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Understanding 9/11tv The Roebling Legacy CSPAN May 20, 2017 5:57pm-6:13pm EDT
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going to send a governor until you get us a new treasurer. finally skinner is persuaded by the governor and they put in someone of the assembly's choosing. this clearly represents a sea change in thinking. skinner by the way never repay the money. he was a loyalist. he flees to canada and the governor is brought in. there are two things in this story. really the changing thinking that if you know anything about politics in new jersey it's how we never have any money. sometimes we think well things could be worse. we could have lost everything. >> the roebling company was the largest in trenton and the 20 century. coming up learn about this
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company and innovations that made the brooklyn bridge in new york and the golden gate bridge in san francisco a possibility. >> back in 2008 the brooklyn bridge had its 125th anniversary party and mayor bloomberg presided over it. he said that the brooklyn bridge would be an icon of new york city. he is absolutely correct because if you look at television or read magazines it's very hard to watch tv and repeated images of the brooklyn bridge. it really is the icon of new york city and it originated here in trenton. john roebling was worn in 1806 impression which later became part of germany and the town he
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was born in mule houston is about 100 kilometers southwest of berlin. when he came here he had a first-class engineering education in germany by some of the best architects and engineers in europe. he arrived here just as america was taking off in terms of the industrial revolution and there were very few train engineers here. he showed up with tremendous skills and was able to you know really live his dream design suspension versus. his first suspension bridge was an aqueduct to carry a canal over the allegheny river and that led to other commissions including to build a canal
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expansion aqueduct for the delaware and hudson canal and had that aqueduct is still in existence. it's up and lock a wax in pennsylvania on the delaware between pennsylvania and new york. it's the oldest suspension bridge in the united states. roebling really loved engineering. that was his passion but he also asked his son said realized he would never become a wealthy man from engineering and he decided to go into manufacturing. when he was out in western pennsylvania he observed what are called inclined planes, so that is, it's a railroad track that goes up the side of a hill so the canal vote would come to the bottom of the hill and it
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would go over is submerged flat car and then it would be tied to the flat car. then the flat car would be pulled up the inclined plane to the top and then let down. that's how people cross the allegheny mountains of when the tunnels were built. the original ropes on the inclined planes were hemp but they were fragile and they would break. roebling got the idea of twisting wires into a rope and that was his first wire rope. he was a very smart businessman so he wrote an article about his wire rope that he made on his farm for the inclined plane. he wrote an article that the american with railroad journal and that was kind of like the wire magazine of its day because really most of the innovation with that was happening back
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then was happening with the row roads. once people had read this journal and saw that he was making wire rope he got all these orders and he started making and manufacturing wire rope on his farm. he did that for about seven years but completely outgrew the capacity there. he wrote a letter to peter cooper who later found -- found at cooper union and architecture engineering and art school. peter cooper had a company called the trenton iron company where they made steel beams and they also made why are. roebling wrote to him and elsewhere would be a good place to locate and cooper recommended trenton and he told them about this particular site. roebling came here in 1848 and built his house on the property and then he built his factory
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and was in the wire rope business. why wire rope we don't think of very much today. it's not something that people think about but 150 years ago it was a new technology that was essential for many other technology so not only suspension bridges but also elevators. we couldn't have skyscrapers without metal rope. cable cars to pull kole and ore out of the earth, tall buildings in terms of construction pulling up the big steel beam and airplanes because airplanes have small diameter wire ropes that go from where the pilot sits on the wheel and they go back to the router. so they turn the router so the
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roebling's got into the airplane business and they called it a record. they produced the air cord that charles lindbergh used when he flew the spirit spirit of st. louis to paris in 1927. so roebling not only designed to bridges and also designed various types of wire rope but he also had to design the machinery to make the wire rope because he couldn't call it a wire rope machine. you have to build it yourself so there are many drawings of his showing his original designs for wire rope machines, the reginald drawings that he did and after he died his son washington and his other two sons ferdinand and charles, took over the business and it was called john a. roebling and sons company and they ran it until washington
