Courtesy of Denton Taylor

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Welcome to Overcoming Distance.

Your flight has just landed in New York City, one of the most popular cultural cities in the world. As you exit the terminal building of the John F. Kennedy airport take our car and ask to go to Manhattan via the Brooklyn Bridge. As you travel in your car, click along the way at the mile marker to find out more about wonders that overcame distance.

Pictures courtesy of Denton Taylor

John Roebling designed the world's longest suspension bridge, the Brooklyn Bridge. After 14 years of hard and dedicated work, $15 million and 27 lives, the bridge was completed on May 24, 1883, making it the first electrical bridge.

One can travel from Brooklyn to Manhattan, via the Brooklyn Bridge which crosses New York's East River. The Brooklyn Bridge helped form the present day greater metropolis of New York City, by joining two rival independent cities. As well, the bridge contains an elevated walkway, in which people can stroll, bike or jog along it, allowing "people...to enjoy the beautiful views and pure air." (Elder Roebling, 1982)

One of the most striking features a person notices as they travel over the Brooklyn Bridge is the hundreds of cables extending over two soaring towers 276 feet above the East River. Accomplishing the task of hoisting heavy cables was not easy and took the creative genius of the bridge designer, John Roebling, to come up with a system. He developed the "Traveling-Wheel" rig where by a wheel carrying the cable was attached to a continuous wire rope anchored to each side of the towers. After each cable was wheeled across the towers it was anchored. Even with its creative system two lives were claimed when the cable snapped hitting the victims.

Like the designer of the Brooklyn Bridge, Roebling, was crippled from the bends and directing the supervision of the bridge from his sick room with binoculars. He died before the bridge was done and his son took over the project "Here I was at the age of 32, suddenly put in charge of the most stupendous engineering project of the age". When the bridge first opened in 1883, 12 people were trampled to death when an anonymous warning broke loose among the crowd that the bridge was ready to collapse. http://www.dentontaylor.com