Brooklyn Bridge

The Brooklyn Bridge stands as a feat of nineteenth century engineering, representing the first time steel was used for cable wire in a suspension bridge. When construction began in eighteen sixty-nine, its main span of fifteen hundred and ninety-five feet shattered all existing world records for length. To build the massive towers that rise above you, workers had to labor inside underwater chambers called pneumatic caissons, where they were exposed to intense pressure. Many, including the chief engineer Washington Roebling, fell victim to decompression sickness, an agonizing condition then known as caisson disease. Continue