The Brooklyn Bridge

8 Pages 2067 Words

1867, a group of influential leaders formed the New York Bridge Company, for the purpose of constructing and maintaining a bridge across the East River. The company was permitted to fix toll rates for pedestrians and all types of vehicles, receiving a profit of no more than 15 percent per year.
To those who doubted the need for the bridge, Roebling responded that expected growth in the cities of New York and Brooklyn would call for the construction of additional bridges. Roebling suggested future construction of the Williamsburg and Queensboro bridges further north along the East River.
Two years later, in June of 1869, the New York City Council and the Army Corps of Engineers approved Roebling's design. Later that month, while examining locations for a Brooklyn tower site, Roebling's foot was crushed on a pier by an incoming ferry. Roebling later died of tetanus as a result of the injuries. Immediately following Roebling's death, his son Washington took over as chief engineer of the Brooklyn Bridge.
Soon after on January 3, 1870, work on the Manhattan and Brooklyn foundations began. The 3,000-ton pneumatic caissons (large, airtight cylinders in which workers cleared away layers of silt in an atmosphere of compressed air underneath the riverbed) were dug below the river on the Manhattan side, and also below the river on the Brooklyn side. To speed up the lowering of caissons, dynamite was used for the first time in bridge construction. The foundations took three years to construct.
Life in the caissons was miserable. Immigrant laborers worked in subterranean foundations and were paid $2.25 per day to work in hazardous conditions without electricity, telephones, or other conveniences. E.F. Fariiinton, the master mechanic working under Washington Roebling, described the inner workings of the caissons as…
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