The Great Bridge by David McCullough Read Free Book Online Page B

Principal Assistant to the Chief Engineer of the state, a man named Charles L. Schlatter, and his report to Schlatter included not only full details on the grades, embankments, bridges, and tunnels required, but a number of prophetic observations about the locale around the village of Johnstown, where one of the nation’s principal iron and steel industries would one day rise. “The iron ore on the Laurel Hill is only waiting for means of transportation to be conveyed to the rich coal basins below, where also limestone is to be had in quantity and, moreover, where an abundance of water power can be furnished by the never-failing waters of the beautiful mountain stream…and certainly capitalists could hardly find a more eligible situation for starting mammoth furnaces on the largest scale…”
    At Johnstown he also became familiar with the workings of the newly built Portage Railroad, a system of long, inclined planes devised to haul canalboats up and over the Alleghenies, between Hollidaysburg at the foot of the eastern slope and Johnstown at the foot of the western slope. It was popularly thought to be one of the engineering marvels of the age and Roebling was fascinated by it. He also decided, after a good deal of study, that it could be greatly improved by dispensing with the immense hemp hawsers then in use. These were about nine inches around, more than a mile long in some cases and cost nearly three thousand dollars. They also wore out in relatively short time and had to be replaced or, as happened more than once, they snapped in two, sending their loads crashing down the mountainside. In one such accident two men had been crushed to death.
    Roebling proposed to replace the hawsers with an iron rope just an inch thick, a product not made in the United States then, but which he had read about in a German periodical. Such a rope, he said, would be stronger, last longer, and be much easier to handle. Apparently he was the only one who took the idea seriously, but he was told to go ahead and try if he had such confidence in it—at his own risk and expense.
    He began fashioning his new product at Saxonburg some time in the summer of 1841, using the old ropewalk system on a long level meadow behind the church he had built soon after finishing his house. The wire, purchased from a mill at Beaver Falls, northwest of Pittsburgh, was spliced inside a small building and wound onto reels for “running out.” Separate strands of wire were laid up first, then twisted into the larger rope by means of a crude machine he had devised, which, like everything else in the process, was powered by hand.
    A six-hundred-foot rope finished “in the best style,” as he said, was tried out at Johnstown in September and it was a failure. Someone hired by the hemp rope interests had secretly cut it at a splice, with the result that it broke during the test. But the sabotage was discovered, Roebling was given a second chance, and his rope worked with such success that it was soon adopted for the entire Portage system. Orders began coming in from other canals with similar inclined planes. The rope was wanted for dredging equipment, for pile drivers, for use in coal mines. Roebling published an article on it in the Railroad Journal. “His ambition now became boundless,” his son would write. Production in Saxonburg picked up sharply, as “farmers were metamorphosed into mechanics and an unlooked-for era of prosperity dawned.”
    “About eight men were needed for strand making,” according to Washington Roebling, “but sixteen or eighteen were required for laying up the rope. These were recruited for a day or two from the village and adjacent farm—quite a task—in which I took my full share. The men were always glad to see me because it meant good pay and free meals for days. Work was from sunrise to sunset—three meals, with a snack of bread and butter in between—including whiskey. Meals were served at the house. My poor, overworked