For years, I rode the train from Brooklyn to Manhattan with a view of the Brooklyn Bridge and the Manhattan skyline passing through the window. This is an excellent book covering the history of the Brooklyn bridge, development of engineering, and the influence of many interesting personalities.

The book The Great Bridge by David McCullough was a very detailed account of the long and troublesome building of the Brooklyn Bridge. It starts with John Roebling and his design and plans for the building of the Brooklyn Bridge. When he eventually passes away his son Washington Roebling takes over and continues where his father left off. Washington Roebling and his team encounter many different problems and political situation that add time and frustration to the total time it will take to build the bridge. This book was a little slow moving due to all of the details. There were many different people mentioned throughout the story and I had trouble following who was who, except for the main characters. I often found myself falling asleep because I had lost interest. Unless you are a true history person, then I would not recommend reading this book.

This is the true story of the building of the Brooklyn Bridge, which was an amazing feat for its time, constructed from 1869 to 1883. McCullough sets the historic context for the achievement, including the politics and culture of the time, its relationship to Tammany Hall, and what was known of decompression sickness (“the bends”). It includes biographies of John Roebling, the originator of the idea, and Washington Roebling, his son, who became the chief engineer and took over the project when his father died. It highlights the contributions of Emily Warren Roebling, who stepped in to help when her husband’s health declined.

McCullough is a fantastic storyteller. He brings history to life. It requires an interest in bridge construction techniques, which are explained in detail. It contains engineering principles, diseases, politics, safety, and public reception. Despite safety measures, accidents occurred, are these are described in terms of cause and effect. I have enjoyed other books by David McCullough, and this is one of his best in my opinion. I loved it.

Read for research, but it's an intriguing book either way. I've loved the story of Emily Roebling for a long time, and the Brooklyn Bridge was a tremendous feat of engineering. Got a little irritated with the timeline within chapters. We'd be at the day before Christmas, pouring concrete, and then two weeks earlier, dealing with a blowout in the caisson. Actual concrete dates might have distracted from the narrative, but they would have made the timeline a whole lot clearer.

Roebling should have gotten a shirt that said: "Spent My Time Building a Bridge, and All I Got Was A Lousy Case of The Bends!"

This is an engaging history of the building of the Brooklyn Bridge. The bridge was one of the greatest engineering feats of its time. The book goes into great detail about the bridge itself, its design and construction techniques.

But most of the book is devoted to the people involved. And the two people who were most involved were father and son, John and Washington Roebling. Thus, the book can also be classified as a biography. These two men had a great vision, and the skills and experience to bring the vision to a reality. John Roebling made the initial design. Washington Roebling carried it out. He was a very competent man; he was a hero during the American Civil War.

A lot of the book also centers on the huge amount of corruption that engulfed many political figures in New York. The immense undertaking gave plenty of opportunities for roguish figures to get rich. There is an amazing story about how a steel contractor delivered sub-par quality of steel. So, Roebling had inspectors go to the warehouse at the point where the steel was being sent out, to ensure that the steel met the specifications. But lo and behold, the steel that arrived at the bridge was found to still be sub-quality! It turned out that in mid-trip to the bridge site, the carriage containing high-grade steel had been switched with another containing low-grade steel!

Another interesting aspect of the story is how many of the workers who worked at great atmospheric pressure inside the caissons were subjected to the bends. At the time, the cause of this malady was unknown. It was finally realized that it could be alleviated by rising up to atmospheric pressure more slowly--but the rate was still too fast. Washington Roebling himself encountered a near-fatal exposure to the bends.

This is a well-researched, comprehensive history of the Brooklyn Bridge, and the men who worked on it, designed it, and managed it. It is also an insightful look at the politicians of the time. I recommend this book to all who are interested in a good history.

Good story about an impressive feat of engineering, but also about the corruption of Tammany Hall and Boss Tweed. An interesting (and perhaps unintended?) sub plot is how utterly dishonest the news media was in that day, yet how much influence over the people they had. The book is very well written with fascinating vignettes about the various politicians, engineers, and workers who were involved in some way (support, opposition, participation) with the project. It is largely a story about the father and son who designed and built the structure: John and Washington Roebling.

