Emily Warren Roebling: Engineer of the Brooklyn Bridge
In May 1883, a few weeks before it was officially open to the public, the first person to cross the Brooklyn Bridge in a horse-drawn carriage was Emily Roebling. It had taken 14 years for the bridge to be built and as the “surrogate chief engineer” of the project since 1872, she had waited 11 years for this moment.
At 40, having devoted more than a quarter of her life to this monumental effort, Roebling was aware of the significance of the carriage ride across the East River. In her lap, she carried a rooster, a symbol of victory. That first trip over the bridge from Brooklyn to Manhattan was intended to test the impact of horsepower on the roadway. But it was really a victory lap complete with cheers from the all-male crew of workers for the woman who finished the project of the century.
We would not have the Brooklyn Bridge today if not for the ingenuity, passion and dedication of three members of one family: the Roeblings of Trenton, New Jersey.
John Roebling was the engineering genius who had the vision, imagination and design for the bridge, but he died in1869 before the project got off the ground. His son, Washington, also an engineer, inherited the project upon his father’s death. But three years later, suffering from the “bends,” or decompression sickness, Washington was too ill to work on the massive construction project.
For eleven years, from 1872 until the bridge was dedicated in 1883, Roebling remained chief engineer on paper, but his wife, Emily, who had no formal engineering background, served as the de facto chief engineer.
In the beginning, Roebling dictated instructions and notes to her to pass along to his assistants. But she was not a mere messenger. Stepping in to manage the project required her to become a fast expert in building materials, cable construction and stress analysis, among many other things.
Over time, as it became evident that Washington was unable to resume his full duties, Emily’s responsibilities expanded greatly. She visited the site daily, delivering Washington’s instructions. She dealt with skeptical workers and gradually won them over, changing their sexist ideas about taking orders from a woman. She negotiated with contractors and suppliers, paid the bills, represented the company in meetings with investors who wanted to oust Washington from the project because of his health problems. She is credited with designing metal parts used in the construction. While managing the bridge, she was also raising their son and caring for her husband.
In David McCullough’s book, The Great Bridge, Washington Roebling describes his wife’s role as “invaluable,” citing ‘her remarkable talent as a peacemaker’ among all the different stakeholders from politicians to workers.
“That was she was welcome among them, her opinions regarded seriously, was considerable testimony in itself, in a day and age when a woman’s presence in or about a construction job except as a spectator on special occasions was absolutely unheard of.”
Emily Warren was the second youngest child in a family of twelve children. She was born on September 23, 1843 in Cold Spring, New York. Her parents, Sylvanus and Phebe, were part of a prominent and well -respected family in the community.
Their progressive attitudes led them to enroll Emily in the Georgetown Academy of Visitation in Washington, DC where she studied history, astronomy, French, and algebra in addition to traditional housekeeping arts. But it was her oldest brother, Gouverneur Kemble Warren, who had the biggest influence on her life. GK, as he was called, was a West Point graduate who had studied engineering and science, two subjects that also sparked an interest in Emily.
Warren was a Union general during the Civil War and one of his best officers was Washington Roebling, oldest son of bridge builder John Roebling. When Emily attended the Officer’s Ball in Washington in 1864 with her brother, she met Washington Roebling. They quickly fell in love and were married a year later in December 1865.
When the Civil War ended, Washington went to work in the family business. In1867, he headed to Europe on a fact-finding mission for his father, who was already planning the future Brooklyn Bridge.
Washington’s job was to study pneumatic caissons, pressurized air structures that allowed crews to work underwater building foundations that could support huge projects. For a project the scale of the Bridge to succeed, everything depended on these caissons. Washington visited factories in Germany, England, and France with Emily at his side.
In the late 1860s, the New York City we know today with its five boroughs did not exist. Manhattan and Brooklyn were booming individual cities separated by the notoriously turbulent and dangerous to navigate East River.
Even then, thousands of people were commuting daily between the cities for work but instead of a subway, which wouldn’t be built until 1908, they took ferries to cross the less than one-mile-wide waterway. Often crowded and unreliable, ferries also had to compete with commercial boats and ships delivering supplies and goods up and down the river. For years, there was talk about putting up a bridge, but it wasn’t until 1867 that serious planning began.
It was no surprise that the most famous bridge builder of the time, John Roebling, was awarded the chief engineer job for the Great East River Bridge as it was initially called.
His design for the Brooklyn Bridge was an all-steel suspension bridge – the first of its kind in the world. Its cables would be made of thick steel galvanized to prevent rust. Two huge granite Gothic style arches would anchor the cables. Measuring 1600 feet from tower to tower, the Brooklyn Bridge also would be the longest span in the world.
Most extraordinary in an age before heavy industrial machines, all of this would be built by human hands. The design was risky, but Roebling’s reputation and experience convinced the New York Bridge Company to approve his design in June 1869.
Roebling wouldn’t live to see his ambitious bridge come to life. Three weeks after winning the bid, as a ferry was preparing to dock near the construction site, Roebling’s foot was caught in the pilings and crushed. Doctors amputated some of his toes, but tetanus set in, leading to a fatal infection. Washington, who had been working closely with his father, took over the project, and was a very hands-on chief engineer for the next three years, until attacks of decompression sickness confined him to working at home.
Emily Roebling’s importance to the Bridge was publicly acknowledged at the dedication on May 24, 1883, before a crowd of thousands, that included the President of the United States, Chester Arthur.
In his dedication speech, Abram Hewitt, one of the Roeblings’ rivals, said,
"The name of Emily Warren Roebling will...be inseparably associated with all that is admirable in human nature and all that is wonderful in the constructive world of art." The bridge, he said would be "an everlasting monument to the self-sacrificing devotion of a woman and of her capacity for that higher education from which she has been too long disbarred."
Emily Roebling’s remarkable life continued after the Brooklyn Bridge was completed. She traveled extensively without her husband, was active in the suffrage movement, an issue she had tabled while working on the Bridge and later earned a law degree from New York University.
She died from stomach cancer in 1903 at the age of 60. In 2018, on the Bridge’s 135th birthday, a street in Brooklyn was renamed in her honor. Emily Roebling Plaza is a popular destination in nearby Brooklyn Bridge Park.
The Brooklyn Bridge was such a significant invention that it is both a national and local landmark. In 1931, the Brooklyn Engineers Club installed this plaque honoring its creators:
THE BUILDERS OF THE BRIDGE
DEDICATED TO THE MEMORY OF
EMILY WARREN ROEBLING
1843 - 1903
WHOSE FAITH AND COURAGE HELPED HER STRICKEN HUSBAND
COL. WASHINGTON A. ROEBLING, C.E.
1837 - 1926
COMPLETE THE CONSTRUCTION OF THIS BRIDGE
FROM THE PLANS OF HIS FATHER
JOHN A. ROEBLING, C.E.
1805 - 1869
WHO GAVE HIS LIFE TO THE BRIDGE
BACK OF EVERY GREAT WORK WE CAN FIND
"THE SELF-SACRIFICING DEVOTION OF A WOMAN"
© 2023 Alice Look
Exec. Producer, Remarkable Women Project