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died in 1926 and they ran it for over 50 years. as the decade went on the size of suspension bridges kept getting bigger and bigger and that required larger diameter wire ropes. the wire ropes were not used for the top cables. they were laid by individual wires but the wire ropes were used for the suspenders, the suspender ropes to hold up the deck. as the bridges got vigor they needed bigger suspender ropes and also as long -- mines got steeper and the mining owners wanted to haul out more iron ore you need a bigger wire ropes so the roebling company kept building a series of wire rope machines. this wire rope machine was built in 1893. it's the largest wire rope machine ever told and at the
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time it was the largest wire rope machine in the world. it's about 64 feet tall and it has an entire story below where we are standing in that has a really marvelous array of gigantic deer that enabled the machines do have three different motions. the first motion was that the machine would turn clockwise hand the spindle would rotate clockwise and as that was happening each one of these individual schools on the small cradle would turn in the opposite direction and that enabled the machine to take the or the twist out of the strands as they went around and then from the thick strands they went up to the top like the rope
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hanging down here and the middle of this is hollow. another strand came up from the bottom. and then at the top thick strands were turned around the middle core and used a closing head tube put the twist in the ropes and that enabled the ropes , enabled the strands to lay in very close, closely together. the rope company worked on dozens of suspension bridges. the biggest one was the golden gate bridge. the second biggest was the george washington bridge but then they worked on many others, the bridge between cincinnati and covington over the ohio river. in new york city you can see three bridges with roebling wire rope could one was the brooklyn bridge and the second was the
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manhattan bridge and the third was the williamsburg bridge and various other bridges around the country. so at the height of the roebling era probably the highest employment was during the first world war. the whole company including here and to other factories in trenton and the factory down in roebling new jersey employed about eight thousand people. probably about 2500 worked on this site. many family members would work together brothers, fathers, sons , cousins. there were multiple family members working for the company and i interviewed a man when i was working on my book. he had come here in i think 1939
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when the depression was on and it was hard to get a job. his uncle knew somebody who worked here and the man put in a good word for him. i think he was 18 years old. he said so they offered me a job and told me to come on monday so i went home and i told my mother i got a job at roebling and my mother said to me now you're set for life. you've got a job here and you spent the next 40 or 45 years there. during the second world war there was so much demand for wire rope that a lot of companies that were in the steel business and even other companies started delving wire rope factories to supply the war effort. when the war was over there was an overcapacity of wire rope and so the roebling' saw that was
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not going to be promising for the future so they sold the company and was bought by a fuel and iron company based in pueblo colorado. cfi as it was called saw it as an opportunity to get you sub type name because roebling had a stellar reputation for high-quality rope and also they could combine their own wire rope business that they had with roebling with economy of scale. csi ran the roebling factory until the 1970s. then we had the arab oil embargo in 1973 and that shot the price of oil a think by a factor of four or five times from what it was before.
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the roeblings steel meal -- steel mills was operating on oil. was using oil to melt scrap steel for its wire rope and the arab oil embargo by restricting the supply of oil and making it very expensive made the roebling plant very uncompetitive. there were other rope factories and steel mills that use electricity to melt the steel but sub i've used oil so cf and eyes shut down the roebling's film -- steel mills in 1974 and beforehand they shut down the wire rope shops which were all around us now. they shut them down and 73
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because there was again too much capacity in wire rope manufacturing. when you think about the legacy of the roeblings starting with john roebling you know the legacy is one of innovation. you know someone said that creativity is taking one idea and then taking another idea and putting those two ideas together and coming up with something. when you think of the bridge it's really a utilitarian structure. it's not a church, a courthouse, a city hall. it's not a symbol of power or a symbol of god. it's a utilitarian structure whose job is to get you from one side of the river usually to another.
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