When Emily Roebling walked across the Brooklyn Bridge on May 24th, 1883, the first person to cross its entire span, she capped a family saga equal parts triumph and tragedy, a story that began sixteen years earlier when her father-in-law, German-American engineer John Augustus Roebling, began design work on the bridge. Roebling had already built suspension bridges over the Monongahela River in Pittsburgh, the Niagara River between New York and Canada, and over the Ohio River between Cincinnati and Covington, Kentucky. But the bridge over the East River was to be something else entirely. As Roebling himself said, it “will not only be the greatest bridge in existence, but it will be the greatest engineering work of the continent, and of the age.”
New York City officials may have had little reason to think so in the mid-1860s. “Suspension bridges were collapsing all across Europe,” notes the TED-Ed video above by Alex Gendler. “Their industrial cables frayed during turbulent weather and snapped under the weight of their decks.” But the overcrowding city needed relief. An “East River Bridge Project” had been in the works since 1829 and was seen as more necessary with each passing decade. Despite their misgivings, the authorities were willing to trust Roebling with a hybrid design that combined methods used by both suspension and cable-stayed bridges. Two years later, he was dead, the result of a tetanus infection contracted after he lost several toes in a dock accident.
