"After a week I had become sufficiently composed to take a sober look at my own situation. That left John's 32-year-old son, Washington, in charge of the project. Aside from the dubious-sounding "water therapy," John refused further treatment. After an operation that resulted in the amputation of his toes, John contracted a tetanus infection. One day in June of that year, John's foot was pinned between a ferry and a piling. By 1869, John was still mired in the design and surveying stage of construction. He conceived of the project as early as 1852, but due in large part to delays caused by the Civil War, preliminary work on the bridge wouldn't begin until 1867. With his foot in the door as an engineer, John won a number of contracts to build various aqueducts and suspension bridges across Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Kentucky in the years prior to winning the Brooklyn Bridge contract. John got his start producing wire rope, a cheaper and more durable alternative to the hemp ropes currently used by railways to transport cargo over mountains and bodies of waters.
Unfortunately, those dreams didn't exactly pan out as arguments between Etzler and the Roeblings threatened their shared vision, but the town still exists today. There, they established a German community known as Saxonburg which was designed based on their shared utopian dreams. And so John-along with his brother Carl and a "technological utopist" named Johann Adolphus Etzler-emigrated to America where they eventually settled in Pennsylvania outside Pittsburgh. Still reeling from the Napoleon Wars, the country had little resources or desire to invest in infrastructure, leaving bright young engineers like John with little recourse in their home country. Upon graduating, John learned that there were very few opportunities for engineers in Prussia. While learning about hydraulics and bridge suspension from the country's top engineers, John also attended philosophy lectures given by the legendary German philosopher Hegel. By the age of fifteen, John had already passed the surveyor's exam and was enrolled in college where he studied architecture and engineering. His parents fostered this interest by hiring him a prestigious tutor in mathematics and science. Born in Prussia in 1806, John Augustus Roebling had an interest in engineering from an early age. In 1973, The Great Bridge won the New York Diamond Jubilee Award along with a Certificate of Merit from the Municipal Art Society of New York. Roebling and his son Washington, detailing the struggles they endured in building the iconic Brooklyn Bridge.
The Great Bridge is a non-fiction book published in 1972 by the American author and popular historian David McCullough.
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