emphasize the possibilities of wire, John A. Roebling, protagonist of the wire bridge idea, advanced a proposal to connect New York and Long Island by

idents had fought the East River in profitable, if archaic, ferryboats too long to b

dividends. The vicious winter of 1866-7, coldest, bitterest, longest the cities have ever known, wrung forth at last a cry for relief. They could wrap themselves up against the weather, but no weight of woolens could turn the shafts of rid

was building wire bridges everywhere, and it began to look as though there was some body of truth in t

uestion a famous engineer who favored the wire type was as

replied, "because

AL CHARTE

ing was appointed engineer. Three months afterward he submitted his report and estimates, which were examined and app

OF JOHN

caused his death. But his work had been well done, and his son and associate, Col. Washin

of acceptance, the pathway of his successor, called without warning to take over res

F CONSTRUC

PE IN T

, punctuated with changes and problems and complications, but it went forward. The landmarks of a bygone age, old houses of historic memory on the water fronts of both cities, vanished silently and where they had been, by and by there grew piles of masonry to form the approaches. From the huge caissons over against either shore rose the towers, tall and grim, which were to carry the cables. In due time they stood complete, with their broa

DER TOWERS CARRY

In Harper's Magazine for May, 1883, now itself yellowed by age, is an exhaustive article concerning the Brooklyn Bridge, in which one is told

e in the towers, the foundations and the long expanses of stone work, which stretching inland nearly a thousand feet, serve to guard and strengthen the anchorage for the cables which are the working force. The rest is wire, for the most part;

ly impossible. What traveler over those high-hung roadways ever stops to ask himself how those great round cables, stretched in long, inverted arches

EAT CABLES

traveling eternally to Brooklyn and back, up over the top of one tower, down in a long curve above the tideway, up to the other tower and down again, to be gripped and carried by links,

y make practically no strain on the towers save to sustain their weight. Another is that the long storm cables that radiate downward from the top of the towers to the bridge floor, for a space of four hundred feet inside and outside each tower, are themselves calculated to sustain, if need be, the imposed weight for that distance. So that th

CABLES ACROSS

ng across it. The beginning was simple-as simple and prosaic in a way as the hitching of a horse-in principle. It began with wire rope. A scow with a coil of three-quart

HE FREIGHT CAR SHORT

ulleys at each end. An endless belt or "traveler," revolving by steam power, now stretched from city to city, and on a day in August, that lives yet in the memory of every man who was there, E. F. Farrington, the master mechanic of the project, who was a veteran of Niagara and the Ohio Bridge, set out to show the workmen, who on this slender aerial were to

s hoarse, the steam whistles of the harbor shrieked to the sky the tidings

in devils of Contraction and Expansion. The tensions all had to be secured in absolutely uniform weather. A determination made when the sun was shining on one part of the bridge and not on another might have thrown the whole calculat

le neither small nor agile, has a trick in common with the minute a

GROWS TOWAR

abric grew toward completion, hung practically in two sections, which all the world nowadays doesn't know, with an expansion joint connecting them in the middle to absorb th

n 1883 the day of realization came. Wire was king. Doubters and malcontents murmured for a time, but little by little subsided. The opening of the bridge was one of those memorable days of which New York has had so many in

NNING OF

warming people. Even when they saw they wouldn't believe it; many of them mounted to its span with their hearts in their mouths. There had been a world of carping and prophecy of disaster. A public that clutched at novelty as an addict does for stimulant could not assimilate the idea that there could be safety in wire where such enormous weight was laid upon it. Its f

of time and tide and wind and wear, and stood them all so well tha

BRIDGES T

the East River, as the city's life has spread northward. For the Williamsburg the Roebling firm furnished the wire and installed the cables.

rrounded the earlier creation will have worn away, or people the world over cease to speak of it with wonder and a certain measure of awe. Anybody, perhaps