From a Dream to Reality
It all began in 1869 when German engineer John Roebling won the highly coveted contract to construct what was then the longest suspension bridge in the world. The Brooklyn Bridge, when completed, would stretch 1,600 feet across the wide East River that separates Manhattan from Brooklyn (which was not yet a part of New York City).
Having built four suspension bridges in the 1850s and 60s, including one over the Ohio River and another near Niagara Falls, John remained undeterred by the monumental feat. He planned the construction of the bridge. The foundations were to sink 70 feet below the river and the two mighty towers—which would be stabilized by adding a web truss to either side of the roadway platform—would dwarf much of New York. At that time, such a bold design seemed almost miraculous, and it was set to be constructed out of a new building material—steel.
Yet Roebling’s ambitious dream was to cost him his life. Before construction even began in 1869, Roebling’s foot was crushed between some pilings and a boat while he was surveying the bridge site. His toes were amputated and a few weeks later he died of tetanus.

Building a Family Legacy
Despite the doubts of investors, his son Washington Roebling proved his ability to carry out John’s ambitions. Soon thereafter, construction began, as did the arduous task of sinking a gigantic caisson foundation while the first tower was built on top. The process took five months due to a number of issues, including fires and unexpected boulders. Similar problems were experienced during the sinking of the second caisson on the New York side.

Nevertheless, Washington Roebling and his team labored deep beneath the East River, but this led them to develop a mysterious new disease, Caisson disease, which is widely known today as “the bends.” Washington himself eventually became bedridden with the bends, confined to his room and only able to watch construction through a telescope from his window.
Undeterred by his poor health and determined to finish what he started, Washington worked closely with his wife, Emily Roebling, to complete the project. Emily taught herself mathematics and engineering, and worked tirelessly to communicate between the structure and its creator.

Bridging the Gap

The towers were completed in August 1876, and it was then that steel wire began to be strung from one to the other. Finally, on May 24, 1883, enormous crowds gathered to watch the bridge’s opening ceremony. For Brooklyn, noted the New York Times, it was to be “the greatest gala day in the history of that moral suburb.” The date was also proclaimed an official holiday by Mayor Seth Low known as “The People’s Day.”
Celebratory cannon fire rang out when they reached the Manhattan-side tower. The festivities also included an hour-long fireworks display, receptions and a number of speeches. Just before midnight, the bridge was opened to the public, and more than 150,000 people streamed across over the next 24 hours.

The First of Its Kind
The Brooklyn Bridge not only inspired the people of New York, but also other architects and engineers who have since constructed remarkable structures themselves. Among these, the Golden Gate Bridge is perhaps the most recognizable. Spanning the Golden Gate, the strait between San Francisco and Marin County, the bridge was completed in 1937 after seven years of construction and remains one of the most popular tourist attractions in San Francisco, USA. Its famous red-orange hue was specifically chosen to make the bridge more easily visible through the thick fog that frequently shrouds the area.

Another noteworthy structure is the Akashi-Kaikyo Bridge, which traverses the Akashi Strait in Japan to connect the cities Kobe and Iwaya. At 1,991 meters (6,532 feet), it is the longest suspension bridge in the world. The Gwangan Bridge, South Korea’s largest bridge, was completed in 2008 and built entirely of steel—144,800 tons of POSCO steel and steel products, to be exact—and serves as the country’s representative steel bridge.
As bridges continue to serve as city landmarks and vital components of urban infrastructure, numerous countries choose steel as the material for large bridges. But it should not be forgotten that the movement began in New York, where the Brooklyn Bridge remains to stand as a memorial to the Roebling family’s vision, sacrifice and loyalty as well as a symbol of visionary engineering, national integrity and working-class heroism.

Watch the full episode of “Seven Wonders of the Industrial World” below:

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This month’s theme, “Steel Wonders of the World,” will focus on stories about some of the greatest engineering and architectural structures of history.

The Great Ship

The Great Eastern was built on the dream of constructing a ship that could circumnavigate the world, and would be big enough to carry the 15,000 tons of coal necessary to do so. It was to be five time larger than any ship the world had seen, an engineering marvel. The engineer behind its design, Isambard Kingdom Brunel, is considered to be the most gifted engineer of the Victorian Age. He helped create the modern industrial world; from his revolutionary visions came the world’s first global transportation system and his railway designs made continental travel faster than ever possible. His bridges spanned distances never before seen.

Ship of Steel
The first ship made almost entirely of metal, the construction of the Great Eastern took years and over 8,600 tons of iron, four times more than any steel structure before it. Brunel engineered the all-iron double-skinned hull which was made from 30,000 steel plates, weighing six tons each. It was the first ship built with a double-skinned hull, and it would be decades before another ship employed the design that is standard today. Its steam engines were higher than four stories and produced the power of 8,000 horses. It combined a sail propulsion system with a single screw and paddle system.

