John Roebling a true American Pioneer

John A. Roebling was born on June 12, in 1806 in http://www.inventionfactory.com/history/RHAgen/rstory/rsevol.html
Muehlhausen, Thuringia .. what was then called Prussia.

He and his younger brother, Karl, organized in 1831 a small group of the younger people of the neighborhood and undertook to lead their emigration to the United States.

Although their goal was the highly romanticized plains of the West, where, they had been told, the real promised land awaited them, certain financial and political exigencies led to the final adoption of a site near Pittsburgh for their proposed community. The town was at first called Germania, but later became known as Saxonburg.

Roebling was an alert and industrious engineer and his imagination was stimulated by finding an obscure German engineering paper which described the experiments which someone in Germany had been conducting in making ropes out of steel wire.Roebling began to experiment at his farm in Saxonburg. This was in 1840.

Success came soon and he sold his first Wire Rope Sold in 1841 - The rope had been made in the meadow behind his Saxonburg farm, on the crudest sort of equipment, with the help of his farmer neighbors as workmen.

The rope worked. It lived up to every promise he had made for it; it was flexible; it was strong and was to form the basis of a short lived fortune.

In the 1860's the Otis Brothers were experimenting in a field which since has become one of the largest consumers of wire rope. Until then, elevators had been used sparingly, and then mostly for industrial purposes because of their lack of safety mechanisms. The Otis Brothers, however, brought out safety devices which have been largely responsible for the expansion of the elevator industry. And the advent of wire rope, which John A. Roebling designed to suit their needs, contributed integrally to this development. (Pic their winding gear at Philadelphia Expo 1876)

However, in 1866 was one of the severest ever experienced in that section. The East River NY was lashed by winds that made ferrying both difficult and hazardous. And finally, in a climax of cold, the river was so choked with ice that the boats could not even put out from their slips.

He proposed a bridge .. the Brooklyn Bridge which opened in 1883

"The contemplated work, when constructed in accordance with my design, will not only
be the greatest bridge in existence, but it will be the great engineering work of the Continent and of the age. Its most conspicuous feature - the great towers - will serve as landmarks to the adjoining cities, and they will be entitled to be ranked as national monuments. As a great work of art, and a successful specimen of advanced bridge engineering, the structure will forever testify to the energy, enterprise, and wealth of that community which shall secure its erection."


The bridge vindicated every claim he had made for it, are matters of record that need no repeating. But ironically, the bridge that remains as his monument, cost him his life. It was while he was locating the site for the Brooklyn tower that a carelessly piloted ferry boat crashed into a pier on which he was standing, and crushed his foot. He developed tetanus poisoning from the injury and died in 1869, before even the towers had been erected.

So if you cross the Brooklyn Bridge, or ride in an Otis elevator remember John Roebley. One of those who made America a great nation.

The just imagine how a twat like Waggoner can stay on at GM.