Original post author: Ryan
Construction of the Brooklyn Bridge started in 1869. Fourteen years later, the bridge was finished. The bridge was such a feat at the time that people didn't trust it to actually stay up. Six days after opening, a crowd of pedestrians thought the bridge was collapsing. This caused a stampede which ended up fatally crushing twelve people.
There seems to be an endless amount of interesting facts and stories about the Brooklyn Bridge, but the caissons used to construct the bridge piers are my favorite.
The sand on the riverbed had to be excavated away to build the bridge piers on bedrock. Excavating underwater was made possible by using caissons, which were giant air-tight wooden boxes. Massive stone blocks were stacked on top of the caissons to hold them on the bottom of the river. The boxes were filled with heavily pressurized air to neutralize the massive weight of the water on all sides. The caissons had no bottoms, so workers could dig away at the sand.
People working in the caissons were called "sandhogs" and were paid about $2 per day, which is equivalent to about $33 per day in 2017. That's especially bad pay when you consider 27 workers died during construction and hundreds got "caisson disease" which we know as "the bends" today. The Bends is an extremely painful ailment that happens when returning to the surface too quickly after being in a pressurized environment; it's caused by gas dissolved in a persons blood turning into small air bubbles as they return to normal atmospheric pressure. Deep sea divers nowadays know to transition back to the surface slowly.
Being inside the caissons was a surreal and terrible experience. A quote from the project's mechanical engineer, E.F. Farrington, is below:
"Inside the caisson everything wore an unreal, weird appearance. There was a confused sensation in the head, like "the rush of many waters." The pulse was at first accelerated, then sometimes fell below the normal rate. The voice sounded faint unnatural, and it became a great effort to speak. What with the flaming lights, the deep shadows, the confusing noise of hammers, drills and chains, the half-naked forms flitting about, if of a poetic temperament, get a realizing sense of Dante's inferno. One thing to me was noticeable - time passed quickly in the caisson." I know it's a little hard to parse that 1800s talk, so let me translate that into a more "modern" format:
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