So, Who Wants to Hear a Nice Story About a Bridge?

This week I finished David McCullough's book The Great Bridge, which is about the design and construction of the Brooklyn Bridge and was one of McCullough's earlier books, written back in the 1970's.  My uncle gave it to me for Christmas some time ago and I finally sat down to read it.  

And it was good, as most things by McCullough are.  The book examined the construction of the bridge but also the stories of the people behind and around it (Washington Roebling, Emily Roebling, Tweed, Kingsley, and a host of others).  Most interesting to me was the construction and sinking of the towers in the East River.  Compressed air was forced into a cavity at the bottom of a caisson that formed the base of the towers.  That kept water out so that men could excavate under the towers - as the caisson sank deeper the towers were built on top of it.  

Of course, one of the problems with compressed air is that it can give you the bends, which is something that scuba divers are familiar with but in actuality it was discovered during work on caissons such as the ones used to build the bridge (the official name of the disease is actually Caisson's disease).  It was a reliatvely new phenomenon but people had drawn the correlation at least between the pressurized air and the devastating disease.  Still, men went into the bridge to work.  Washington Roebling himself got the bends while oversseing work in the Caissons and he dealt with the after-effects for the rest of his life.  

McCullough does a pretty good job of describing how the bridge was built without going into overlycumbersome detail.

And....that's really about it.  It was a fascinating read, and I'm in awe of what they were able to do in the past.  The nineteenth century was an engineer's dream....