Bridges and Men by Joseph Gies

Author:Joseph Gies
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781787208353
Publisher: Papamoa Press
Published: 2017-11-29T16:00:00+00:00

Four operations were going on at once (Figure 47).

The work was pushed all autumn and on into the winter; a bitter cold spell filled the river with ice cakes, and for a period of several days the men were stranded at the pier; one of the barges, the Hewitt, was provided with blankets and rations for such an emergency. The day before Christmas, Eads succeeded in getting his most powerful tug, the Little Giant, out to the “Hotel de Hewitt,” where he found his sandhogs and construction gang in good spirits despite the cold. The ice subsided for a few days, then came back stronger than ever and threatened to smash the pier. Eads had built a breakwater against this danger; a mountain of ice piled against it. For a few days it was touch and go; then the weather warmed a little, the ice began to subside, and the threat passed. The men finally could travel back and forth between home and job again, and the work tempo picked up.

As the working chamber dug deeper and deeper, the air pressure inside slowly raised, to 20 pounds per square inch, to 25, to 30. Some of the men began to complain of stomach pains; one or two reported moments of fleeting paralysis. These occurred after work, when a shift emerged from the caisson. No particular alarm was felt. The men invented their own “cures”—bands of zinc and silver around wrists and ankles—for what they called the “Grecian bends,” after a picturesque fashion of the day in feminine posture. At a depth of 76 feet, with air pressure at 32 pounds, one man suffered such severe abdominal pains that he had to be hospitalized.

Apparently up to this moment Eads had never heard of caisson disease, the terrible affliction of compressed-air workers. Yet as early as 1839 a French engineer named Triger had observed the effects of compressed air on men working under pressure in the quicksand of the Loire. Another French engineer, Cézanne, noted non-fatal discomforts among his men working on bridge foundations in Hungary and Lithuania. Isambard Brunel, too, had encountered caisson disease under the Tamar, and had overcome it by reducing his working shifts. Two French mining engineers, Pol and Watelle, had made the important discovery that incidence of illness was proportionate to speed of decompression, and that a return to compression gave relief. An English doctor named Foley also had correctly prescribed slow decompression as a preventive. But scientific and medical news did not travel fast in the nineteenth century unless it had a direct connection with making money. The sorry story of compressed-air work—boldness, ignorance, tragedy—was acted out again and again on bridges and tunnels in Europe and America before the simple and effective solution was applied universally. Every engineer was on his own in that halcyon day of laissez-faire, and his men’s lives depended solely on his judgment and heart.

Eads noted that many of the men who suffered from the mysterious malady were underfed or alcoholic.

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