John A. Roebling

John Augustus Roebling, born Johann August Roebling in Prussia, was a German-American civil engineer who became the foremost designer of wire-cable suspension bridges in nineteenth-century America. His 1867 bridge across the Ohio River between Cincinnati and Covington, Kentucky, spanned 1,057 feet and was the longest suspension bridge in the world at completion, and he had earlier built the Niagara Falls Suspension Bridge in 1854 and aqueducts for the Delaware and Hudson Canal. His culminating design was the Brooklyn Bridge, with a main span of 1,595 feet across the East River, but he did not live to see it completed: in June 1869, while surveying the site at Fulton Ferry, his foot was crushed by an arriving ferry, and after refusing conventional treatment in favor of water therapy he died of tetanus on July 22, 1869. His son, Washington Roebling, took over as chief engineer and finished the bridge in 1883.