Securing Niagara (1852–55)

The Niagara contract was a fitting judgment on John’s career to date, and the bridge itself was a triumph, eliciting praise and admiration from all over the globe, for both its handsome Egyptian architecture and the soundness of its design. It took four years to build and was the world’s first railroad suspension bridge, or at least the first successful one, fully demonstrating the strength and effectiveness of the suspension plan for heavy-going freight. It also compared very favorably with Robert Stephenson’s recently completed Britannia Tubular Bridge, the British engineer’s rival solution to the problem of long-span railroad bridges. A lifelong, committed abolitionist who wrote extensively about the evils of slavery, John also appreciated the impact his bridge had (somewhat incidentally) on the institution of slavery. Harriet Tubman (among others) used John’s bridge numerous times in the late 1850s to lead runaway slaves out of the United States and into British Canada.

Economies of Scale (1848–51)

Between 1847 and 1852, John built four separate aqueducts for the Delaware and Hudson Canal; moved his home, family, and wire rope factory from western Pennsylvania to Trenton, New Jersey; secured the contract to build a huge railroad bridge over the Kentucky River; and continued to mount substantial campaigns to win contracts to span the Ohio at Wheeling and the Niagara Gorge. The four D&H spans were mini masterpieces of engineering and planning. Each structure was very different; each required new solutions to site-specific problems. One of the spans, the Delaware Aqueduct, exists to this day, the oldest suspension bridge in the United States and one of the oldest “modern” suspension bridges in the world. On the larger projects, John again lost out to his old rival Ellet on both the Wheeling and the Niagara spans.

And out to Western Pennsylvania (1831–32)

After a long and trying journey across the length of Pennsylvania, John found himself in Pittsburgh and decided to stay. “Pittsburgh meets all [our] demands more than any other [city],” John wrote home; “life and activity here are astonishing . . . it is the key to the West.” He began to look for a large parcel of land on which to begin a large-scale farming community. He found one about thirty miles north of Pittsburgh in Butler County and then started to write home to convince others to join him. That winter he composed a remarkable 101-page handwritten letter to a friend back in Mühlhausen. It is a remarkable record of his evolving thoughts on race, independence, freedom, equality, and the needs and aims and of his (as yet unbuilt and unplanned) utopian farming community.

Private Life, Public Works (1844–45)

Right as John was trying to establish his new business, Pittsburgh found itself in need of a new aqueduct to carry the Pennsylvania Canal over the Allegheny River. John got to work immediately: designing, promoting, corralling, and influencing. While waiting to hear about the bridge contract, John wrote a long, revealing letter home to his father, in which he pondered the nature of life and death, along with issues of matter and the soul. John’s philosophyowed much to Hegel’s Weltgeist (“world spirit”) and Ralph Waldo Emerson’s ideas on nature and the soul. John was certainly a man of strict science, but he was also a bit of a spiritual mystic, inclined to the hard lines of the Enlightenment as well as the soft textures of Romanticism. The work on the Allegheny Aqueduct was extremely difficult and the effort was massive, but all was proceeding well until a fire broke out on the other side of town.

Making Wire Rope and the Wire Rope Industry (1840–48)

After missing out on the Schuylkill Bridge contract, John turned his attention to manufacturing wire rope, an entirely new idea in the United States. John undertook an extensive campaign to have his ropes adopted on the Allegheny Portage Railroad. The effort had John recruiting advocates, dodging political shenanigans, fixing technical hitches, and marching up and down the Allegheny Mountains, and his efforts were successful. Slowly, as each new rope met the demands of the mountain, more and more of the inclines switched over and started to use John’s ropes, as did others in the haulage business. John’s successes made him rich and led to the establishment of the American wire rope industry, in the process helping drag elevators up and down new tall buildings; pull funiculars up steep hills; power rigs, derricks, and cranes all over the nation; hold up suspension bridges of prodigious length; and drive mass transit cable car systems all over the United States.

Internal Improvements (1838–41)

John left farming in the wake of the panic of 1837 and found work as a surveyor, eventually working on a series of canal projects around western Pennsylvania, where he met Charles Schlatter. Despite his evident ability and expertise, John was doing little more than grubbing around for piecemeal surveying work before linking up with Schlatter. In 1838, Pennsylvania placed Schlatter in charge of surveying three potential railroad routes across the state, and he immediately drafted John to help. While submitting his survey report to the state authorities in Harrisburg, John got embroiled with Charles Ellet in a competition to build the first long span suspension bridge in the United States, over the Schuylkill River in Philadelphia. Ellet won the contract, instituting a rivalry that would last much of the next twenty years.

Establishing Saxonburg (1832–37)

Over the following seven years, John planned the village of Saxonburg. Harried by his fear of debt and his abject failure as a farmer, John eventually decided against a communal settlement and for a massive sell-off. He sorted and surveyed and had much of the land parceled up and ready for sale soon after. Life in Saxonburg was difficult. Still, almost everyone made a go of it, except John. Despite all his assertions to the contrary, Saxonburg was a poor farming area, and John had no real knowledge or experience of agriculture, and he tried all sorts of bizarre schemes to avoid it—raising canaries, building a dye house—most of which he knew even less about. Displaying the strange, somewhat laughable side of his personality, John was quick to seize on a variety of fads and foolish ideas.

In Napoleon’s Shadow (1806–24)

John Roebling was born and raised in the medieval walled town of Mühlhausen in what is now central Germany during the chaos and destruction of the Napoleonic Wars, as a result of which he grew to hate chaos and disorder. The era influenced John in other significant ways. Once Napoleon had been packed off, two realities ruled the social landscape: repression of political dissent and the opening up of the education system. John chafed under the first and blossomed under the second. He attended the Mühlhausen gymnasium, newly converted to the tenets of the enlightened Realschule movement, before moving on to Ephraim Unger’s School of Mathematics in nearby Erfurt. There he flourished, becoming an excellent mathematician, surveyor, and draftsman and getting a start in philosophy, another lifelong passion. By the close of his time in Erfurt, John packed up and set off to the bright (gas) lights of Berlin.

Berlin and the Culture of Revolution (1824–25)

In Berlin, John came face to face with the Industrial Revolution. At the Building Academy, he took courses in a variety of subjects, most importantly on fledgling art and science of suspension bridge engineering. He was hooked, and he ended the year as one of the Building Academy’s best students. He also signed up for G. W. F. Hegel’s lectures on logic, and the experience transformed him. Hegel’s ideas helped form a system that embraced and explained the seemingly chaotic reality unfolding all over Europe. In Berlin, John shed his provincial outlook and his religiosity and embraced reason; following Hegel’s lead, he started to think for himself. Suffused with this spirit, he left Berlin to get some practical experience building roads and bridges in the Prussian province of Westphalia. He never returned to Berlin.

Introduction

A young German emigrant sets sail across the Atlantic Ocean toward the United States. He dreams of his new adoptive land, where he understands that success will depend upon him casting off the old and embracing the new. Luckily, his life up to this point has prepared him for this. Despite coming from a provincial backwater, he has embraced the modern world and seeks to establish his place in it. His life is reviewed as is the main themes of the book that is to follow: the need for order, harmony and balance amid a shifting world; a somewhat contradictory commitment to freedom; a genius and a visionary who was strangely attracted to fads and foolish trends.