John Augustus Roebling

Trained at the Royal Polytechnic Institute in Berlin under Hegel, Roebling arrived in western Pennsylvania in 1831 with a plan for a German agricultural settlement. The settlement failed; the engineering did not. By 1841 he had patented the wire rope that would make his name, and by the 1850s he was building suspension bridges across the Niagara Gorge and the Ohio River. The Brooklyn Bridge was his last and most ambitious project, contracted in 1869. He died that July of tetanus contracted when his foot was crushed against a piling while surveying the Brooklyn tower site. His son Washington completed the bridge, paralysed himself in the caissons, and directed construction for fourteen years from a window overlooking the East River.