The Great Bridge
Built to join the rapidly expanding cities of New York and Brooklyn, the Brooklyn Bridge was thought by many at the start to be an impossibility destined to fail if not from insurmountable technical problems then from political corruption. (It was the heyday of Boss Tweed in New York.) But the Brooklyn Bridge was at once the greatest engineering triumph of the age, a surpassing work of art, a proud American icon, and a story like no other in our history. Courage, chicanery, unprecedented ingenuity and plain blundering, heroes, rascals, all the best and worst in human nature played a part. At the center of the drama were the stricken chief engineer, Washington Roebling and his remarkable wife, Emily Warren Roebling, neither of whom ever gave up in the face of one heartbreaking setback after another. The Great Bridge is a sweeping narrative of a stupendous American achievement that rose up out of its era like a cathedral, a symbol of affirmation then and still in our time.
Stats for nerds
8recommend
11mentions
11people
2010–2026years
73% recommend27% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- It's such a good book! Like any dad reading history, I have been annoying my family for years with fun facts I learned in that book. David McCullough's other books like The Great Bridge (about building the Brooklyn Bridge) are also great.
- The Last Viking - a biography of explorer Roald Amundsen
The Wager- a book about a ship by the same name which wrecked in the Drake Passage.
Eccentric Orbits - about the Iridium constellation.
The Great Bridge by David McCullough - goes into a pretty good amount of detail in the engineering and sub-problems of construction of the Brooklyn Bridge.
- 81. Failure is Not an Option by Gene Kranz
82. Mrs. P’s Journey by Phyllis Pearsall
83. River of Doubt by Candice Millard
84. Longitude by Dava Sobel
85. Dreaming in Code by Scott Rosenberg
86. The Last Viking - A biography of Roald Amundsen
87. The Wager by David Grann
88. Simply Fly by Captain G. R. Gopinath
89. Engines That Move Markets by Alasdair G. M. Nairn
90. The Education of Cyrus by Xenophon
91. Boyd: The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War by Robert Coram
92. Madhouse at the End of the Earth by Julian Sancton
93. How to Make a Spaceship by Julian Guthrie
94. West with the Night by Beryl Markham
95. The Age of Uncertainty by Tobias Hürter
96. American Steel by Richard Preston
97. Showstopper by G. Pascal Zachary
98. Eccentric Orbits by John Bloom
99. The Great Bridge by David McCullough
100. Loonshots by Safi Bahcall
101. The Art of Doing Science and Engineering by Richard Hamming
102. Where Wizards Stay Up Late by Katie Hafner
103. The Evening Star by Henry S. F. Cooper
- Read this a few years back.. highly recommended
The Great Bridge: The Epic Story of the Building of the Brooklyn Bridge by David McCullough
https://www.amazon.com/Great-Bridge-Story-Building-Brooklyn/...
- I've enjoyed books narrating the history of a company or a thing, like David McCullough's The Path Between the Seas, Jon Gertner's The Idea Factory or Dava Sobel's Longitude.
But, missing a name for this particular genre, I have a hard time finding new entries. Does HN have anything of that kind to recommend?
Other books I've found so far: - Skunk Works by Ben E. Rich & Leo Janos - The Box by Marc Levinson - Apollo by Charles A Murray & Catherine Bly Cox - The Great Bridge also by David McCullough
- For those interested in the construction of the Brooklyn Bridge, the book The Great Bridge[1] tells a very interesting story of both the difficult engineering problems and the political intrigue of those times.
