Engineering

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.

Sir Benjamin Baker: Born on 31 March 1840 in Keyford, now part of Frome, Somerset, England, United Kingdom. Deceased on 19 May 1907 in Pangbourne, England, United Kingdom.
Education: Apprentice at the ironworks Price & Fox, Neath Abbey (South Wales)
1862 - 1898.
Works in John Fowler's office; directs the construction of the London underground, 1867. Refitting work on three Telford Bridges: Menai Straits Bridge, Buildwas Bridge, and the Severn River Bridge near Gloucester; Cooperation on the Encyclopedia Britannica, 1882 - 1890.
Designs the Firth of Forth Bridge with John Fowler; Asswan Dam on the Nile

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.

Today, we meet the father and son who built the Brooklyn Bridge. The University of Houston's College of Engineering presents this series about the machines that make our civilization run, and the people whose ingenuity created them.

For me, the story of John Roebling begins in Kentucky, not far from where I used to live. On Sunday afternoons my wife and I would take our kids to see Old High Bridge over the Kentucky River. A plaque credits John Roebling with having started this old bridge in 1853. Actually, the bridge there today has been entirely reconceived. Still, the glorious spider web of steel emerging out of the quiet hilly isolation around it powerfully evokes Roebling's sense of design.

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.

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."

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.

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.

As a father and son, John and Washington Roebling were the foremost American engineers of suspension bridge construction in the nineteenth century. John Roebling was born in Muhlhausen, Thuringia in 1806. While in school he developed an interest in both metaphysics and in bridge building. He graduated with a degree in civil engineering from the Royal Polytechnic Institute of Berlin in 1826.

In 1831 Roebling and his brother immigrated to Pennsylvania to farm. When this venture failed, Roebling accepted the position of Pennsylvania state engineer. In this position, he surveyed and supervised the construction of canals, locks, and dams.

In 1841 Roebling invented the twisted wire-rope cable, an invention which foreshadowed the use of wire cable supports for the decks of suspension bridges. Six years later he established a factory in New Jersey for the manufacture of this cable. Because the cable could support long spans and extremely heavy loads, Roebling quickly gained a reputation as a quality bridge engineer.

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.