Virtual Museum: Engineering America – The Life and Times of John A. Roebling

John Roebling was one of the nineteenth century’s most brilliant engineers, ingenious inventors, successful manufacturers, and fascinating personalities. Raised in a German backwater amid the war-torn chaos of the Napoleonic Wars, he immigrated to the US in 1831, where he became wealthy and acclaimed, eventually receiving a carte-blanche contract to build one of the nineteenth century’s most stupendous and daring works of engineering: a gigantic suspension bridge to span the East River between New York and Brooklyn. In between, he thought, wrote, and worked tirelessly. He dug canals and surveyed railroads; he planned communities and founded new industries. Horace Greeley called him “a model immigrant”; generations later, F. Scott Fitzgerald worked on a script for the movie version of his life. This talk will be conducted by Richard Haw, author of Engineering America: The Life and Times of John A. Roebling, just released earlier this month via Oxford University Press.

Richard Haw is Associate Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, CUNY. He is the author of The Brooklyn Bridge: A Cultural History and Art of the Brooklyn Bridge: A Visual History.

Part of NMIH’s Virtual Museum Live Programs. Get more info at https://nmih.org/virtualmuseum

All live streams will be at https://www.facebook.com/NMIHorg/live_videos/