You're in the middle of the Brooklyn Bridge. Manhattan behind you. Brooklyn ahead. Look around. You are standing on one woman's masterwork.
Her name was Emily Warren Roebling. And she was never hired for this job.
After John Roebling died, his son Washington took over as chief engineer. Washington was thirty-two. Brilliant. Obsessive like his father. And he made the same mistake. He worked too hard in the caissons — stayed down twelve straight hours to boost morale — and rose to the surface too fast.
The nitrogen in his blood formed bubbles. In his joints. In his brain. They carried him out unconscious. His life was saved with difficulty.
Washington Roebling spent the remaining eleven years of the bridge's construction in a bedroom in Brooklyn Heights. Partially paralyzed. Temporary loss of vision. Temporary loss of voice. Chronic, crippling pain. He could not visit the bridge. He could not meet with his engineers. He could not attend a single trustees' meeting.
He watched through
a telescope.
And his wife became the bridge.
Emily Warren Roebling met Washington at a soldiers' ball in February eighteen sixty-four. Her brother was a Union general — the hero of Little Round Top at Gettysburg. Washington was on his staff. They fell in love immediately. Six weeks later he bought her a diamond ring. They married in January eighteen sixty-five.
Emily had studied algebra, geome
