The Bridge to the Future

This year’s recommendation for vacation reading is the epic story of the building of the Brooklyn Bridge, resonant with dilemmas we still recognize today.

It is 140 years since the opening of the Brooklyn Bridge, the first span across New York’s East River and the longest suspension bridge built up to that time.

That is reason enough to choose David McCullough’s epic 1972 history of its construction, The Great Bridge, as my annual vacation reading recommendation.

What makes it even more compelling is that, as in my initial recommendation, War and Peace, and last year’s pick, Serhii Plokhy’s The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine, the subject is firmly situated in the bigger picture: The Brooklyn Bridge is revealed as a monument of the Second Industrial Revolution—fascinating to reflect upon as we witness transformative change in the Fourth Industrial Revolution.

Like Walter Isaacson’s biographies of Einstein and Leonardo, it’s a story of an individual’s vision (or rather, the vision of an individual, his son and his wife). Like Hans Rosling’s Factfulness, it celebrates progress as an antidote to fear and defeatism. And, for all the reasons that the Chernobyl nuclear power station isn’t still operating today (the topic of my 2020 post), the Brooklyn Bridge is: Despite enormous cost, the corruption of 1870s New York and the tumult of the time, engineering remained paramount and everything was built stronger than it needed to be—lessons we do well to remember as our own technologies pick up speed and challenge social norms and structures.

An Innovative Hybrid

First and foremost, the Brooklyn Bridge was a technological and engineering marvel, like today’s generative artificial intelligence (AI) software, genetic sequencing and battery innovations.

Rather than having divers build from the bottom up, the bridge’s suspension towers were rooted to the bedrock of the East River by being rested on huge wooden caissons, filled with compressed air, which gradually sank as workers within them dug away at the sediment and boulders on the riverbed. Those towers supported an innovative hybrid between a cable-stayed and a suspension bridge, using the strength of both vertical and diagonal cables to cross a span that was the longest in the world for two decades.

Even when a corrupt contractor supplied poor quality wire for the cables, the bridge stood firm because the chief engineer, Washington Roebling, had designed it to be eight times stronger than it needed to be: The inferior wires left it “only” four times stronger. On top of that, Roebling ordered 150 extra wires to be added to each cable.

At a time before wind tunnels and bridge aerodynamics, it was this redundancy that prevented the bridge’s enormous side spans from swaying dangerously in high winds.

Adding Extra Cables

Did New Yorkers appreciate the engineering calculations? It appears that they took more assurance from P. T. Barnum parading elephants across the new bridge—despite the animals weighing much less than the trains that would soon trundle across it.

There are lessons here for our own era of rapid technological change, hot takes, disinformation and social-media-showbusiness CEOs. Thoughtful analysis and careful engineering are our best guides to safety and risk, but it is easy to be distracted by stunts and eye-catching claims.

The ongoing decarbonization and electrification of today’s economy requires shifting to more intermittent renewable power and a new transmission infrastructure, a transition that needs to be managed carefully, not rushed. We should also remember that, like bridge aerodynamics in the 1870s, many aspects of complex disciplines such as AI, ecology and biotechnology remain poorly understood, even by the experts themselves.

The cost of “adding extra cables” can turn out to be less redundant than it seems.

Social and Economic Change

As well as being a symbol of technological progress, the Brooklyn Bridge stands as a monument to the social and economic change of the Second Industrial Revolution.

The period between the 1870s and the First World War saw the advent of machine tools, factory production lines, sewage and water supply systems, gas and electricity distribution, mass transit, the telegraph, the telephone, and a wave of globalization and migration—from continent to continent and countryside to city.

This was a revolution in manufacturing, industry and society in which return on capital soared and labor competition was fierce. The rise of the corporation as an organizing structure for businesses enabled the deployment of huge amounts of capital. (The incorporation of the New York and Brooklyn Bridge Company unlocked $5 million from the two cities.) This was met with the formation of early U.S. labor unions, such as the Knights of Labor and the American Federation of Labor (both born in the 1880s, shortly after the Brooklyn Bridge opened).

Scale and institutionalization in both capital and labor laid the seedbed for corruption: As well as falling victim to the dishonest wire maker, the New York and Brooklyn Bridge Company was tarred by the involvement of “Tammany Hall,” the Democratic party machine led by the notorious William “Boss” Tweed who, among other murky practices, benefitted from exorbitantly overpriced contracts for public works.

Flash Points

At the same time, the emerging working classes sought to figure out their place in the changing economic order. Working conditions were one flash point, migration and globalization were another, and by today’s standards, the contention could be savage: As the Brooklyn Bridge was rising, around 100 people were killed in the violence of the Great Railroad Strike of 1877.

It is estimated that 27 workers died building the bridge, not through violence, but due to accidents and by succumbing to a mysterious condition affecting those toiling in the tower caissons, deep underwater. We now know this was decompression sickness. Roebling, himself nearly crippled by “the bends” and relying on his remarkable wife, Emily, to manage the project, refused to attribute any more than two deaths to it. Building the bridge was risky, albeit relatively well-paid work for the time, much of it done by new immigrants to the country.

Indeed, the Brooklyn Bridge was both a product and an enabler of migration. It was first conceived by Washington Roebling’s father, John, who came to the U.S. to escape the hardships of post-Napoleonic Prussia and to take advantage of its grand civil engineering opportunities. At the local scale, it greatly eased the flow of labor between Brooklyn and Manhattan, effectively turning two cities into a single New York.

The impact was considerable. It not only brought the labor forces of the two cities into direct competition, but effectively wiped out the sizeable East River ferry industry: Although it limped on until the 1940s, water traffic plummeted as soon as the bridge opened. Blue-collar workers who feel like casualties of the more recent wave of globalization, and white-collar workers nervously reading about the power of AI, can both relate to those dynamics.

A Better Future

Dawning recognition of the bridge’s disruptive potential may help to explain the rising opposition, particularly on the grounds of cost, as it slowly became a physical reality. Was it merely “extravagance” and “vanity”?

It was costly—around half a billion dollars in today’s money, with the debt finally being paid off in 1956—but a century-and-a-half later, the six bridges and four tunnels that now cross the East River make the debate seem moot. The fierceness of current disputes such as those around AI and the paths toward renewable energy and electrification infrastructure, and what they mean for economic growth, inflation, debt and deficits, are an echo of the hubbub around the great bridge.

So many of today’s dilemmas are like those faced by the protagonists in McCullough’s classic book. Can we square technological progress and productivity growth with economic and social justice? Can we manage the technological transformations, natural resource requirements and infrastructure development needed in the coming years while managing waste, indebtedness and conflict?

Innovation brings opportunity and disruptions: History informs us of the importance of embracing it with an eye toward all of its implications, positive and negative. In the words of Washington Roebling himself, “the advantages of modern engineering are in many ways balanced by the disadvantages of modern civilization.”

But the story of Roebling’s bridge reminds us that many challenges similar to, and in many cases thornier than, today’s have been addressed successfully in the past. It highlights how new technologies and infrastructure investment, if properly harnessed, can offer society a path toward a better future. In a world threatened by fragmentation, both within and between countries, what better symbol could there be for the exciting opportunities as well as important risks of our time than building a bridge?