Secondary Source

The John A. Roebling's Sons company and its employees played an important role in the lives of many, if not all, Americans with thier power to make the impossible, possible and the impractical, practical.

This web site tells the story of one man from Prussia and his family, the people who worked for them, and the communities they built. The archive is mostly Primary Source material and is divided into four sections. For an introduction to the Company, check out The Roebling Story a history published by the company on its Centennial Anniversery. Then check out General History of the Roebling Company for more on the company and the family that built it.

Some further reference should now be made to two men whose names are identified with the rise and progress of the railway system. George Stephenson was born in a small cottage, in the village of Wylam, on the banks of the Tyne, near Newcastle. He was the son of a collier, and had early to labour for his share of the household bread. Heavy were the demands upon him. When " too young to stride across the furrow " he went to plough. Then we find him picking bats and dross from the coal-heaps, at twopence a day, and he was still so small that he often hid himself when the overseer passed, lest he shculd be thought too little to earn his wages. Shortly after he entered his teens he worked as brakesman on a tramway, and subsequently became stoker to an engine on an estate of Lord Ravensworth, often having to rise at one and two o'clock in the morning, and to work till a late hour at night. Thankful in the receipt of a wage of a shilling a day, he declared, when this amount was doubled, that he was "a man for life."

Few American cities can claim a landmark as distinctive as Cincinnati's Suspension Bridge. The Covington and Cincinnati Bridge, in 1984 renamed after designer John A. Roebling, and all the while called by locals simply "The Suspension Bridge", has been a symbol of the city since its opening in December of 1866. Images of the bridge can be seen today in all parts of the city hanging in homes, offices, restaurants, bars, waiting rooms, and as backdrops for the local television news. More than just a nostalgic decoration, the old bridge remains an important river crossing for thousands of cars and buses each day.

...The bridge opened to pedestrians in December 1866, and the 1,057ft. main span was at that time the longest in the world, surpassing the Wheeling, WV suspension bridge (1849). Not only was the Cincinnati Suspension Bridge the world's longest, but it was also the first to utilize both vertical suspenders and diagonal stays fanning from either tower. This advance was next seen on the Brooklyn Bridge (also designed by John Roebling), which surpassed the Cincinnati bridge in length and almost every other statistical category in 1883.

Among the features of Letchworth State Park that attract attention and stand out in the memory bank of visitors of all ages is not part of the Park at all but is the Erie High Bridge. This railroad bridge is still in active use today, and is the same bridge, with some renovations to allow heavier trains, that was built after the equally famous wooden structure burned. The origin of this bridge leads us to study a very interesting man -- the engineer who designed the bridge, George Shattuck Morison. My reason for use of this title will become more clear as you read of his accomplishments.

An engineer by training, Eiffel founded and developed a company specializing in metal structural work, whose crowning achievement was the Eiffel Tower. He devoted the last thirty years of his life to his experimental research.

Born in Dijon in 1832, he graduated from the Ecole Centrale des Arts et Manufactures in 1855, the same year that Paris hosted the first world's Fair. He spent several years in the South West of France, where he supervized work on the great railway bridge in Bordeaux, and afterwards he set up in his own right in 1864 as a "constructor", that is, as a business specializing in metal structural work. His outstanding career as a constructor was marked by work on the Porto viaduct over the river Douro in 1876, the Garabit viaduct in 1884, Pest railway station in Hungary, the dome of the Nice observatory, and the ingenious structure of the Statue of Liberty. It culminated in 1889 with the Eiffel Tower.

John Roebling was enthusiastic.

"No other part of the East River offers a locality so favorable to bridging," the great engineer wrote to the New York businessmen who proposed building a span to link Manhattan and Long Island.

But the East River bridge that so interested Roebling was not the Brooklyn Bridge that would be the cornerstone of his enduring fame. This span -- proposed in 1856, more than a decade before the Brooklyn Bridge project took form in 1867 -- was what would become the Queensboro Bridge.

Upper Delaware Scenic and Recreational River is the home of the oldest existing wire suspension bridge in the United States — the Delaware Aqueduct, or Roebling Bridge as it is now known. Begun in 1847 as one of four suspension aqueducts on the Delaware and Hudson Canal, it was designed by and built under the supervision of John A. Roebling, future engineer of the Brooklyn Bridge.

Portions of the D & H Canal, including the Delaware Aqueduct, were designated a National Historic Landmark in 1968. The Delaware Aqueduct is also designated a National Civil Engineering Landmark.

...A German immigrant, and graduate of the Royal Polytechnic School of Berlin, Roebling came to the United States in 1831. It was not until 1845 that he built his first suspension structure. From 1845 until his death in 1869, he designed five major suspension bridges. Two — the Cincinnati-Covington Bridge and the Brooklyn Bridge — are still standing.

On June 12, 1806, John A. Roebling, civil engineer and designer of the Brooklyn Bridge, was born in Muehlhausen, Prussia. The Brooklyn Bridge, Roebling's greatest achievement, spans the East River to connect Manhattan with Brooklyn. For nearly a decade after its completion, the bridge, with a main span of 1595 feet, was the longest suspension bridge in the world. Steel wire cable, invented and manufactured by Roebling, made the structure possible.

When the Brooklyn Bridge was opened you had to pay three cents to cross it until it was paid for. When they opened the bridge everybody went to see it..It took them 14 years to build the Brooklyn bridge.

Villard de Honnecourt is known only through a portfolio of 33 parchment leaves containing approximately 250 drawings preserved in Paris (Bibl. nat. de France, MS. Fr. 19093). There is no record of him in any known contract, guild register, inscription, payment receipt, tax record, or any other type of evidence from which the names of medieval artisans are learnt. Villard's fame is due to the uniqueness of his drawings and 19th-century inventiveness in crediting him with having "erected churches throughout the length and breadth of Christendom" without any documentary evidence that he designed or built any church anywhere, or that he was in fact an architect.

Who Villard was, and what he did, must be postulated from his drawings and the textual addenda to them on 26 of the 66 surfaces of the 33 leaves remaining in his portfolio. In these sometimes enigmatic inscriptions Villard gave his name twice (Wilars dehonecort [fol. 1v]; Vilars dehoncort [fol. 15r]), but said nothing of his occupation and claimed not a single artistic creation or monument of any type. He addressed his portfolio, which he termed a "book," to no one in particular, saying (fol. 1v) that it contained "sound advice on the techniques of masonry and on the devices of carpentry . . . and the techniques of representation, its features as the discipline of geometry commands and instructs it."

The first iron bridge was constructed in 1779 at Coalbrookdale, a cast-iron arch. Cast iron then began to replace stone, quite successfully in arch bridges, but the attempt to use cast-iron beams ended in the failure of Robert Stephenson's Dee Bridge. Thereafter, cast iron was used for compressive members only, and engineers turned to wrought iron as a tougher, more reliable material, using it first in massive tubular girders riveted together from the small plates which were all that were available at the time. Wrought-iron link chains were used for suspension bridges by Telford and Brunel.

In the United States, iron was expensive and largely imported from Britian because of the primitive state of the domestic iron industry. Wood, however, was abundant and cheap, and it was good hardwood that made an excellent material of construction. Wood, therefore, was the material most often used for even major bridges, with spans greater than 50 feet. We are not talking here of the trestles and king-post trusses used for minor bridges, but bridges that crossed the rivers and gorges that abounded. Two kinds of bridges were in common use, the lattice truss and the trussed arch, of which there were as many varieties as there were builders. Bridge builders were self-taught craftsmen and amateurs, for the most part.