2016 Issue

the stories of a few of the profession’s top practitioners in a way that even captivates readers who failed high school algebra. And perhaps the reason the protagonists in these stories did not suc- cessfully avoid the attention paid to them and their remarkable careers, is that they were too dead to protest it. This friend of engineering is the author David McCullough and the books which celebrate the accomplishments of some leading lights of the profession are: The Great Bridge: The Epic Story of the Building of the Brooklyn Bridge; The Path Between the Seas: The Creation of the Panama Canal 1870-1914; and TheWright Brothers. Mr. McCullough, referring to his most recent book in an interview on NPR, said the following: I see my book [The Wright Brothers] as the third of a trilogy. The Brooklyn Bridge, the Panama Canal and the airplane. All happened in the same period of time. All were done by Americans. All at great risk - at great risk to their reputations, great risk to lives - and requiring great courage to have done it. Unprecedented, absolutely unprecedented. And they did it. Well, who were they? Who were they? We should know who they were and what they went through to do what they did, which is to all of our benefit. THE BRIDGE His book about the building of the Brooklyn Bridge was the first published in 1972. This spellbinding narrative brings Washington Roebling back to life as a union soldier who apprenticed under his austere father in the bridge building business and eventually became the chief engineer for the bridge that connected the bor- oughs of Brooklyn and Manhattan. Roebling was born in 1837 and lived to be 89 years old. He had graduated as a civil engineer and joined the family business prior to serving as an officer in the Union army during the Civil War where he helped defend Little Round Top in the Battle of Gettysburg. Just prior to construction on the Brooklyn Bridge in 1869, Roebling was appointed chief engineer by his father, John Augustus. Not long after pro- moting his son, his father died from an injury he sustained while surveying the project. Washington was 32 at the time. To begin work on the towers, Roebling designed the pneumatic caissons: inverted, pressurized wooden boxes weighing 3,200 tons and measuring 170 feet x 102 feet x 14.5 feet high. While scores of masons worked above the surface of the East River building the piers that rested on the caissons; over 100 “Sandhogs” used picks and shovels to excavate the river bed below them. The increasingweight of the piers drove the caissons deeper as the excavators dug down to a suitable foundation - a depth of 78 feet on the New York side. Since proper decompression procedures were not understood at the time, Roebling ended up suffering from “Caisson Disease”, or the bends, along withmore than 100 of the workers. With his health shattered, he continued to oversee the construction from an apart- ment that overlooked the site. His wife, Emily Warren Roebling, in addition to functioning as his nurse during the remaining 11 years of the project, learned enough about bridge building to take over much of the day to day supervision of the construction. Roebling survived his wife Emily, remarried, and at age 84 again be- came president of the family business following the sudden death of his nephewwho had been serving as the president of the company. THE CANAL McCullough’s treatment of the Panama Canal was published five years later. It begins with the backdrop of the project begun by the French in 1881 to create a sea level canal connecting the Atlantic to the Pacific through the Central American Isthmus. At the beginning of the Twentieth Century, control of the project transitioned to the United States. The canal ultimately constructed by the U.S. benefited fromsome of the excavation performed by the French, but instead of a sea level passage, the canal would include a system of locks, dams and reservoirs to lift and lower vessels in their passage to the other ocean. Promenade on the Brooklyn Bridge c. 1899 Brooklyn Bridge c. 1901 ENGINEERS | continued on page 40 39