The Brooklyn Bridge to 14 years to construct over the East River in New York, but in 1883, it was finished, thereby connecting the great cities of New York and Brooklyn for the first time in history. Prior to that point, the trip from Brooklyn and Manhattan Island could only be accomplished by taking a ferry boat across. While that method was feasible, it also took more time to get a larger number of people across. The bridge would make it possible to transport many more people quickly.
On the day of the dedication, thousands of residents of Brooklyn and Manhattan Island turned out for the dedication ceremony. To make it more special, it was presided over by President Chester A Arthur, as well as New York Governor Grover Cleveland. The bridge was designed by the late John A Roebling, and it was the largest suspension bridge ever built to that date.
The designer, John Roebling was born in Germany in 1806. He was considered a great pioneer in the design of steel suspension bridges. He studied industrial engineering in Berlin and at the age of 25 immigrated to western Pennsylvania. Once in Pennsylvania, he attempted to make a living as a farmer, but he was unsuccessful. Later, Roebling moved to the state capital in Harrisburg, where he found work as a civil engineer. He began promoting the use of wire cable and established a successful wire-cable factory, which put him in a position to design the Brooklyn bridge.
Roebling began to earn a reputation as a designer of suspension bridges, which at the time were widely used. The problem was that they were also known to fail under strong winds or heavy loads. Roebling is credited with a major breakthrough in suspension-bridge technology, using a web truss added to either side of the bridge roadway that greatly stabilized the structure. Using this model, he successfully bridged the Niagara Gorge at Niagara Falls, New York, and the Ohio River at Cincinnati, Ohio. Due to those successes, New York State accepted Roebling’s design for a bridge connecting Brooklyn and Manhattan. The bridge was to have a span of 1,595 feet, and Roebling was appointed as chief engineer. The bridge would become the world’s first steel suspension bridge.
Unfortunately, just before construction began in 1869, Roebling was injured while taking a few final compass readings across the East River. It was a strange sequence of events. A boat smashed the toes on one of his feet, and three weeks later he died of tetanus. No one would have expected such a thing. Oddly, Roebling was the first of more than two dozen people who would die building his bridge. Following his dad’s death, his 32-year-old son, Washington A Roebling, took over as chief engineer. Roebling had worked with his father on several bridges and had helped design the Brooklyn Bridge, so he was the likely choice to replace his dad.
Because of the way the bridge was built, building the two granite foundations of the Brooklyn Bridge on timber caissons, or watertight chambers, which was sunk to depths of 44 feet on the Brooklyn side and 78 feet on the New York side, and the unknown problems with compressed air pressurized the caissons during underwater construction…a little, at the time, risk of working under such conditions caused more than a hundred workers to 
suffer from cases of compression sickness. Compression sickness, which is also called the “bends,” is caused by the appearance of nitrogen bubbles in the bloodstream that result from rapid decompression. Several men died, and Washington Roebling himself became bedridden from the condition in 1872. Other workers died as a result of more conventional construction accidents, such as collapses and a fire. The bridge is amazing, but at great cost.
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