John Roebling’s wire rope supported world changing bridges
John Augustus Roebling was educated in engineering and even worked for the Prussian government for several years.
But when he settled in America in 1831, he was not planning to use his engineering skills. That changed in 1837. And thus began the Roebling legacy of entrepreneurship and engineering innovation that we continue to honor and want to preserve for future generations.
Roebling took a surveying job for the Pennsylvania working on canal engineering and construction. He eventually worked on the canal portage routes across the Allegheny Mountains.
The canal system, known as the Allegheny Portage Railroad, depended on hauling canalboats along railway tracks over the mountains. The system relied on 9-inch hemp ropes that had to be replaced frequently and would sometimes fray and break. On one occasion, Roebling saw a canal boat careening down a mountain after a hemp rope broke. Two men were killed.
Roebling came back to Saxonburg and developed a seven-strand iron wire cable that was twisted manually along a wire rope walk on land Roebling owned near Water and Rebecca streets in Saxonburg. Eventually, his wire rope cable replaced the hemp rope used on the canalboats.
That began Roebling’s legacy of developing a better way to make wire rope cable and as an important American builder, designing suspension bridges that were once unimaginable.
Roebling’s acclaimed work on wire rope cable and his suspension bridge career began in the still standing wire rope workshop in Saxonburg’s Roebling Park, an area once known as “Roebling’s Meadow.”
The workshop, which dates back to about 1838, was where he perfected the twisting of wire rope cable and is where he received his first U.S. Patent, no. 2720, on July 16, 1842, for the “Method of and Machine for Manufacturing Wire Rope.”
That first patent was for a method of the “spiral laying of the wires around a common axis without twisting the individual wires” while also having them “each under a uniform and forcible tension.”
Roebling was not shy when he wrote about his new wire rope in an 1841 document titled “Specification.”
“Be it known that I, John Augustus Roebling of Saxonburg, in the County of Butler, State of Pennsylvania, have invented and a new and improved mode of manufacturing Wire Ropes, and I hereby do declare the following: The nature of my invention consists of a combination of any number of wires, laid parallel to each other, to form a round cylinder … to be substituted and used in place of hempropes, hempcables, chaincables and chains, for all purposes for which the latter have been applied heretofore. The superior merits of wire ropes over hemp ropes are chiefly their great durability and little cost. Wire ropes manufactured in the above manner, will likewise be superior to twisted Wire Ropes.”
As Kelley Marie Hatch-Draper wrote in 2011 in “Wired for Business: The Roebling Story,” “Roebling's ability to assess a technological problem and invent a solution took him far beyond the meadow behind his Saxonburg home. The 1840s proved to be a busy time for Roebling. From 1844 to 1850 Roebling built six aqueducts and the Smithfield Street Bridge in Pittsburgh. Each project brought him more acclaim.”
And in the late 1850s, after leaving Saxonburg to establish a factory in New Jersey because of so many demands, he returned to Pittsburgh to build the Allegheny River Suspension Bridge, where the Roberto Clemente “Three Sisters” Bridge now stands.
The ultimate suspension bridge was yet to come, although a tragic accident was to befall John Roebling before the work on the Brooklyn Bridge would commence in 1869.
A ferryboat crushed his right foot while he was doing survey work. He died of tetanus 24 days later.
Col. Washington Roebling, John Roebling’s first son, who had been born in May 1837 in Saxonburg, and Washington’s wife, Emily, finished the famous bridge.
“At the time of its completion [May 1883], the Brooklyn Bridge, ‘The Eighth Wonder of the World,’ was,” according to Hatch-Draper, “50% longer than any previous suspension bridge, the first to use pneumatic caissons, and the first steel suspension cable bridge. With 14,060 miles of wire rope, an elevated promenade for foot traffic, train tracks, and two roadways suspended from four 15 3/4-inch cables, it was more than just an engineering masterpiece. As John Roebling had envisioned, the bridge was a work of art, aesthetically pleasing, with its two arched stone towers standing watch over the masses of Brooklyn and New York. Congressional representative, industrialist, and philanthropist, the Honorable Abram S. Hewitt proclaimed on opening day, ‘It stands before us today as the sum and epitome of human knowledge; as the very heir of the ages’.”
And it all started in Saxonburg, where the historic John Roebling Wire Rope Workshop and surrounding land is undisputedly “the birthplace of the wire rope industry in America.”
To support that statement, Washington Roebling wrote in a Dec. 4, 1893, letter to ‘The Bulletin of The American Iron and Steel Association’: “Dear Sir: The first wire rope in this country was made by Mr. John A. Roebling in 1840 at the village of Saxonburg, in Butler County, Pennsylvania.”
And historian Don Heinrich Tolzmann, has added in recent years that “the importance of Roebling’s Saxonburg workshop is comparable to Edison’s research lab.”
Numerous authors and historians have noted that John Roebling accomplished every goal he set for himself in the New World. He established a new village in Butler County, north of Pittsburgh, that has flourished over its 192 years. And he became the premiere inventor, bridge designer and builder of the nineteenth century.
Without Roebling's innovation in wire rope that began in Saxonburg, the world may not have had suspension bridges or cables for elevators, construction cranes and other devices in the modern world.
A legacy that is still honored today and will into the future.
Unfortunately, the historic John Roebling Wire Rope Workshop building’s foundation has deteriorated. There are no longer stone foundations in some areas, and the building has tilted.
In addition, the floor joists are weakening and the floor is tilting by 2 to 4 degrees. An initiative is underway to fund a preservation project to save the building for future generations. You can help by sending a check, of any amount, to the 501(c)3 charitable organization the Friends of Saxonburg Museum, PO Box 17, Saxonburg, PA 16056.
Fred Caesar is the volunteer coordinator of the Saxonburg Museum.