My only complaint is that McCullough sometimes spends pages describing some physical aspect of the work when a diagram would have helped immensely.

Four stars. Interesting read.

This is a non-fic about the construction of Brooklyn bridge, the longest suspension bridge in the world when completed and also much the tallest structure on the skyline of then-New York. I read it as a part of buddy reads for May 2022 at Non Fiction Book Club group.

The contents of the book can be spit thematically into three broad categories: [1] engineering & engineers; [2] politics & corruption and [3] curiosities about the Gilded age. The book isn’t written that way, it is more a chronological story from initial plans to great opening of the construction, with some diversions to tell a biographies of important characters or what happened as well during the project.

Engineering & Engineers is a story of John A. Roebling, the German-American genius of suspension bridges, who pushed for the creation of the bridge, but died of blood poisoning just before the work has begun; his eldest son Colonel Washington Roebling, who supervised the works, initially on site but remotely, after a mental/physical breakdown caused by one of the accidents during the lowering of the caisson that created the foundation for one of two towers; his wife, Emily Warren Roebling, who, despite no specialized education first become a messenger between her husband and people working on the project and later – the woman to go to in order to discuss many aspects of the project.

The engineering part describes what kinds of suspension bridges existed before, as well as main stages of the construction. I started with lowering the caissons in times before not only the cause and treatment of bends or caisson disease were unknown, but when there has been neither telephone nor electric lights, so people worked under the light of candles and communicated between the surface and depth with different mechanical contraptions. Then there is a spooling of wire, miles and miles of it (Each cable would contain just over 3,515 miles of wire and the wire in all four cables would come to more than 14,000 miles), the construction of towers, the joining of the bridge. There is a lot of specific details, like the debate about what steel (Bessemer or crucible) to use for wires, how the caissons were built, lowered, how they operated (e.g. on New York side where sand was the most common, they used narrow sand pipes extended down through the roof and into the chamber to within a foot or so of the work surface. If opened, such a pipe worked as a giant cleaner, sucking everything due to the differences in pressure: When the caisson was down about sixty feet, for example, the air was blasting out of the sand pipes with such force that fourteen men could stand in a circle around one pipe and shovel sand under it with all their strength and the sand would disappear as fast as they could shovel.

Politics & Corruption - the 1860s and 70s were the period of Democratic party machines, of Boss Tween and Tammany Hall, Common Council of New York destined was known as “The Forty Thieves.” The idea behind them was simple: get elected to receive cashbacks on public projects handed down by your office to people able to give you votes for re-elections or ‘feed’ new emigrants on budget money but so that they knew, who their provider is and voted as requested.

For example, several years prior to the time Tweed developed an interest in bridgebuilding, he had commenced a new County Courthouse on Chambers Street, just across the park from City Hall, or almost directly in line with where the New York entrance to the bridge was to be. The architect’s plans called for a three-story building, of iron and marble, in the style of a Palladian country house, and it was to cost, according to law, no more than a quarter of a million dollars. At the outset it had looked like a straightforward, relatively modest piece of business. But by 1868 it was still being built and rebuilt—and ever so slowly. The “city fathers” (Tweed’s people) had authorized some additional three million dollars to keep the job going (such an edifice certainly ought to be in keeping with the greatness of New York itself, Tweed would say), and there seemed no end to the number of people needed to work on the structure, or to keep it running smoothly. It took, for example, thirty-two full-time employees just to maintain the heating apparatus. By the time it would be finished, in 1871, Tweed’s courthouse would cost more than thirteen million dollars, or nearly twice the price paid for Alaska.

The longest bridge in the world cannot be cheap and therefore watered mouths of local politicians. They got the building company’s stock, prepared to have a nice boost to their wealth, but then Tweed’s ring fell, he was arrested and supplied a lot of incriminating evidence, newspapers, either in reformist fury or paid by interested parties started to actively discuss e.g. whether Roebling, as both the main engineer and a stockholder in the largest US wire-making company can be trusted in setting requirements for the wire. They took the supply contract from formally his company (he sold his stock, but his brothers were still owners) to J. Lloyd Haigh, contractor for the cable wire, who sold the more expensive wire and additionally had been perpetrating a colossal fraud: all wire leaving the factory was tested, but on route it was replaced with rejected wire and the good wire returned to the factory to pass the test (again).

