The Brooklyn Bridge: Caisson Disease and the Women Who Built It

John Roebling did not live to see a single cable strung. The engineer who designed the Brooklyn Bridge died of tetanus on July twenty-second, eighteen sixty-nine, three weeks after a ferryboat crushed his foot during a surveying trip to the Brooklyn riverbank. The accident happened at the exact spot where the bridge's Brooklyn tower would stand. The bridge would take fourteen more years to build.

His son Washington Roebling took over the project at thirty-two years old, an engineer and Civil War veteran who had built wooden bridges at Harpers Ferry under Confederate fire. Washington's problem was the foundations. The East River's bedrock was deep below water and silt; the towers had to rest on it. To reach the bedrock, workers descended inside giant sealed wooden chambers called caissons, pumped full of compressed air to keep the river out, and dug by hand in conditions of superhuman discomfort: high air pressure, extreme heat, cramped darkness, and the ever-present risk that the caisson would crack or the compressed air would explode.

What the compressed air did to the workers, nobody fully understood. Men who worked in the caissons for long shifts and then ascended too quickly developed what was then called caisson disease, what we now call decompression sickness: nitrogen bubbles forming in the blood and tissue, causing agonizing joint pain, paralysis, and in some cases death. Washington Roebling worked in the caissons himself, supervising the excavation, and emerged in eighteen seventy-two with such severe symptoms that he could barely walk, barely speak, and could not endure daylight.

He directed the remaining eleven years of construction from a sickroom in a Brooklyn Heights apartment, watching through a telescope. His wife Emily Warren Roebling became the bridge's operational chief engineer in everything but formal title: she negotiated with contractors, communicated his technical decisions to the construction teams, managed the politics with city and state officials, and learned enough advanced engineering mathematics to answer questions her husband could not travel to address in person.

The Brooklyn Bridge opened on May twenty-fourth, eighteen eighty-three. Emily Warren Roebling was the first person to cross it. At least twenty-seven workers died during construction. The neurological damage inflicted on the caisson workers is not fully recorded.