Built to carry 4,000 passengers, it was the largest moving man-made structure of its time. It never saw the commercial success that Brunel envisioned, yet the Great Eastern revolutionized shipping engineering and design. It would be 50 years before the world saw another ship of its magnitude.
The gigantic ship of steel would be the final work of the great industrial engineer. Building the Great Eastern bankrupted Brunel and it was considered a failure during his life; however, it is now revered as one of the greatest feats in engineering.

Coming Up
Following our look into the history of steel, this month’s theme, “Steel Wonders of the World,” is inspired by the BBC documentary series, The Seven Wonders of the Industrial World.” You can find the full series, created by Deborah Cadbury, on YouTube.
The modern world we live in would not be possible without the influence of steel. As a global leader in steel production, POSCO is committed to leading innovations for the future. Stay tuned for the following stories.

• The Brooklyn Bridge: A historical look at the construction of the Brooklyn Bridge and other modern suspension bridges that it has inspired
• The Panama Canal: Building the Panama Canal took 25 years and the efforts of two nations. The Panama Canal connected the world by connecting two oceans
• The Hoover Dam: A true testament to the ingenuity of man, the Hoover Dam was built under budget and ahead of schedule
• Steel Innovations Driven by POSCO: Take a look at some of the most famous steel structures built with steel produced by POSCO
• Steel and Art: POSCO’s steel is used for art sculptors and the full scale construction of buildings. This is the story of the steel sculpture, “Steel Igloo,” created by POSCO architect, Chan Joong Kim.

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A historian, an Emmy award-winning British author and a BBC television producer, Deborah Cadbury has written a book called Dreams of Iron and Steel. The book’s main characters are those who ‘overcame the fear for a failure and did not give up on challenging’. Though the book’s time setting is distant from the ‘industrial revolution’, the story does not come across as irrelevant, because the details of each structure’s building process reflect ourselves who are also facing ‘new challenges’ today.

In addition, the subject of ‘steel’ overlaps with the history of POSCO, which started from nothing in the desolate Yeongil Bay in 1968. Both subjects are similar in the way that both had a person with a dream that comes to a reality and the world has changed from it. 

As a BBC television producer, Deborah Cadbury, produced a docudrama series known as ‘Seven Wonders of the Industrial World’ (2003) and started her writing for Dreams of Iron and Steel (2005) at the same time.

The Brooklyn Bridge (1883) 

John Roebling, a U.S immigrant from Germany, won the contract to build the largest bridge that stretches across the East River separating Manhattan and Brooklyn. According to Roebling’s blueprint, it was clear that the structure would develop as a 2km-long masterpiece that possesses both durability and symmetrical delicacy. The foundations were to sink 21m below the water level and the two main 84m-high towers would overlook a panorama of New York City.

However, while seeking for the right spot for the towers, John Roebling was faced with imminent death from a terrible accident. Thus, his son, Washington Roebling continued his father’s legacy as a ‘Man of Steel’ and 14 years of construction finally came to an end in May 24^th, 1883. Transforming the cityscape of New York, the Brooklyn Bridge has become a symbol of Roebling family’s great human spirit.

The Hoover Dam (1936) 

In the late 19^th century, the desert regions of Arizona and Nevada were considered as a hostile environment. Arthur Powell Davis, the Director of U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, realized that even the desert regions can flourish by making some improvements. Accordingly, he planned a project to drill through snow-covered highlands and valleys, and to use the 2,253 km-long Colorado River as a source of hydropower. He also intended to stabilize the river, which experiences severe floods and droughts. Started in 1931 and finished by 1936, the Hoover Dam was soon to break all world records with its height equivalent to 60 stories and a volume bigger than the Great Pyramids at Giza.​

At the height of the Great Depression, poverty-stricken workers had to face explosions, carbon monoxide poisoning and sunstrokes, only to earn a few dollars a day. But the construction had to go on. The chief engineer, Frank Crowe, nevertheless, managed to complete ahead of schedule and under budget with his own know-how in structural management. Remaining as another masterpiece that represents an extraordinary ability of humankind, the dam epitomizes a clear evidence of overcoming a limitation through revolutionary structural improvements.

