BROOKLYN BRIDGE

suspension bridge spanning the East River from Brooklyn to Manhattan Island, New York City. A brilliant feat of 19th-century engineering, the Brooklyn Bridge was the first bridge to use steel for cable wire, and during its construction explosives were used inside a pneumatic caisson for the first time. The masterwork of John Augustus Roebling, the Brooklyn Bridge was built (186983) in the face of immense difficulties. Roebling died as a result of an accident at the outset, and his son, Washington Roebling, taking over as chief engineer, suffered a crippling attack of caisson disease (the bends) during the founding of the New York pier (1872). Confined to his apartment in Columbia Heights (Brooklyn), he continued to direct operations, observing with field glasses and sending messages to the site by his wife, Emily Warren Roebling. A compressed-air blast that wrecked a pneumatic caisson slowed the work, as did a severe fire that smoldered for weeks in another caisson, a cable that parted from its anchorage on the Manhattan side and crashed into the river, and the fraud perpetrated by a steel-wire contractor that necessitated the replacement of tons of cable. The Brooklyn Bridge's 1,595-foot (486-metre) main span was the longest in the world until the completion of the Firth of Forth cantilever bridge in Scotland in 1890. Its deck, supported by four cables, carries both automobile and pedestrian traffic. A distinctive feature is the broad promenade above the roadway, which John Roebling accurately predicted in a crowded commercial city will be of incalculable value.