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Understanding 9/11tv The Roebling Legacy CSPAN May 21, 2017 9:46am-10:03am EDT
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to appoint people. the governor says no, specifically the people still want a new treasure and they say we're not going to fund the government until you give us a new treasurer and so finally skinner is persuaded to resign by the governor. and then they put in someone of the assembly's choosing. and so this really represents a sea change in thinking, skinner by the way never repaid the money or war breaks out and he's a loyal test, he flees to canada and the governor is arrested. >> but there are things to this story that illustrates it's really the change in thinking but also if you know anything about politics in new jersey and how we never have any money, sometimes i think well, things could be worse. we could have lost everything. >>.
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>> the roebling company was the largest employer in trenton at the turn of the 20th century. running up, learn about this company and the innovations that made the brooklyn bridge in new york and golden gate bridge in san francisco a possibility. >>. >> back in 2008, the brooklyn bridge had hundred 25th anniversary party. sitting in new york through and mayor bloomberg presided over it and he said that the brooklyn bridge was the icon of new york city, and he was absolutely correct. if you look at television or read magazines, it's very hard to watch tv and not see repeated images of the brooklyn bridge. it really is the icon of new york city and it originated here in trenton.
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>> so john roebling was born in 1806 in prussia which later became part of germany. and the town he was born in, wheel house and 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 and he arrived here just as america was taking off in terms of the industrial revolution. and there were very few training engineers here. so he showed up with tremendous skills and was able to you know, really live his dream to design suspension bridges so his first suspension bridge was an aqueduct to carry a canal over the allegheny river.
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>> and that led to other commissions including to build a canal, suspension aqueduct for the delaware and hudson canal. and that aqueduct is still in existence, it's up in pennsylvania on the delaware. which means between pennsylvania and new york and it is the oldest suspension bridge in the united states. >> roebling really loved engineering, that was his passion but he also as the son said realized that he would never become a wealthy man from engineering and he decided to go into manufacturing. and when he was out in western pennsylvania, he observed what are called inclined planes and so that is a, it's a rare railroad track that goes up the side
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of the hill and so the canal boats would come through the bottom of the hill and it would go over the submerged flatcar. and then it would be tied to the flatcar and then the flatcar would be pulled up the inclined plane to the top and then let down and that's how people crossed the allegheny mountains before tunnels werebuilt . the original ropes on the inclined planes were hemp, but they were fragile and they would break and roebling got the idea of twisting wires into a road 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 planes. he wrote an article to the american railroad journal and that was kind of like the
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wired magazine of its day because really most of the innovation was happening back then was happening in railroads. >> so once the people that read this journal 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 he completely outgrew thecapacity there . so he wrote a letter to peter cooper who later found founded cooper union in new york, the architecture and engineering and art school and peter cooper had a company in trenton called the trenton iron company that they make steel beams and they also made wire and roebling wrote to him and asked where would be a good place to locate and cooper recommended trenton and he told them about this particular site and so
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roebling came here in 1848, built this house on the property and then he built his factory and he was in the wire rope business. so wire rope, we don't think of very much today, it's not something people think about but hundred 50 years ago, it was a new technology that was essential for many other technologies, not only suspension bridges but also elevators, we couldn't have skyscrapers without wire rope, table cars , mines to pull: or out of the earth . tall buildings in terms of construction like pulling up the big steel beams 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 runner
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and so they turn the runner and so mister roebling got into the airplane business and they, the airplane and wire rope business and they called it airport and they produced the airports that charles lindbergh used when he flew the spirit of st. louis to paris in 1927. so roebling not only designed the bridges and also designed various types of wire rope but he also had to design the machinery to make the wire rope because you couldn't call up somebody and order a wire rope, you had to build it yourself. so there are many drawings of his showing his original designs for a wire rope machine, the original drawings that he did and after he died, his son washington and his other two sons, ferdinand and charles
