Roebling, John Augustus and Washington Augustus John (Johann) Augustus: b.June 12, 1806; Muhlhausen,Thuringia d.July 22, 1869: Brooklyn Heights, New York Washington Augustus: b. May 16, 1837; Saxonburg, Pennsylvania d.July 21, 1926;Trenton, New Jersey
German American engineer John Augustus Roebling and his son Washington Augustus planned and oversaw the construction of several suspensions bridges in the United States—the most famous being the Brooklyn Bridge.
Johann August Roebling was born on June 12, 1806, in Muhlhausen, Thuringia, and educated at Berlin’s Royal Polytechnic Institute, also studying philosophy with Georg Friedrich Wilhelm Hegel. He worked for the Prussian government for three years before organizing emigration with others from Muhlhausen in 1831 to form the Socialist agricultural community of Saxonburg on 7,000 acres in western Pennsylvania.Johann (anglicized to “John”) married Johanna Herting, a fellow emigrant’s daughter. Their nine children included eldest son Washington Augustus. After becoming a civil engineer in the state capital of Harrisburg, John built dams, canals, and locks while surveying a Pennsylvania railroad route. He envisioned weaving iron wire into cables, first to replace flimsy hemp hawsers to tow canal boats up inclined planes. Given growing demand for such rope for coal mines and industrial equipment, he opened a Trenton, New Jersey, wire rolling mill in 1848, the first to manufacture everything from chicken wire to 36-inch cables, on 14 acres of grounds. After graduating from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, his son Washington joined the firm. It remained in the family for three generations, incorporated in 1876, and managed by sons Charles and Ferdinand.
Roebling’s first engineering project was a suspension aqueduct across the Allegheny River (1845) that required innovating new construction techniques. He built a suspension bridge with cast-iron towers at Pittsburgh (1846) that was strong enough to carry coal wagons. Other projects included railway bridges and the Delaware and Hudson Canal Aqueducts (1848). Roebling’s 825-foot Niagara Falls Gorge or International Suspension Bridge (1851— 1855) with four low stone towers attracted acclaim due to its dramatic location and its being the first chain bridge to carry trains with vehicular and pedestrian traffic on a lower level.
Its success assured the future of suspension bridges. His 1,030-foot Allegheny River Bridge (1857) in Pittsburgh, the first built with his son, had six ornamental iron towers with cables “spun” on the site and carried trolleys and other traffic.The Covington and Cincinnati Bridge Company (1846) under coal merchant Amos Shinkle hired Roebling in 1856 to design the first span across the Ohio River. The Panic of 1857 and the worst winter on record shut down work as Irish laborers quit. When the Civil War intervened, son Washington served in the Union army with the rank of colonel, then returned to take charge of building the enormous twin masonry towers with German workers. The world’s longest suspension bridge, running 1,057 feet in length over water (2,252 feet in total and 36 feet wide), was complete in 1866. One New Yorker praised it as a model for one in his city.
The Roeblings began plans for the first bridge to unite Manhattan with Brooklyn across the East River in 1867. Ferries had been the only link, impeded by winter ice. After congressional approval, New York State hired the Roeblings to design it with supporting cables of steel, then considered experimental in its first use for any bridge or building. Deck elevation 130 feet above the water would make it the world’s highest bridge and permit navigation by all but the tallest-masted ships. The 1,595-foot span over water, 80 feet wide, would be the world’s longest, extended to 5,862 feet onto the shores. The revolutionary plan included two central tracks for trains pulled by endless cables powered by a steam engine in Brooklyn, two flanking lanes for traffic, and an “elevated promenade” or pedestrian boardwalk above. Claiming it would last forever, Chief Engineer John promised the “Great Bridge” would appeal to New York’s “pride, gratitude and prosperity” with its two great towers serving as landmarks between the adjoining cities like a “great monument to progress” (McCullough 1972, 90).
Washington traveled to Europe with a “bridge party” of engineers and consultants for a year to study innovative methods for sinking foundations into the East River to support granite towers with Gothic archways, including a visit to the Krupp works at Essen.
Back in New York, while he was checking final measurements from pilings, a docking ferry smashed John’s feet. Doctors amputated toes, but John died three weeks later, on July 22, 1869, of tetanus at his son’s Brooklyn Heights home. Appointed chief engineer in his father’s place, Washington Roebling set to work on foundations using experimental, watertight, pneumatic timber caissons, the largest ever built, weighing 3,000 tons and larger than 4 tennis courts. The effects of work in underwater chambers with compressed air was not known, and over a hundred workers either died or suffered paralysis as a result of decompression sickness (“caisson disease” or the “bends”) from surfacing too rapidly.After spending twelve hours in a chamber one day in 1872, Roebling was carried home unconscious. Although recovering, nitrogen in his blood left him a semicrippled invalid in extreme pain. A six-month
Illustration of the New York entrance of the Brooklyn Bridge with inset portrait of J. A. Roebling, 1883. (Library of Congress)
trip to take the therapeutic waters at Wiesbaden (Nassau, Prussia) did not help. With the second granite tower complete in 1876, he watched the dramatic spinning of 14,000 miles of wire into cables with field glasses from his bedroom, as his wife Emily Warren Roebling took charge, carrying orders to engineers and foremen and bringing home her reports. Roebling’s “amanuensis” won her own public acclaim as “assistant engineer.” After thirteen years of work, President Chester A. Arthur inaugurated the bridge on May 24, 1883, as 150,000 walked for the first time between the two cities, paying a penny each.
Retired to Trenton, New Jersey, the ailing Washington Roebling remained active in the John A. Roebling’s Sons wire business, which provided cable to the Otis Elevator Company, for telegraphs and electricity, and even for building the Panama Canal.
Emily died in 1903. Washingtonoversaw the building of a new mill complex ten miles away in Kinkora, renamed Roebling and judged one of the nation’s best- planned industrial towns. He posed for a statue of his father in 1908, the year he remarried. He electrified the Roebling mills and began producing electrolytic galvanized wire. He published his Early History of Saxonburg (1924) two years before his death at age eighty-nine, founding the Roebling Press for it and other books, including his father’s reminiscences of the immigration experience. Washington left an estate of over $29 million in 1926.
Blanche M. G. Linden
References and Further Reading
McCullough, David. The Great Bridge: The Epic Story of the Building of the Brooklyn Bridge. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1972.
Roebling, John Augustus. Diary of My Journey from Muehlhausen in Thuringia via Bremen to the United States of North America in the Year 1831. Trans. Edward Underwood. Trenton, NJ: Roebling, 1931.
Schuyler, Hamilton. The Roeblings: A Century of Engineers, Bridge-Builders, and Industrialists. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University, 1931. (Reprinted as: Roeblings: The Story of Three Generations of an Illustrious Family, 1831—1931. AMS Press, 1972.)
Steinman, David. The Builders of the Bridge: The Story of John Roebling and His Son. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1945.