The Brooklyn Bridge was designed by one Roebling, built by a second and finished by a third — and for a long time only two of them were remembered.
The first was John Roebling, the engineer who drew the plans. In 1869, surveying the site from a pier, he was hit by a ferry. Crushed between the boat and the wood, his foot never healed, and he died of tetanus a few weeks later.
Having lost his father, Washington Roebling took over the work at the age of thirty-two. He spent long days in the caissons, the airtight chambers sunk into the riverbed, and in 1872 he was struck by the caisson disease that killed several of his workers. Partly paralysed, often in great pain, he could no longer visit the site.
The bridge did not stop, and the reason was his wife. Watching through a telescope from his window in Brooklyn Heights, Washington followed every cable and every stone; Emily carried his instructions to the site. To do this well, she had to understand them. Trained by her husband and by her own reading, she studied higher mathematics, the strength of materials and the calculation of cables. Within a few years engineers were bringing their questions to her, and some of them suspected that she, not her husband, was now the real chief engineer.
It was not an easy position. Politicians tried to remove Washington from the project, and it was Emily who spoke for him to the men who wanted him gone. Having heard her, they let him stay.
In May 1883, shortly before the bridge opened, Emily Roebling became the first person to cross it, riding in a carriage and carrying a rooster as a sign of victory. Its main span, 486 metres long, was then the longest of any suspension bridge in the world.
Standing on that bridge, she understood something that took the city much longer to admit: sharp work can be done by someone whose name is not on the plans. A plaque on the bridge today names all three Roeblings.