Chief Engineer by Erica Wagner

Author:Erica Wagner [Wagner, Erica]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

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aThe masonry of the Brooklyn Bridge is composed of granite and limestone. The towers are mostly limestone below the water, and granite above. The anchorages are mostly limestone—with 650 cubic yards of granite blocks placed on top of the anchor plates.

bThe difference of a foot, between the report and the label, may allow for a few inches either way.

11

“I have been quite sick for some days”

Andrew Smith’s 1878 essay on “the Caisson Disease” is perspicacious, though not perfect in its understanding of the new syndrome it describes. But the copy held at RPI is annotated: down along the sides of certain paragraphs there are fine pencil lines of emphasis; and then, every so often, words written in the margin. It is clearly Washington’s hand. He highlighted certain aspects of the condition’s character: the way in which the increased pressure of air in the caisson changes a bass voice “to a shrill treble”; the way in which the heart rate was often increased; the way in which sweat would not evaporate down below; the way the appetite was greater after exposure to the compressed air.

There is no way of knowing when Washington made these annotations. One suspects that it was much later in his life, when he was composing his memoir of his father’s and his own life, and when he was combing through his papers in the knowledge that one day others would comb through them, too. And until the East River Bridge was finished, the work—and his health—would allow little time for reflection. But even at the height of his anxiety over the sinking of the great caissons, Washington did not neglect his work on behalf of the family firm, just as, when he was at work in Cincinnati, he had mailed out company circulars all over the country. Now, he sent off plans for a bridge of three spans of 435 feet each to John W. Glenn, the mayor of Austin, Texas, judging that the construction would cost $85,875; he recommended one Charles McDonald to actually build the thing, as he himself was somewhat preoccupied: “He is a reliable man in every respect … My own individual time is too entirely taken up with the construction of the East River Suspension Bridge.” There are estimates for a bridge out in Ohio; and on May 15—just three days before the New York caisson settled on its final resting place on the East River’s bed—he corresponded with Mr. Wilkins, from Wilkins and Davison engineers in Pittsburgh, who was wishing to make alterations to the Allegheny Bridge in Pittsburgh so that locomotives might cross. Washington’s reply is a considered analysis of the problem arising from the concentration of the load on the bridge.

His home life, his personal life, is elusive. His son John was a toddler now; his youngest brother, Edmund—whose life became a mysterious tragedy, childhood damage never repaired—was in his charge. Edmund had been sent to boarding school, as Washington had been as a boy, in 1867,

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