<v Speaker 1>I'm Jerry Broadway, and this is Anonymous America where we

<v Speaker 1>take a deep dive into American history to find a

<v Speaker 1>hero who did something amazing and then slipped through the

<v Speaker 1>hands of time. Every single day, more than one hundred

<v Speaker 1>thousand people crossed the Brooklyn Bridge. It's one of the

<v Speaker 1>most famous things ever built by American hands. It carries

<v Speaker 1>two men's names, but the person who actually finished it,

<v Speaker 1>who held it together for eleven years through disease and

<v Speaker 1>doubt and death, was a woman almost no one remembers.

<v Speaker 1>The Brooklyn Bridge was the dream of an engineer named

<v Speaker 1>John Roebling back in the eighteen sixties. It was very

<v Speaker 1>nearly an impossible idea. The longest suspension bridge in the

<v Speaker 1>world flung clear across the East River to join Manhattan

<v Speaker 1>and Brooklyn into one great city. John Roebling designed the

<v Speaker 1>whole thing, but construction had barely begun when in eighteen

<v Speaker 1>sixty nine his foot was crushed in an accident at

<v Speaker 1>the edge of the water. He developed tetanus, and within

<v Speaker 1>weeks the man who had dreamed up the bridge was dead.

<v Speaker 1>So the enormous job was passed on to his son,

<v Speaker 1>Washington Robling. Now Washington was a gifted engineer in his

<v Speaker 1>own right. He was a decorated Civil War veteran who

<v Speaker 1>had trained at his father's side. And Washington Roebling also

<v Speaker 1>had a wife. Her name was Emily from hay Dad Productions.

<v Speaker 1>This is anonymous America. Now. To build the Brooklyn Bridges

<v Speaker 1>massive stone tiwers, workers first had to dig all the

<v Speaker 1>way down to the bedrock beneath the river. They did

<v Speaker 1>it inside gigantic, air tight wooden chambers called caissons, sunk

<v Speaker 1>to the river bottom and pumped full of compressed air

<v Speaker 1>to hold back the water. And the mud men labored

<v Speaker 1>down there and the pressurized dark, and if they came

<v Speaker 1>up to the surface too quickly, they got terribly sick,

<v Speaker 1>joint pains, paralysis, sometimes death. It was called Kisson disease.

<v Speaker 1>Today we call it the Benz. In eighteen seventy two,

<v Speaker 1>Washington Roebling came up out of that caisson and collapsed.

<v Speaker 1>He survived, but he was never the same. He was

<v Speaker 1>left partially paralyzed. He was in chronic pain. He was

<v Speaker 1>often unable to walk the construction site. At times he

<v Speaker 1>was unable to even speak above a whisper, and he

<v Speaker 1>could not bear light or visitors. The chief engineer of

<v Speaker 1>the greatest construction project in America was now an invalid,

<v Speaker 1>confined to a single room in his house on the

<v Speaker 1>Brooklyn side of the river, where he could watch the

<v Speaker 1>towers of the bridge rise through a telescope in his

<v Speaker 1>bedroom window. The whole enterprise was teetering on the edge

<v Speaker 1>of collapse. Not the bridge, the whole project. A bedridden

<v Speaker 1>chief engineer who couldn't visit his own work. The financiers

<v Speaker 1>and the board wanted him removed. And this is where

<v Speaker 1>Emily Warren Roebling walked right into history. Emily was never

<v Speaker 1>trained as an engineer. Women of her era were simply

<v Speaker 1>not permitted to be. But she was sharp, and she

<v Speaker 1>was relentless, and she began to learn at her husband's bedside.

<v Speaker 1>She studied higher mathematics. She studied the strength of materials,

<v Speaker 1>the science of cable construction, the calculation of stresses and

<v Speaker 1>curves and loads. She learned the entire language of the work.

<v Speaker 1>And then for the next eleven years, Emily Roebling effectively

<v Speaker 1>became the Brooklyn Bridge. She was her husband's eyes, hands

<v Speaker 1>and voice. Every day she traveled to the construction site,

<v Speaker 1>carrying his detailed instructions down to the men. She dealt

<v Speaker 1>with the assistant engineers, she dealt with the contractors and

<v Speaker 1>the steel suppliers, she dealt with the politicians and the

<v Speaker 1>skeptical board members who held the money. And when officials

<v Speaker 1>openly questioned whether Washington was even still competent to run

<v Speaker 1>the project, it was Emily who went and spoke on

<v Speaker 1>his behalf before the American Society of Civil Engineers, one

<v Speaker 1>of the first women ever to address that body. For

<v Speaker 1>more than a decade, the men building that bridge took

<v Speaker 1>their daily orders from a woman. Many of them just

<v Speaker 1>assumed she was relaying her husband's words. The truth was

<v Speaker 1>that she understood the engineering so completely that people close

<v Speaker 1>to the work began to wonder aloud whether the finished

<v Speaker 1>bridge was in every way that mattered hers. The Brooklyn

<v Speaker 1>Bridge opened on May twenty fourth, eighteen eighty three, and

<v Speaker 1>the very first person to ride across it, ahead of

<v Speaker 1>the dignitaries, ahead of the crowds, ahead of the fireworks,

<v Speaker 1>was Emily Warren Roebling, carried over in a carriage holding

<v Speaker 1>a rooster in her lap as an old symbol of victory.

<v Speaker 1>Her husband watched her cross the bridge from the window

<v Speaker 1>of his room through his telescope. There's a plaque on

<v Speaker 1>that bridge today. It honors the three Roeblings, John who

<v Speaker 1>designed it and died for it, Washington, who built it

<v Speaker 1>and suffered for it, And Emily, whose faith and courage,

<v Speaker 1>it says, helped her stricken husband complete the work. The

<v Speaker 1>plaque carries this line on the back of every great

<v Speaker 1>work we can find the self sacrificing devotion of a woman.

<v Speaker 1>That's a lovely sentiment for eighteen eighty three, but it

<v Speaker 1>badly under sells Emily. Emily Robling didn't merely support the work.

<v Speaker 1>She taught herself an entire profession she was forbidden to enter.

<v Speaker 1>She ran the day to day construction of the most

<v Speaker 1>ambitious bridge on earth for eleven years. She held together

<v Speaker 1>a project that powerful men were ready to just abandon,

<v Speaker 1>and she did all of it at an age that

<v Speaker 1>told her flatly that a woman's mind wasn't built for

<v Speaker 1>that now. Later in life, Emily went on to earn

<v Speaker 1>a law degree because she was not apparently finished proven points.

<v Speaker 1>But her real monument was already standing. Fourteen hundred feet

<v Speaker 1>of steel and stone thrown across the East River carrying

<v Speaker 1>the endless traffic of a city that mostly forgot her name.

<v Speaker 1>So the next time you see the Brooklyn Bridge in

<v Speaker 1>a photograph or a movie, or if you're standing right

<v Speaker 1>there on it, remember it was finished by a woman

<v Speaker 1>who just taught herself how. That's Emily Warren Roebling, and

<v Speaker 1>that's Anonymous America.