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took over this business and it was called john a roebling and sons company and they ran it until washington died in 1926 so they ran it for over 50years. so as the decades went on , the size of suspension bridges kept getting bigger and bigger and that required larger diameter wire ropes and the wire ropes were not used for the top tables, they were by individual wires but the wire ropes were used for the suspenders, the suspender ropes that hold up the debt so as the bridges got bigger, you needed bigger suspender ropes and then also as mines got deeper and the mining owners wanted to haul out more iron or, and one lift you needed bigger wire ropes so the roebling company kept
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building a series of wire rope machines and this wire rope machine which was built in 1893 is the largest wire rope machine ever built and at the time it was the largest wire rope machine in the world. it was about 64 feet and it has an entire story below where we are standing and that has a really marvelous array of gears that enabled the machine to have three different motions. the first motion was that the machine would turn clockwise, the whole platform and the spindle would rotate clockwise and as that was happening, each one of these individual spools on the small cradle would turn in the opposite direction, that enable the machine to take the cake out where the twist out of the strand as they went around riyadh and then
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from the six strands, the they went up to the top like this rope hanging down here and the middle of the spindle is hollow, and another strand came up from the bottom and then at the top, the six strands would work turned around the middle course strand, and they used closing head that put a little twist in the ropes and that enabled the ropes to, enable the strands to lay in close together. the roebling company worked on dozens of suspension bridges, the biggest one was the golden gate bridge. the second-biggest was the george washington bridge and they work on many others cincinnati bridge, and between cincinnati and covington over the ohio river.
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and new york city on the east river you could see three bridges with roebling wire rope, one in the brooklyn bridge, the second was the manhattan bridge and the third was the williamsburg bridge. various other bridges around the country so at the height of the roebling era, probably the highest employment was during the first world war and the whole company including here and the two other factories in trenton and the factory down in roebling new jersey employed about 8000 people. probably about 2500 worked on this site. many family members would work together, brothers, fathers, sons, cousins. it was very common that there were multiple family members working for the company. and i interviewed a man when
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i was working on my book and he had come here and i think it was 1939 when the depression was going on and it was hard to get a job and he said you know, his uncle knew somebody who worked here and the man put in a good word for him and they called him in for an interview. >> i think he was 18 years old. >> and he said so they offered me a job and told me to come in on monday. he said i went home and i told my mother i got a job and my mother said to me, now you are set for life. and that's the way it was. you got a job here and you spent the next 45 years here. >> 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 other companies started building wire rope factories to supply the war effort. so when the war was over,
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there was an overcapacity of wire rope and so the roebling's saw that that was not going to be very promising for the future so they sold the company and it was bought by the colorado fuel and iron company was based in pueblo colorado and cmi as it was called saw it as an opportunity to get the roebling name because roebling had a stellar reputation for high quality rope and also they could combine their own wire rope that they had with roebling and get some scale so cf and i ran the roebling factories until the 1970s. then we had the oil embargo in 1973 and that shot the price of oil i think by a
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factor of four or five times from what it was before. and the roebling steel mill was operating on oil, using oil to melt scrap steel to make wire for its wire rose and the arab oil embargo, by restricting the supply of oil and making it very expensive made the roebling plant very uncompetitive so other factories and steel mills that use electricity to melt steel. but the building use oil so cf and i shut down the roebling steel mill in 1974 and they eventually or beforehand they shut down these wire rope shops here where, which are all around
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us now. they shut them down in 73. because there was again, too much capacity in wire rope manufacturing. when you think about the legacy of the roebling's starting with john roebling, the legacy is one of innovation. you know, someone said that creativity is taking one idea and then taking another idea, smashing those two separate ideas together and coming up with something new. when you think of a bridge, it's really a utilitarian structure. it's not a church, a courthouse, a city hall. it's not meant to be a symbol of power or a symbol of god. it's a utilitarian structure riyadh it's job is to get you
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from one side of the river usually to another. but when he designed the brooklyn bridge, he made it a work of art cause he knew these were going to be americans monuments in the future. >> book tv is in trenton new jersey to learn more about its literary culture. up next is the trenton free public library, one of the oldest public libraries in the state. >>
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