The Roebling Legacy by Clifford W. Zink (review)

In this profusely illustrated book, Clifford Zink offers a narrative account of the Roebling firm, its eponymous engineer/managers, their landmark suspension bridges, and the range of products that sustained this family-run company for four generations. The context for the events and forces that shaped the Roeblings and their Trenton, New Jersey, factory gets inadequate attention, however, and no broader analytic questions structure the narrative. History here is one damn thing after another, all competently reported but never explained. Zink has worked for decades on various public history projects recording and interpreting the activities of the Roebling firm and the remaining structures of its extensive factories, shuttered in the early 1980s. This attractive book illustrates the work that emanated from the plants in Trenton and in Roebling, New Jersey, and it clearly succeeds in educating modern visitors about just what happened in those places. Why those things happened is left for others to explain.

Zink is a thorough researcher and a competent writer, and he mined rich source materials. Apparently most of the internal business papers of the family firm—John A. Roebling's Sons—were destroyed, likely after its 1952 merger into the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company. To make up for that loss, Zink assembled a broad array of sources: secondary accounts on the firm and on bridge building, letters among the Roebling family, articles from newspapers and technical journals, Roebling company publications, oral history interviews with retired workers, and detailed memoirs by the firm's founder, John A. Roebling, and by his son Washington. Much of their story was already told with narrative verve (and scant analytic framing) in David McCullough's 1972 The Great Bridge.

Zink comes into his own in detailing the firm's work on the great suspension bridges that came after Brooklyn, including the Williamsburg and George Washington bridges in New York City and the Golden Gate in San Francisco. Zink also excels in describing the evolution of management and production as Washington, his brothers, and their sons shaped the firm from the 1870s into the 1930s. The Roeblings found innovative applications for their basic core competence: the drawing of wire from steel bars and its spinning into cables. Beyond suspension bridges, Roebling cable suspended Otis elevators, hauled excavators for the Panama Canal, lifted ship cargos, actuated airplane control surfaces, and eventually powered ski lifts. Electrical wire and various applications of woven mesh rounded out the product line. Abortive moves into automobiles circa 1910 and lawn mowers after 1945 show that the Roeblings were not infallible.

The 1905 decision, led by Charles Roebling, Washington's brother and the engineer in chief of production, to create the firm's own open-hearth steel mill also receives extensive description. The brothers had resisted J. P. Morgan's enticements to join the U.S. Steel combine, formed in 1901. Zink does not explain that risky choice, nor does he explore the key question of how Roebling succeeded in competing against the integrated giant for many decades. Surely the choice to make its own steel was one key element—safeguarding quality, supply, and costs. But integration alone cannot explain how the Roebling David battled so successfully for so long against the USS Goliath.

Another key contextual issue ignored here: How and why did the markets for bridges evolve over time? Zink glides past the fact that suspension bridges never won the approval of railroad engineers, and railroads had nearly endless needs for spans. So how, beyond its founder's genius, did Roebling develop the market for its big suspension bridges? Did it also work to create a market for the more prosaic spans that nearly every community needed? Between 1870 and 1940, the primary responsibility for projecting and building long-span road or rail bridges shifted from the private to the public sector; how did that shift affect Roebling's business? The automobile clearly bolstered demand for long suspension bridges. But what technical paradigms won the favor of engineers at the Federal...