Technology and Culture

Opened for traffic in 1883, the Brooklyn Bridge is revered by many as a world-class exemplar of structural engineering. Its history is well known, thanks to David McCullough's The Great Bridge (Simon & Schuster, 1972) and to other suspension bridge historians, including David Billington, Henry Petroski, and Don Sayenga. And people commonly know that, while John Roebling designed the awe-inspiring crossing of the East River in New York City, his death in the summer of 1869 left the span's construction in the hands of his son and daughter-in-law, Washington and Emily. Less well known, and heretofore less examined, are the fulsome life experiences of John Roebling that preceded his conception of the Brooklyn Bridge masterpiece.

At times, Richard Haw's Engineering America may seem overly detailed, but it succeeds as a remarkable work of primary source scholarship, one that brings Roebling to life in all his human complexity. As part of this, it also conveys a sense of the world that Roebling inhabited, beginning with his 1806 birth in Muhlhausen, Thuringia, through his emigration to the United States in 1831, and throughout his life as a proud American until his death in Brooklyn at age sixty-three.

For those most interested in Roebling's work as a designer/builder of suspension bridges, Engineering America will not disappoint. The book covers his introduction to bridge engineering in 1820s Germany, through his first bridges in 1840s Pittsburgh, and onto to the prosaic—yet enormously effective—aqueducts, built to carry coal barges for the Delaware and Hudson Canal Company. In fact, his 1850 Lackawaxen Aqueduct remains in place as a National Park Service-protected National Historic Site. Probably the most interesting discussions of bridge projects involve Roebling's work promoting and building the international railroad crossing at Niagara Falls, opened for service in 1855, and the Covington and Cincinnati Bridge across the Ohio River that was started prior to the Civil War but not completed until late 1866. Planning and financing for this latter project was particularly complicated because it connected a slave state (Kentucky) with a free state (Ohio) and engaged Roebling in a multifaceted political maelstrom reflecting the complex character of antebellum American life. For the record, Roebling was unabashedly pro-Union and antislavery.

A great strength of Haw's analysis derives from his engagement with the cultural, social, and economic context of Roebling's life, including his education at the Muhlhausen Gymnasium, Unger's School of Mathematics at Erfurt, and Berlin's Bauakademie. While in Berlin, he also attended [End Page 1266] many lectures by the renowned philosopher Georg Hegel. By the late 1820s, Roebling had wearied of the engineering opportunities open to him in Germany, and in the spring of 1831, he embarked for America with other like-minded emigres; he settled in rural Saxonburg, Pennsylvania, and after failing as a farmer, found commercial success in the manufacture of wire rope and, soon thereafter, in the building of wire rope suspension bridges. For Roebling, America was indeed the land of opportunity, and he quickly came to champion its place as an international leader in advancing technological progress.

Mixed in with this treatment of Roebling as a politically savvy engineering entrepreneur, Haw describes his complicated family life and, perhaps surprisingly given the technological rationalism that underlay his superlative bridge designs, pays close attention to both Roebling's manic devotion to hydrotherapy (or the "water cure" professed to remedy any and all ills) and his fascination with spiritualism and séances for communicating with the dead. A great engineer infatuated with spiritualism? This may seem incongruous when viewed through a twenty-first-century lens, but it is a reminder of how Roebling, despite his myriad engineering achievements, remained embedded in a nineteenth-century culture that, to a modern eye, was not always all that modern.

At times, Haw's prose can be rather dense, and readers might well muse on how best to edit down the...