Washington Roebling was the engineer in charge of building the Brooklyn Bridge. In 1871 he went down into one of the bridge’s caissons because he wanted to see the conditions his men worked in. When he came out, he had a very bad case of an illness the workers called caisson disease. He was paralyzed for the rest of his life.
A caisson, from the French word for “box”, was a huge room filled with compressed air, which is air pushed together under high pressure. Builders used caissons to make the foundations of a bridge in a river. Men dug at the bottom, and the pressure of the air kept the water out. This way of building was faster and cheaper, but it had a hidden cost. Today the illness is called decompression sickness. When the pressure around a person falls quickly, a gas called nitrogen can form bubbles in the blood and body. This causes pain in the joints, problems with breathing, itching, confusion and seizures. In the 1870s, nobody knew what caused it.
Roebling started work in May 1870 on a bridge 1,600 feet long between Manhattan and Brooklyn. Its caissons were bigger than any built before. They were three times the size of the caissons for a new bridge across the Mississippi River at St. Louis. His father, John A. Roebling, had first planned the project, but he died during the early work.
At St. Louis, the workers had already suffered. Many came out of the caissons bent over in pain. This reminded people of a fashionable way for women to stand, called the Grecian Bend, so people said the men had “the bends”. Nearly a quarter of all the workers got sick, and 13 of them died.
At Brooklyn, a doctor named Andrew H. Smith looked after the men. He recorded 86 cases of the disease. He gave the sick men medicines like morphine, but he could do little to stop the illness because nobody understood its cause. He noticed that most of the men who got sick were overweight. A study in 2024 said that Smith was wrong about how the disease worked. But his strict rules and quick help made it possible to finish the stone towers of the bridge.
Roebling was worried because more and more men were hurt or killed. He finally stopped the digging at 78 feet, although people thought it was necessary to go down to 100 feet to reach solid rock. Against the advice he was given, he built the Manhattan tower on sand. The writer Joel Cook later said Roebling was an invalid, a person too sick to live normally, for years.
Someone else helped with the work. In May 1883, a newspaper in Sacramento wrote about men from factories who wanted to work on the bridge. They went to New York to talk to Colonel Roebling. They were very surprised when Mrs. Roebling sat down with them. She knew a lot about engineering, and she helped them solve their problems. The bridge opened that same month.
Abram S. Hewitt gave a speech about the bridge for the city of New York. He said that the name of Emily Warren Roebling would always be connected with the best things in human nature. He also talked about the price the family paid: the father had died, and the son who finished the bridge had a terrible disease.
The answer to the mystery came from a French scientist, Paul Bert. He showed that the disease came when the pressure fell too quickly. He said that workers should come up more slowly, and that people with paralysis should go back under pressure at once. Doctors still use his ideas today.
But this help came too late for the men in the East River. Hewitt asked people to remember not only the engineers but also the workers whose names nobody knew: the brave men who built the bridge deep down in the caissons.