Emily Warren Roebling
When her husband was struck down, she quietly ran the building of the Brooklyn Bridge for 11 years
Emily Warren married Washington Roebling in 1865, a Union officer whose father, John Roebling, was the leading bridge builder in America. John had designed a suspension bridge across the East River between Brooklyn and New York longer than any yet built. In 1869, surveying the site, his foot was crushed by a ferry. He died of tetanus weeks later, and Washington took over as chief engineer.
The bridge towers stood on caissons, huge chambers sunk to the riverbed and filled with compressed air so men could dig inside them. Nobody yet understood the bends. Washington spent long hours in the caissons and by 1872 was crippled by the disease, in pain, partly paralysed and unable to leave his home. He could not visit the site again for the ten years the bridge took.
Emily stepped into the gap. She had studied science at school; now she learned higher mathematics, the strength of materials, stress analysis and the construction of wire cables. She carried her husband's instructions to the site, answered the engineers' questions, dealt with contractors and politicians, and defended him when the bridge company tried to remove him. Many assumed she was the real engineer.
When the bridge opened in May 1883 she was the first to cross it, carrying a rooster for luck. She later earned a law certificate from New York University. A plaque on the bridge names all three Roeblings.