and completed during the time he was in charge.  … “It’s my job to carry the responsibility and you can’t desert your job.  You can’t slink out of life or out of the work life lays on you.”  … He died peacefully at age eighty-nine, on July 21, 1926, with his wife, son, and several others at his bedside.