WASHINGTON A. ROEBLING - AUTOGRAPH LETTER SIGNED 04/30/1914 - HFSID 265113

WASHINGTON ROEBLING
The Chief Engineer of the Brooklyn Bridge signed this handwritten letter discussing labor issues in Colorado, a period that is now known as the Colorado Coalfield War
Autograph Letter signed: "WAR", One page. 5x6¾. On personal letterhead. April 30, 1914. To "Dear John". In Full: "While cutting off some coupons today I failed to find the 10 Colorado Power bonds - whose interest is due today. Please let me know if I sent them to anybody in Bernardsville last Christmas. The strikers are injuring the Co. They are all foreigners - what abject cowards the American people (the politicians) have become. The miners are supported in Congress and Rockefeller is blamed for the whole murderous business. Mexico is overshadowed by Colorado Damp weather. Cornelia is weak but a little better. Ear trouble bad as ever. The [illegible] are back." Washington A. Roebling (1837-1926) was educated at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York, then the leading school of professional engineering in the country. Upon receiving his degree, Roebling started to work in his father's wire rope mill in Trenton, New Jersey, where the family had moved. He spent 1868 abroad conferring with the leading engineers of England, France and Germany. He studied their principles and practice of caisson foundations in order to help his father in the newly projected Brooklyn Bridge, of which the elder Roebling had been appointed Chief Engineer. Immediately on his return from Europe, he entered his father's office as Principal Assistant and prepared the detailed plans and specifications for the great bridge. After the elder Roebling died just as the field work was beginning, his son succeeded him as Chief Engineer. The foundations of the great towers were built by the caisson method, under compressed air, and Washington Roebling spent long hours in the damp high-pressure of the caisson chambers. Caisson disease, the dreaded "bends", attacked the laborers. At that time little was known of methods of treatment. One afternoon in the spring of 1872, Roebling was taken almost unconscious from the caisson on the New York side, but in a few days he was back on the job. By the end of the year, however, his health had been seriously and permanently affected, and he did not visit the bridge site again. From that time until the bridge was finished in 1883, except for six months abroad in a vain attempt to regain his health, he directed the work from his house in Brooklyn, too sick to leave it, with the significant assistance of his wife Emily Warren Roebling (1843-1903). Despite this permanent illness, Roebling did not pass away until he was at the ripe old age of 89. He died at his home at 191 West State Street, Trenton, New Jersey on July 21, 1926, outliving his wife by nearly 24 years. Lightly toned. Otherwise, fine condition.