John August Roebling

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John A. Roebling (Portrait of Franz Krüger , 1855)
Memorial plaque on Roebling's birthplace in Mühlhausen

John August Roebling (actually Johann August Röbling ; born June 12, 1806 in Mühlhausen in Thuringia ; † July 22, 1869 in New York , NY ) was a German-American engineer and bridge builder. He became world famous as the designer of the Brooklyn Bridge in New York. On September 30, 1837 he received the certificate of naturalization of the USA and called himself John A. Roebling from then on.

Life

Johann August Röbling was born in the Thuringian city of Mühlhausen , which at that time belonged to the Kingdom of Prussia , as the fifth child of Friederike Therese Röbling and the tobacco dealer Christoph Polykarpus Röbling. He attended grammar school in Mühlhausen, which he had to leave because of bad grades in religion and Latin. He continued his training at the renowned private pedagogy of the mathematician Ephraim Salomon Unger in Erfurt . In 1824 Johann August Röbling enrolled at the Royal Building Academy in Berlin , where he studied architecture , civil engineering and bridge construction , dyke construction , hydraulics and mechanical engineering. In lectures by Johann Friedrich Wilhelm Dietlein (1787–1837) he learned about the first suspension bridges that had just been built in Bavaria, the Palatinate and Westphalia, and which he inspected immediately. At the University of Berlin he also studied philosophy with Hegel . He took his exams in 1826. He initially worked as a "construction conductor" in Westphalia and lived in Eslohe , where he developed the first plans for suspension bridges over the Ruhr and Lenne in 1828, but these were not implemented. However, the architect A. Bruns resorted to his plans for a chain bridge in Freienohl , who commissioned the Count of Westphalia to build a pedestrian bridge at Laer Castle in 1839 .

At that time construction technology received new scientific foundations. That meant applying the equation of the catenoids or chain line to the suspension bridge and many other things.

emigration

In May 1831 Johann August Röbling emigrated to America via Bremen together with his brother Karl, the utopian Johann Adolphus Etzler and other citizens of Mühlhausen . After arriving in Pittsburgh , the group split up: The smaller part around Etzler moved further west. The larger part around Röbling bought together with some other emigrants on October 28, 1831 in Butler County Pennsylvania 6.4 km² of land and founded the settlement Germania , which was later renamed Saxonburg . Initially, Röbling ran agriculture. In May 1836 he married Johanna Herting, who was also from Mühlhausen, and in 1837 became the father of son Washington , the eldest of later nine children. In the same year Röbling became an American citizen.

After his brother Karl died, John August Roebling began working as an engineer building canals and waterways. He spent three years working for the state Pennsylvania Railroad train paths over the Appalachians to measure. In 1841 he further developed the wire rope in his workshop in Saxonburg , which became the basis for his economic success and for his later bridge construction.

First bridge construction

John A. Roebling Suspension Bridge in Cincinnati (1999)

In 1844 Roebling won the tender for the Allegheny Aqueduct , a canal bridge that would lead the Pennsylvania Canal over the Allegheny River into central Pittsburgh and replace an older wooden structure. It consisted of an approx. 300 m long wooden trough for the water, which was carried by a continuous cable running over seven pylons on both sides.

In 1845, the Smithfield Street Bridge , a suspension bridge over the Monongahela River in Pittsburgh , was built, and in 1848 he designed two more aqueducts as a suspension bridge over the Delaware and Hudson Canal (see Delaware and Hudson Railway ). During this time he moved to Trenton, New Jersey .

His next project was the Niagara Falls Suspension Bridge , a rail and road bridge, the construction of which he began in 1851 for the New York Central Railroad and the Great Western Railway of Canada over the Niagara River . The bridge was 250 meters long and two-story, for the railroad and for the road. It took a total of four years to build.

During this time he also began building a railroad bridge over the Kentucky River between Lexington and Danville, which should have a span of over 370 meters. This structure was never completed because the Lexington and Danville Railroad had to file for bankruptcy beforehand.

In 1858 Roebling constructed the Allegheny Bridge (also St. Clair Bridge , second Sixth Street Bridge ), another suspension bridge in Pittsburgh with a total length of 310 meters and a maximum span of twice 100 meters.

During the American Civil War , Roebling's work came to a halt temporarily. But as early as 1863 he supervised the construction of a bridge over the Ohio River in Cincinnati, which was completed in 1867. This structure, which was later named John A. Roebling Suspension Bridge after him , was the longest suspension bridge in the world with a span of 322 meters until the Brooklyn Bridge was built.

