ROEBLING, JOHN AUGUSTUS (1806-186g), American civil engineer, was born at Miihlhausen, Prussia, on July 12,1806.
Soon after his graduation from the polytechnic school at Berlin he removed to the United States, and in 1831 entered on the practice of his profession in Western Pennsylvania. He estab lished at Pittsburgh a wire rope factory, and in May 1845 com pleted his first important structure, a suspended aqueduct across the Allegheny river. This was followed by the Monongahela sus pension bridge at Pittsburgh and several suspended aqueducts on the Delaware and Hudson canal. Removing his wire factory to Trenton (N.J.), he began, in 1851, the erection at Niagara Falls of a long-span wire suspension bridge with double roadway, for railway and vehicular use (see BRIDGE), which was completed in 1855. Owing to the novelty of its design, the most eminent engineers regarded this bridge as foredoomed to failure; but, with its complete success, demonstrated by long use, the number of suspension bridges rapidly multiplied, the use of wire ropes in stead of chain cables becoming all but universal. The completion,
in 1867, of the still more remarkable suspension bridge over the Ohio river at Cincinnati, with a clear span of 1,057ft., added to Roebling's reputation, and his design for the great bridge span ning the East river between Manhattan and Brooklyn, New York city, was accepted. While personally engaged in laying out the towers for the bridge, Roebling received an accidental injury, which resulted in his death, at Brooklyn, from tetanus, on July 22, 1869. The bridge was completed under the direction of his son, Washington Augustus Roebling (b. 1837).