There are two extraordinary truths about the Brooklyn Bridge.

The first is that its creation was one of the heroic feats of 19th-century American capitalism; the second is that it was the personal epic of John Roebling and his family. The bridge’s construction was akin to Cyrus Fields’s laying of the transatlantic telegraph cable, to Thomas Edison’s harnessing of electrical power, to James J. Hill’s privately funded construction of the Great Northern Railroad, and to numerous other notable achievements.

It was engineer John Roebling, who, frustrated one wintry day by ice-caused delays crossing the East River between New York and Brooklyn, conceived the idea of a massive suspension bridge spanning the distance.

Roebling (1806–1869) emigrated from Germany to the US in 1831, seeking greater freedom than in his homeland. According to historian David McCullough in The Great Bridge: The Epic Story of the Building of the Brooklyn Bridge, Roebling was a man undaunted even by the most imposing impediments. He was a brilliant entrepreneur: a self-made millionaire in the mid-19th century from profits earned by his New Jersey factory manufacturing wire rope.

McCullough writes of him: “In all his working life John Roebling had never been known to take a day off… he was never known to give in or own himself beaten… illness he regarded as a moral offense and he fought it with the same severe intensity he devoted to everything else…” He was an inventor as well as an engineer who had designed every apparatus in his factory. He held an indomitable confidence in his own ability, a conviction that “no force of circumstance could divert him from carrying into effect a project once matured in his mind.” Once, during the Civil War, he was called to Washington, DC, by General John Fremont, the famous “Pathfinder” who had........

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