Brooklyn Bridge and Death

In 1865 Roebling began planning the Brooklyn Bridge , which should span the East River in New York and connect the districts of Brooklyn and Manhattan . While surveying a bridge pier he had an accident on July 6, 1869 in Fulton Ferry, as a result of which he died sixteen days later of a tetanus infection . As an ardent supporter of homeopathy , Röbling had refused conventional medical treatment and treated the wound only with water. On July 25th, John August Roebling was buried in Trenton, attended by thousands.

His son, Washington Augustus Roebling , continued to work, but fell ill three years later and was partially paralyzed. His wife Emily Warren Roebling took over the construction management and completed the work, although she was not a specialist. On May 24, 1883, she was the first person to cross the bridge.

J. A. Roebling's sons Washington Augustus Roebling (1837-1926), Ferdinand William Roebling (1842-1917) and Charles Gustavus Roebling (1849-1918) jointly operated the John A. Roebling's Sons Company. From 1859 to 1955, the Roebling Wire Company / John A. Roebling's Sons Company supplied steel cables for 24 suspension bridges in the United States, Quebec, Canada, and El Salvador, etc. a. for the Golden Gate Bridge near San Francisco . They also made the plans for some of these bridges.

buildings

John August Roebling Memorial near Cincinnati
  • 1844 Allegheny Aqueduct , Pittsburgh, span 50 meters
  • 1846 Smithfield Bridge , Pittsburgh, span 57 meters
  • 1848 Lackawaxen aqueduct , span twice 35 meters
  • 1849 Delaware Aqueduct , span 4 by 40 meters
  • 1850 High Falls Aqueduct , span 44 meters
  • 1850 Neversink Aqueduct , span 52 meters
  • 1854 Niagara Falls suspension bridge , New York-Canada, span 250 meters
  • 1859 Allegheny Bridge , Pittsburgh, span 105 meters
  • 1867 John A. Roebling suspension bridge over the Ohio River , span 304 meters
  • 1869 Waco suspension bridge in Waco , span 145 meters
  • 1883 Brooklyn Bridge , New York, span 486 meters

Works

  • Diary of my trip from Mühlhausen in Thuringia via Bremen to the United States of North America in 1831, written for my friends . Eschwege, 1832
  • Diary of my journey from Mühlhausen in Thuringia via Bremen to the United States in 1831 . Edition annotated by contemporary texts and images, ed. by Iris Roebling with the assistance of Eyk Henze, Halle 2006. ISBN 978-3-89812-388-4

Honors

  • 1876 ​​A memorial plaque is installed on the house where he was born in Mühlhausen based on a design by the New York sculptor H. Baerer
  • In 1883, the Kurz Görmarstrasse in Mühlhausen, where the house where he was born, was renamed Röblingstrasse. In Berlin-Schöneberg , the northern part of today's Röblingstrasse was named after him in 1913 and the southern part (until then a section of Schöneberger Strasse) in 1935.

A street in the north of Erfurt is also named after him.

  • In the summer of 1908 a seated bronze statue was erected on a cube-shaped pedestal in his honor in Cadwalader Park in Trenton (New Jersey) and was unveiled in front of 15,000 spectators.
  • The Röblinglauf has been taking place in Mühlhausen annually since 2002, and in 2013 the Mühlhausen Röblinglauf Club was formed
  • In 2006, Deutsche Post issued a commemorative stamp for his 200th birthday ( Michel no . 2546).
  • According to a design by Werner Löwe , a life-size bronze statue of Johann August Röbling was erected in 2007 on the Mühlhausen Untermarkt.
  • In Mühlhausen / Thuringia the Johann-August-Roebling-School was named after him.

literature

Web links

Commons : John A. Roebling  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c Preface to the diary of my trip from Mühlhausen in Thuringia via Bremen to the United States in 1831. Edition annotated by contemporary texts and images, ed. by Iris Roebling with the assistance of Eyk Henze, Halle 2006. ISBN 978-3-89812-388-4
  2. ^ William E. Ellis: The Kentucky River . P. 91, books.google.de
  3. ↑ Jens Hiersemann: Mühlhausen street names then and now . 2004, p. 75
  4. ↑ Röblingstrasse. In: Street name lexicon of the Luisenstädtischer Bildungsverein (near  Kaupert )
  5. ↑ Donald Sayenga (Ed., 2011), p. 7
  6. ↑ Reiner Schmalzl in Thüringer Allgemeine from July 22, 2014, TAMU2
personal data
SURNAME Roebling, John August
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Röbling, Johann August
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German-American engineer and bridge builder
DATE OF BIRTH June 12, 1806
PLACE OF BIRTH Mühlhausen / Thuringia
DATE OF DEATH July 22, 1869
Place of death New York , NY