Brooklyn Bridge ca. 1903
Opened in 1883, the Brooklyn Bridge ushered in the era of the new metropolis, closing the chapter had been a compact unified, "walking" city. Extended routes of daily travel and multiple neighborhoods for dwelling, working, shopping, entertainment, and all other aspects of the urban quotidian became the norm for most New Yorkers thereafter.
As the first twisted-steel cable (the cables measure 15 3/4" in diameter) bridge and the first span bridge of such prodigious length, the Brooklyn Bridge inaugurated a new era of modern bridge building. All bridges built after it- the Manhattan and Williamsburg, the George Washington, the Golden Gate, and others - derived much of their engineering methods from this project. Additionally, the Brooklyn bridge, referred to when it opened as the "Eighth Wonder of the World," facilitated metropolitan consolidation; this, in turn, contributed to a widening sense of regional identity, underscoring the commercial and sociological importance of the bridges themselves.
In the 1840s, German-born engineer John Roebling developed a cable made of twisted steel wire, the strongest and most resilient technique ever devised for this kind of bridge construction. The new cable enabled the construction of the longest bridge ever known. Improved methods for sinking the pneumatic caissons - the huge airtight boxes of compressed air provided for workers excavating beneath the river beds- were developed during this project.
In 1869, while John Roebling was trying to determine the location of the Brooklyn tower, his leg was crushed by an incoming ferry. Roebling died from the resulting gangrene. He was succeeded as project director by his son, Colonel Washington A. Roebling. In the summer of 1872, Washington became incapacitated by decompression illness, also known as the bends or caisson disease. His wife, Emily Warren Roebling, oversaw the last ten years of the bridge's construction in what may be a unique instance of a woman in the bridge world. It became and remains a major New York City icon.
