How Johann August Röbling became John A. Roebling
Although John A. Roebling indelibly left his mark on America through his feats of engineering, many of which still stand today, the man himself has remained a mystery. In this excerpt from the first major biography of him in over 75 years, Engineering America: The Life and Times of John A. Roebling, Richard Haw takes a closer look at the man who embodied many of the contradictions and dramas of nineteenth-century America.
Born in Prussia during the chaos and destruction of the Napoleonic Wars, John Roebling spent his youth in Mühlhausen, a medieval walled-town in central Germany, before earning a seat at the prestigious national Building Academy. In Berlin, he heard G.W.F. Hegel lecture on logic, experienced the rising might and the promise of the industrial revolution, and was introduced to the fledgling art and science of suspension bridges. He became enthralled by all three. After several years building roads in Westphalia and kicking about his home town, he immigrated to America hoping to establish a communal settlement along principles he had worked out (and published) with his friend and fellow technological visionary John Etzler. He succeeded only in establishing Saxonburg, PA, a rather humdrum little village. Returning to engineering — the one thing he was good at — John worked on a variety of internal improvements projects: designing canals, surveying railroad routes, designing dams and locomotives. In 1841, he hit on the idea of making rope out of spiraled wire, a notion that made his fortune.
Like his finest creations, John was held together by the delicate balance of countervailing forces.
John worked furiously throughout the 1840s, bursting into the consciousness of the world’s engineering community with a series of daring plans and proposals, even while his achievements were rather more modest: three suspension aqueducts and a single suspension bridge. During the same time, he also built up his wire rope works into a large national industry, so much so that by the end of the decade he was forced to move his entire operation east. He spent the next two decades only somewhat less furiously realizing all the plans and ideas he had proposed and establishing himself as America’s preeminent bridge builder. He built the world’s first functioning railroad suspension bridge (over the Niagara Falls gorge) and the first structure to link a Northern state with a Southern one after the Civil War (the Covington and Cincinnati Suspension Bridge). In 1867, he was awarded the contract to build a massive 1,600-foot span over the East River between the independent cities of New York and Brooklyn, a project he had actively lobbied for since 1857. On the verge of commencing his dream project, Roebling suffered a bizarre accident at the bridge site. He was soon diagnosed with tetanus, and he died in agony on July 22, 1869, several months before construction of his dream bridge had even begun.
Like his finest creations, John was held together by the delicate balance of countervailing forces. On the surface, he led an exemplary public life, and his accomplishments were legion. As an immigrant, community builder, manufacturer and employer, he was admired and respected. As an inventor and engineer, his works profoundly altered the physical landscape of America. John believed in the moral application of science and technology, that great works of connection — bridges, railroads, the Atlantic Cable — could help bring people together, erase divisions, heal wounds, and bring about a fairer and more equal society. He was deeply committed to the creation of a more perfect union, forged from the raw materials of the continent. He was a fervent abolitionist, a deep and voracious reader of philosophy, a proficient linguist, and an accomplished musician. Yet John’s public persona — engaged, calm, rational, and specific — was offset by private mania. Behind closed doors he was intense, fierce, and often irrational. Oddly for a technical genius, John’s understanding of the natural world bordered on the occult and his opinions about medicine are best described as medieval. For a man of science and great self-certainty, he was also remarkably quick to seize on fads and foolish trends. He believed not just in science but also in the spirit world, in wrapping himself in a wet sheet at night, and in chewing charcoal on a daily basis. The two poles of Roebling’s personality played out most poignantly in his relationship with his first and most burdened son. Washington Roebling was awed and inspired by his father; privately, he feared him and was haunted by their relationship. “Roebling was a great man,” Washington once remarked, but “there was something of the tiger about him.”
John was a complex, deeply divided, yet undoubtedly influential figure — one of the foremost engineers in a century defined by engineering — and his biography illuminates not only his works but also the world of nineteenth-century America. Yet, while John’s engineering feats are well known, the man himself is not, for alongside the drama of large scale construction lies an equally rich drama of intellectual and social development and crisis, one that mirrored and reflected the great forces, trials, and failures of the American nineteenth century. Unfortunately, John has proved a hard man to know. Many of the details of John’s life were invented or enhanced in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by John’s descendents in an effort to sanctify and sanitize his image, most of which has simply been repeated in books and articles over the years. Few people have gone to the archives to seek him out, ensuring that the story of John’s story has remained thin. In 1972, while compiling the bibliography for The Great Bridge, David McCullough noted that there was “no first-rate biography” of John. Nothing in the intervening time has altered this fact.
John was a complex, deeply divided, yet undoubtedly influential figure — one of the foremost engineers in a century defined by engineering — and his biography illuminates not only his works but also the world of nineteenth-century America.
Engineering America is a book about one man’s struggle to define himself: to learn, adapt and change, to keep moving in new and unfamiliar directions, and to achieve independence, even as he clung to his own fixed ideas and opinions. It is about how Johann August Röbling, the third child of provincial Prussian tobacconist, became John A. Roebling, CE, world-renowned American engineer and wealthy manufacturer. It is also the story of how a liberty-loving Democrat became first a corporate Whig and then an entrenched Republican. More broadly, this is a book about the nineteenth century: about Jacksonian and pre-Civil War America; about the market, transportation, and communications revolutions; about shifting notions of freedom and liberty, slavery and dependence; politics and philosophy; immigration and community; science and superstition; about a nation’s passage from individualism to incorporation. And it is about one man’s place within it all, as a witness, a participant and a driving force.
Richard Haw is Associate Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, CUNY. He is the author of The Brooklyn Bridge: A Cultural History and Art of the Brooklyn Bridge: A Visual History.
