Read more
Informationen zum Autor Rachel Lance Klappentext "This is a previously classified story of one group of scientific researchers-men and women-who exposed themselves to extraordinary risks to make D-Day a success"-- Leseprobe CHAPTER 2 Brooklyn Bridge of Death On February 28, 1872, two decades before J. B. S. Haldane’s birth, Brooklyn Bridge laborer Joseph Brown was submerged well below the murky waters of New York City’s East River. . . technically. The twenty-?eight-year-old American-born foreman sloshed through a shallow layer of dark, frigid water in his work-issued, thigh-high black rubber Goodyear boots, but the rest of him stayed dry, free to hoist a pickax or a sledgehammer beneath the low ceiling and bring it down with enough force to remove yet another hunk from the rocky sand of the moist river floor. Caissons are massive constructions that look a bit like large rectangular wooden bowls. They’re turned so the open mouth faces downward,and they get plunked into the water beneath a layer of hefty building material thick enough to ensure that they plummet firmly to the bottom. Once they have settled onto the topmost, waterlogged layer of unstable earth on the river floor, workers use gas pumps to push air down into them from the surface, and that compressed air blows out the water from inside the inverted bowls. The workers are then free to travel down into the wooden structures and dig inside, working the edges of the caisson downward inch by painful inch into the muck and soil as they remove bucketfuls of stone and earth from below. Each caisson used for the Brooklyn Bridge was thirty-?one by fifty-?two meters in size, divided into six long chambers by internal walls. They were sizable hunks of a city block beneath the waves, but with no sun, and with impenetrably thick, flat, iron-reinforced wooden skies looming only three meters overhead. Brown, like so many others, sloshed inside. The dark, soggy, air-?filled crawl spaces had floors of mud and sand and were peopled by “sand hogs”— workers wielding pickaxes, chisels, sledgehammers, and shovels. As the sand hogs dug, the knife-?edge perimeter of the bowl crept downward, the crushing weight of the tower above held at bay almost exclusively by the upward push of the pressurized air within. More layers of stone were arranged carefully on top of each caisson as it sank, and these layers became the pillars of the bridge, creeping their way from the river floor downward to the bedrock like the probing roots of a massive stone tree. When the workers hit bedrock, they would evacuate, the empty space inside the caisson would be filledwith cement, and the entire monolith would be left in place as a support for the stable thoroughfare above. The humidity of the river mingled with Joseph Brown’s sweat and the evaporated stench of the laboring crew around him. Most of the workers had long ago peeled off their shirts, or they had gone down without them in the first place. The air temperature around them rose to tropical levels with each swing of their tools, even as their feet froze from the chill water, and they could feel their headaches slowly build as they breathed and rebreathed the same air inside the enclosed space. Brown and the rest of the roughly sixty-?person working crew were at the end of their third hour inside the humid, dimly lit, wooden-?walled caisson. For foreman Brown, it was the end of his watch. It was hot. It was humid. It was time to come up. He headed for one of the ladders. A particularly brutal winter in 1867 had iced the East River, the obstacle between Brooklyn and Manhattan, and left the ferryboats locked at their piers. After that difficult winter, the people of Brooklyn had decided they wanted a bridge to Manhattan. But not just any bridge. With the East River more of a broad, active tidal basin than a river, stretching an immodest five hundred meters across, it would need to be the...
