The bands played, the cannon tore the air, the multitudes yelled themselves hoarse, the steam whistles of the harbor shrieked to the sky the tidings that, though nobody then understood it, "Greater New York" was on the way.
This was six years and a half from the time when Washington A. Roebling had begun the work of construction. Seven other years followed, years full of troubled effort, of planning and replanning and replanning, of battling with the twin devils of Contraction and Expansion. The tensions all had to be secured in absolutely uniform weather. A determination made when the sun was shining on one part of the bridge and not on another might have thrown the whole calculation awry. Sun and wind played pranks with the work in the summer and in the winter snow and ice coated the wires and running gear so that work was often impossible. Deflection varied a third of an inch for every degree of temperature.
"In short," says the writer of that time, "the ponderous thing, while neither small nor agile, has a trick in common with the minute and lively insect which when you put your finger on him isn't there."
[Sidenote: THE FABRIC GROWS TOWARD COMPLETION]
But in due time the great cables were in place, and bound. Then the suspender bands were set, from which suspender cables hung to hold the frame of the roadway. And so the fabric grew toward completion, hung practically in two sections, which all the world nowadays doesn't know, with an expansion joint connecting them in the middle to absorb the expansion and contraction of the metal. Even the rails at this section are split in half lengthwise, to permit them to slide back and forth with the changes in temperature.
There were accidents and drawbacks and political complications, as there are always bound to be in public works; there were believer and unbeliever, booster and knocker, as now, but the work went on to its completion and in 1883 the day of realization came. Wire was king. Doubters and malcontents murmured for a time, but little by little subsided. The opening of the bridge was one of those memorable days of which New York has had so many in her brief history, a day when President and Governor and many lesser dignitaries, who have now passed from the stage, strutted their little hour to hail the passing of a milestone, and there were "fireworks in the evening."