These airtight chambers were pinned to the river’s floor by enormous granite blocks pressurized air was pumped in to keep water and debris out. To achieve a solid foundation for the bridge, workers excavated the riverbed in massive wooden boxes called caissons. Roebling had worked with his father on several bridges and had helped design the Brooklyn Bridge.
A boat smashed the toes on one of his feet, and three weeks later he died of tetanus. Just before construction began in 1869, Roebling was fatally injured while taking a few final compass readings across the East River. It would be the very first steel suspension bridge, boasting the longest span in the world: 1,600 feet from tower to tower. In 1867, on the basis of these achievements, New York legislators approved Roebling’s plan for a suspension bridge over the East River between Manhattan and Brooklyn. Meanwhile, he earned a reputation as a designer of suspension bridges, which at the time were widely used but known to fail under strong winds or heavy loads. Roebling addressed these problems by combining structural elements from previous bridge designs-including cable arrays and stiffening trusses. Using this model, Roebling successfully bridged the Niagara Gorge at Niagara Falls, New York, and the Ohio River in Cincinnati, Ohio.
Barnum led 21 elephants over the Brooklyn Bridge to prove that it was stable. He promoted the use of wire cable and established a successful wire-cable factory.ĭid you know? On May 17, 1884, P. He later moved to the state capital in Harrisburg, where he found work as a civil engineer. Born in Germany in 1806, he studied industrial engineering in Berlin and at the age of 25 immigrated to western Pennsylvania, where he attempted, unsuccessfully, to make his living as a farmer. John Augustus Roebling, the Brooklyn Bridge’s creator, was a great pioneer in the design of steel suspension bridges.
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