John Augustus Roebling
John Roebling was a German-born engineer who emigrated to the United States in the 1830s, intent on establishing a Utopian community in Pennsylvania. The community he started was named Saxonburg, in Butler County Pennsylvania. Roebling tried his hand at agrarian pursuits, found them unsatisfying, and by the end of the 1830s was working surveying railroad routes. Roebling had trained as an engineer in his native Prussia, and in the early 1840s, he was working in that discipline, manufacturing wire rope in Saxonburg and corresponding with bridge designers.
By the end of the 1840s, Roebling was designing and building suspension bridges across canals and rivers, including the first suspension bridge over the Monongahela River at Pittsburgh. In 1851, he began construction of a railroad bridge over the Niagara River, connecting the New York Central Railroad with Canada’s Great Western. This project was still underway when he began the construction of a stone-anchored suspension bridge across the Ohio River at Cincinnati. Roebling’s bridges were considered engineering marvels and although the work on several of his projects was halted due to the Civil War, his business was financially successful.
In 1867, the bridge at Cincinnati was completed (it still stands and carries automobile and pedestrian traffic between Cincinnati and Covington, Kentucky) and Roebling began design work on what would be his masterwork, a suspension bridge, modeled after the Cincinnati bridge, to connect Brooklyn and Manhattan. The Cincinnati Bridge was the longest suspension bridge in the world when it was completed, and Roebling believed that the engineering principles used in it would work for his Brooklyn Bridge as well.
Roebling was surveying possible sites for the spot where the Brooklyn Bridge would span the East River in late June 1869. While at Fulton Ferry Roebling was standing on the dock when a ferry arrived and his foot was crushed by the ferry against the pier. The injury to his right foot was severe enough to require the amputation of several toes, which Roebling insisted be done without the use of anesthetic, which he distrusted. Against the advice of his doctors, he elected to use a fad curative of the day known as the water cure to recover.
The water cure consisted of the continuous flow of water across an injury or open wound. Roebling rapidly developed tetanus around the damaged tissue, but refused any further treatment by doctors, and within less than a month he was dead from the infection which ensued from the accident. Accidents would take many more lives during the construction of the Brooklyn Bridge he envisioned, the construction of which was taken over by his son, Washington Roebling. His grandson Washington Roebling II would die in another accident, that of the Titanic striking an iceberg in 1912.