John A. Roebling, the German civil engineer best known for the design of the Brooklyn Bridge and the invention of wire-rope suspension, was born in the city of Muhlhausen on June 12, 1806.
John grew up in Muhlhausen, where characteristic traits of his designs are evident in the existing architecture. The strains of the Gothic style, evident in building designs, are all that John believed to be beautiful and durable in architecture.
At the age of 14 Roebling got the title of a Masterbuilder. It was apparent very early on that Roebling was going to be a genius and his mother, Friederike Dorothea Roebling, read the signs correctly. She arranged for young John to attend the Royal Polytechnic Institute in Berlin. There John studied architecture and engineering under masters like Rabe and Sluter, while also gaining some grounding in bridge construction, foundation construction, hydraulics, language, and philosophy. It was also there that he was acquainted with great geniuses like Dietleyn and Eytelwein. He graduated from the institute in 1826 as a qualified civil engineer. One thing that not many people know is that John at that time was also under the tutorship of the great German thinker Georg Hegel. In no time Roebling became Hegel’s pet student and completed his 2,000 page thesis on the conceptualization of the universe.
Only a year prior to Roebling’s arrival in the US, Andrew Jackson had sanctioned $100 million to be engaged in public construction projects like roads, railway lines, bridges, and canals. This was largely because manufacturing units in the east had to be efficiently connected to the ready markets in the west. The only way to do this was to build an extensive transport network. This was meant to promote and protect national interests.
The canal boats from Philadelphia had to be lugged on to railroads to get to the other side of the Allegheny Mountains. Roebling saw this as a waste of human resources, time, and money. It was to solve this predicament that John started developing wire rope in his laboratory, in Saxonburg in 1841.
1844 was an eventful year for Roebling. He secured a bid to change the wooden conduit over the Allegheny River. His innovative design, which was segregated into seven parts of 163 feet each, had wooden trunks to hold the water and wire cable on both sides for support. A lot of people before Roebling had tried to construct a workable bridge in this area and failed.
John’s next project was the suspension bridge over the Monongahela River in Pittsburgh, in 1845. He then built four suspension canals on the Delaware and Hudson Canal. After that, he moved to Trenton, New Jersey. The railroad bridge between the New York Central and Great Western Railways of Canada over the Niagara Falls was the next Roebling project. This project, which started in 1851, took four years to complete. The architectural wonder spans the whole of 825 feet and is held up by four 10-inch wire cables.
At the time when he was working on the Niagara project, he was also working on a bridge that crossed the Kentucky River from Cincinnati to Chattanooga. The bridge spans over 1,124 feet. The bridge was eventually left uncompleted due to the collapse of the railway company funding it. But the year 1858 saw the launch of another one of Roebling’s bridges in Pittsburgh. It is a 1,030 feet long suspension bridge divided into four spans.
With the outbreak of American Civil War, Roebling’s work came to an abrupt but temporary halt. Even though the war waged on, in 1863 he started working on another bridge. Later, the bridge was named after him. It was called the John A. Roebling Suspension Bridge. Until the Brooklyn Bridge was built, this was the largest suspension bridge in the world.
It was only in 1867 that Roebling started working on the blueprint of the Brooklyn Bridge in New York. One day in 1869, John was standing on the docks, supervising some work and an arriving ferry hit him and crushed his toes. He had to be hospitalized and his toes amputated. He continued to guide the Brooklyn project even then. He eventually contracted tetanus and died 24 days after the accident.
His son, Washington Roebling, continued and finished the work his father had started. His third son, Charles was the man behind the 80-ton wire rope machine. He also set up the town of Roebling, New Jersey. It is in this town that John A. Roebling and Sons Steel Mills was built.
