John A. Roebling

Roebling was born June 12, 1806, in Mühlhausen, then part of Prussia, and trained at the Bauakademie in Berlin, where he sat in lectures by the philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and filled notebooks with drafts of a philosophy system he never finished. Prussia after Napoleon offered little room for an ambitious engineer without noble birth, so in 1831 he sailed for America with his brother and a group of fellow settlers and founded the farming town of Saxonburg, Pennsylvania. He surveyed canals and railroads for hire. Then he remembered a magazine article about wire rope, tried spinning it himself on the farm around 1841, and discovered a business where he had expected only a curiosity.

The wire rope works moved to Trenton, New Jersey, and the bridges got longer: an aqueduct over the Allegheny, a span across the Monongahela at Pittsburgh, four canal aqueducts, the Niagara Falls Suspension Bridge in 1855, a bridge at Cincinnati that was in 1867 the longest suspension span in the world. In 1867 New York and Brooklyn hired him to connect their cities, and he designed towers taller than anything built in America and a main span nearly 600 feet longer than his Cincinnati record. He never built it himself. That work fell to his son, and this page is about the father who did not live to see it finished.

On June 28, 1869, while he was fixing the exact site for the Brooklyn tower, a ferry crushed his right foot against a piling at the Fulton Street slip. Surgeons wanted to amputate the mangled toes. Roebling, a lifelong believer in hydropathy and his own theories of self-cure, refused conventional treatment and instead had his son pour water over the wound for hours at a stretch, hoping to flush out the infection himself. Tetanus set in. He spent his final days rigid with muscle spasms, unable to speak, communicating by squeezing hands, and died at his son Washington's house in Brooklyn Heights on July 22, 1869, twenty-four days after the accident and fourteen years before a single cable of his bridge would be strung.

Washington Roebling took over as chief engineer, developed caisson disease supervising the underwater foundations, and spent much of the next decade managing construction from a sickroom window through his wife Emily, who carried his instructions to the site. The Brooklyn Bridge opened May 24, 1883, with President Chester Arthur and New York Governor Grover Cleveland in attendance. John Roebling's company kept making cable long after the family sold it, supplying the wire for the Golden Gate Bridge in the 1930s. A Roebling museum opened on the old Trenton works site in 2010, and Mühlhausen, Germany, still marks his childhood there with a school bearing his name.

John A. Roebling's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Niagara Falls Suspension Bridge building
  An 825-foot clear span, the first working railway suspension bridge 1855
• Wire rope works, Trenton, New Jersey company
  Moved from Saxonburg, later John A. Roebling's Sons 1848
• John A. Roebling Suspension Bridge, Cincinnati-Covington building
  World's longest suspension span at completion 1867
• Brooklyn Bridge design building
  Chief engineer, 1867 to 1869, construction began six months after his death 1869

• June 12, 1806 aged 0 Born in Mühlhausen, Prussia
• 1824 aged ~18 Enrolls at the Bauakademie in Berlin Attends lectures by the philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel.
• 1831 aged ~25 Emigrates to America and founds Saxonburg, Pennsylvania
• 1841 aged ~35 Begins manufacturing wire rope at Saxonburg
• 1848 aged ~42 Moves the wire rope works to Trenton, New Jersey
• 1855 aged ~49 Completes the Niagara Falls Suspension Bridge
• 1867 aged ~61 Completes the Cincinnati-Covington bridge, then the longest suspension span in the world
• June 28, 1869 aged 63 Crushes his foot in a ferry accident while surveying the Brooklyn tower site
• July 22, 1869 aged 63 Dies of tetanus in Brooklyn Heights Fourteen years before a cable of his bridge would be strung.

• Washington Roebling 1837–1926
  Engineer who oversaw the construction of the Brooklyn Bridge after his father's death. son and successor
• Chester A. Arthur 1829–1886
  Twenty-first president who signed the Pendleton Act establishing merit-based federal hiring. attended the bridge opening
• Grover Cleveland 1837–1908
  Only president elected to nonconsecutive terms who championed limited government and the gold standard. spoke at the bridge opening
• Andrew Carnegie 1835–1919
  Steel magnate who built one of the largest steel empires in history and later became a major philanthropist. Gilded Age industrial contemporary