Great Bridge: Epic Story of Building of Brooklyn Bridge by David McCullough
	List Price:   $21.00 Unit Price:   $16.80 You Save:   $4.20 (20%) ISBN-10:   067145711X ISBN-13:   9780671457112 Publisher:   Simon & Schuster Category:   Young Adults Pub. Date:   January 1983 Pages:   562 Format:   Paperback
Subjects
BROOKLYN BRIDGE (NEW YORK, N.Y.)
Description/Notes
The New York TimesAfter reading David McCullough's account, you will never look at the old bridge in quite the same way again. Christopher Lehmann-HauptThe New York TimesAfter reading David McCullough's account, you will never look at the old bridge in quite the same way again. Celebrating the centennial of the opening of the Brooklyn Bridge, here is the classic account of one of the greatest engineering feats of all time. This monumental book is the enthralling story of one of the greatest events in our nation's history, during the Age of Optimism -- a period when Americans were convinced in their hearts that all things were possible.In the years around 1870, when the project was first undertaken, the concept of building an unprecedented bridge to span the East River between the great cities of Manhattan and Brooklyn required a vision and determination comparable to that which went into the building of the great cathedrals. Throughout the fourteen years of its construction, the odds against the successful completion of the bridge seemed staggering. Bodies were crushed and broken, lives lost, political empires fell, and surges of public emotion constantly threatened the project. But this is not merely the saga of an engineering miracle; it is a sweeping narrative of the social climate of the time and of the heroes and rascals who had a hand in either constructing or exploiting the surpassing enterprise. NewsdayThe Great Bridgeis a great book....Get your hands onThe Great Bridge....This is the definitive book on the event. Do not wait for a better try: there won't be any. Los Angeles TimesThe Great Bridgeis a book so compelling and complete as to be a literary monument...McCullough has written that sort of work which brings us to the human center of the past. Chapter 1 The Plan The shapes arise!Walt Whitman They Met at his request on at least six different occasions, beginning in February 1869. With everyone present, there were just nine in all -- the seven distinguished consultants he had selected; his oldest son, Colonel Washington Roebling, who kept the minutes; and himself, the intense, enigmatic John Augustus Roebling, wealthy wire rope manufacturer of Trenton, New Jersey, and builder of unprecedented suspension bridges.They met at the Brooklyn Gas Light Company on Fulton Street, where the new Bridge Company had been conducting its affairs until regular offices could be arranged for. They gathered about the big plans and drawings he had on display, listening attentively as he talked and asking a great many questions. They studied his preliminary surveys and the map upon which he had drawn a strong red line cutting across the East River, indicating exactly where he intended to put the crowning work of his career.The consultants were his idea. In view of 'the magnitude of the undertaking and the large interests connected therewith,' he had written, it was 'only right' that his plans be 'subjected to the careful scrutiny' of a board of experts. He did not want their advice or opinions, only their sanction. If everything went as he wanted and expected, they would approve his plan without reservation. They would announce that in their considered professional opinion his bridge was perfectly possible. They would put an end to the rumors, silence the critics, satisfy every last stockholder that he knew what he was about, and he could at last get on with his work.To achieve his purpose, to wind up with an endorsement no one could challenge, or at least no one who counted for anything professionally, he had picked men of impeccable reputation. None had a failure or black mark to his name. All were sound, practical builders themselves, men not given to offhand endorsements or to overstatement. With few exceptions, each had done his own share of pioneering at one time or other, and so theoretically ought still to be sympathetic to the untried. They were, in fact, about as eminent a body of civil engineers as could have been assembled then, and seen all together, with their display of white whiskers, their expansive shirt fronts and firm handshakes, they must have appeared amply qualified to pass judgment on just about anything. The fee for their services was to be a thousand dollars each, which was exactly a thousand dollars more than Roebling himself had received for all his own efforts thus far.Chairman of the group was the sociable Horatio Allen, whose great girth, gleaming bald head, and Benjamin Franklin spectacles gave him the look of a character from Dickens. He fancied capes and silver-handled walking sticks and probably considered his professional standing second only to that of Roebling, which was hardly so. But like Roebling he had done well in manufacturing -- in his case, with New York's Novelty Iron Works -- and forty years before he had made some history driving the first locomotive in America, theStourbridge Lion,all alone and before a big crowd, on a test run at Honesdale, Pennsylvania. He had also, in the time since, been one of the principal engineers for New York's Croton Aqueduct and so was sometimes referred to in biographical sketches as 'the man who turned the water on.'Then there was Colonel Julius Adams of Brooklyn, a former Army engineer, who was usually described as an expert on sewer construction, and who, in truth, was not quite in the same league as the others. He had, however, a number of influential friends in Brooklyn and for years he had been dabbling with designs for an East River bridge of his own. For a while it had even looked as though he might be given the chance to build it. When Roebling's proposal was first made public, he had been among those to voice