The ‘Great Eastern’ Ship (1858) 

(Photo from Wikipedia http://bit.ly/13zlY2w)

The ‘Great Eastern’, also known as the ‘crystal palace of the sea’, is distinctive in many ways other than being the largest ship in the world when it first launched on the River Thames in London. For instance, the design incorporated a double hull on the side and the bottom part of the ship which improved the draft line. However, the scale of the ship was too out of the ordinary for its time. Intriguingly, a distinguished mechanical and civil engineer, Isambard Kingdom Brunel dreamt of ‘creating a floating city made of iron and transporting 4,000 people to Australia, the opposite side of the earth’. Finishing his blueprints in 1852, Brunel initiated the construction on the River Thames in 1857. Living on the ship for two years, he poured his passion into this project. Unfortunately, in September 1959, just before the Great Eastern’s maiden voyage, Brunel died of a terrible stroke. Despite the failure in commercial use, Brunel’s name remains in the shipbuilding history for his colossal-scale ship and shipbuilding techniques.

The Bell Rock Lighthouse (1811)

(Photo from Wikipedia http://bit.ly/1t5eBfA) 

A creator of the Bell Rock Lighthouse, Robert Stevenson is the grandfather of Robert Louis Stevenson, an author of Treasure Island. The lighthouse was built on a 400m-wide reef 17km out to sea.  Numerous ships went down by crashing into the large reef that was submerged for most of the day. Although everyone believed it to be impossible, the construction of a lighthouse lasted for three years from March 1807 to October 1810. During the process, many workers were sacrificed and the structure collapsed a few times. Battling against the difficulties, Stevenson finally completed the lighthouse in February 1811. To this day, the lighthouse shines out across the North Sea forever.

Bazalgette’s London Sewers (1874)

(Photo from Wikipedia http://bit.ly/1CtGfFM) 

In the 1800’s, over 30,000 people died from three epidemics of cholera in London. In the summer of 1858, while the Great Eastern was preparing for her maiden voyage, the ‘Great Stink’ was sweeping through the city. A 37-year-old civil engineer, Joseph Bazalgette proposed a bold scheme for the problem. It only took him 12 weeks to outline his solution for the problem that lasted for hundreds of years. The key to his proposal was ‘simplicity’.

Previous sewage system and pipes all lead to both sides of the river. Bazalgette’s plan was to simply move various pipes and link the sewers to be connected. The plan seemed easy on the surface but the reality required to link 130km of sewage superhighway and 1,600km of street sewers, creating one large network of underground sewer system. It seemed as an implausible challenge at the time but eventually Bazalgette’s design brought the first modern sewer system. It not only saved the city of London and its inhabitants, but also became a standard model of sewer systems worldwide.

The Panama Canal (1914) 

The first person to plan an excavation of the Panama Canal was Charles V, the emperor of Spain in 1529. However, the actual project was discussed only in 1881 by a Frenchman, Vicomte Ferdinand de Lesseps, who completed building the Suez Canal in 1869. Regardless of his age at 74, Ferdinand de Lesseps had a vision to cut a path across continent through Panama connecting the Atlantic Ocean and Pacific Ocean. Although the plan was grandiose, the project execution faced insurmountable difficulties. The workers faced the tropical heat of Panama, impenetrable jungle, devastating mudslides, deathly tropical diseases and other obstacles. The lavish dream had cost lives of many workers and left company to bankrupt in 1889. To top it off, Vicomte Ferdinand de Lesseps also died soon after. The vivid dream eventually came true 25 years under the leadership of civil engineer, Colonel George Washington Goethals.

The Panama Canal is perceived as a miraculous triumph of technology in modern history. Being the longest canal in the history, the 80km-long Panama Canal took 35 years to complete. Moreover, the construction cost approximately 639 million dollars and lives of 25,000 workers. This sacrifice, however, achieved a miracle of shortening a 22,000km-long journey to a 9,500km journey of traveling from New York to San Francisco.

The Transcontinental Railway (1869) 

(Photo from Wikipedia http://bit.ly/1ACtjLw) 

During the American Civil War in 1857, the hero of the Union Army General William T. Sherman said “This will be the work of giants. And, President Lincoln is the only person that I know who can battle through this.” ‘This’ refers to the Transcontinental Railway, reaching across the American continent. Back then, it took about 6 months to travel from New York to California by ship. Under the administration of Abraham Lincoln, the Transcontinental Railway’s construction came to a start in 1860, in the midst of the American Civil War. As a solution to reunite the separated nation, Lincoln decided to initiate the railway construction which was possible due to repeated successes in the steel industry. Two railroad companies, Central Pacific Railroad Company from the west and Union Pacific Railroad Company from the east, started the construction separately from each end of the line. The completed railways were finally opened in 1869. About a decade later, it was possible to make the record of 83 hours and 39 minutes to travel 5,600km across the continent. Consequently, the railways acted as a catalyst for the U.S to develop as a key industrial nation.

As these unique masterpieces suggest, the slow but evolving industrial revolution was accomplished by continuous effort and endless passion of our ancestors. As they were the individuals who struggled to realize their dreams and leave marks on the world, POSCO will inherit their ambitions and continue to pursue further advancements of the overall industry.