Curiosities. these range from the spiritualist movement in the US at the time to pneumatic trains. The former is linked chiefly to Andrew Jackson Davis, “The Poughkeepsie Seer,” a pale, nearsighted son of an alcoholic shoemaker, who had become a clairvoyant, healer, and overnight sensation in 1844, at age seventeen, when he took his first “psychic flight through space” while under hypnosis in Poughkeepsie, New York. A New Haven preacher who took down everything he uttered while under the spell, all of which was turned into books, a strange mixture of occult mystery, science, or what passed for science, progressive social reform, intellectual skepticism, and a vaulting imagination. (One such book ran to thirty-four editions.) As to a pneumatic train, a brainchild of Alfred Ely Beach, who dug New York’s first subway and without Tweed or anyone else knowing about it, the idea was to have a cylindrical car, large enough to carry twenty-two people, and it would be sent plummeting back and forth along its track by an enormous, reversible fan mounted at one end of the tunnel.

The things ‘in the moment’ are interesting, but also is the idea Roebling voiced in the 1884:

To build his pyramid Cheops packed some pounds of rice into the stomachs of innumerable Egyptians and Israelites. We today would pack some pounds of coal inside steam boilers to do the same thing, and this might be cited as an instance of the superiority of modern civilization over ancient brute force. But when referred to the sun, our true standard of reference, the comparison is naught, because to produce these few pounds of coal required a thousand times more solar energy than to produce the few pounds of rice. We are simply taking advantage of an accidental circumstance.

Overall, a great deeply researched story written in flowing prose. Highly recommended.

A must read for any New Yorker and engineering enthusiast.

I had heard that David McCullough provides extensive and fascinating books about subjects that claim his attention so when I was looking for a book about the Brooklyn Bridge and found one by him, I figured it was worth a shot to see if the hype was deserving.

In my opinion, it definitely is righteous and provides an author that I will be looking into reading more of. Thanks to a friend that encouraged me to actually make the time to read this one.

On to the book - the Brooklyn Bridge is an icon of the American Progressive Era. Connecting the cities of Brooklyn and New York on Manhattan, it was designed by John A. Roebling and constructed under the guidance of his son, Washington Roebling, who suffered a debilitating case of the bends while sinking the Brooklyn caisson and was rarely ever seen in person, much less available to mentor the sites themselves. Of course, this was also the time of the Tammany Ring and all the greed and political corruption so the maneuvering to get the bridge construction and later the material contracts approved takes up a portion of the book.

McCullough goes into the details of the construction as well as the antics of the Bridge Company with the scandalous accusations of mismanagement and bribes during the entire 14 years of construction. Of course, many times, individuals on the company board attempted to remove the homebound Roebling or accused him of impropriety as the family company was considered the one of the best wire manufacturers in the world.

The book ends with lists of details regarding the bridge - miles of cable, height of the towers, weight of a tower, and so on which can be interesting but I would have appreciated more modern photos or detailed line drawings instead of the artists' portrayals from newspapers at the time.

Just for fun, I looked up what the final rounded cost of $15,000,000 in 1885 dollars would be today - even at $447,075,773., it would have been a bargain as the economic growth that it provided to the city of New York back then and even today would be well worth the cost.

Seriously, fascinating and absorbing. Certainly know more about the bridge than likely many of those that cross it every day. Maybe if I ever return to NYC, I'll have to make a point to walk across the Bridge instead of do some other touristy thing.

2022-109

This took me awhile but it was well worth finishing. I can't wait to go walk the Brooklyn Bridge again after learning so much about it!

McCullough has done a tremendous amount of detailed research for this historical account of the difficult construction of the Brooklyn Bridge. I have traveled over the bridge many times, but his description of the construction has left me wanting to go back to this famous, iconic structure. The author kept my attention throughout, blending interesting personal insights into the builders' family lives, and the intricate construction trade that was so heavily dominated by corrupt politics from start to finish on this great project. Highly recommended.