In our Season 1 finale we conclude our two part episode on the Brooklyn Bridge, and later in the episode we speak with Unit Managing Director with Mott McDonald, Chris Mealing, about his history as a bridge Engineer and how he sleeps at night!

In part one of our Brooklyn Bridge double feature we discussed some people who were a little crazy, and a little cool, but mostly both: The Roeblings. This family of Engineers were largely responsible for the design and construction of the bridge, which would be the first to span the East River. In part one we extensively discussed John and his son Washington Roebling, but only just touched on our first female Engineer of the podcast: Washington’s wife Emily Roebling.

Despite the fact that Emily was not officially recognized as an Engineer at the time Emily completely took over the project after her husband fell ill with decompression sickness from an accident in the caissons. Emily managed contractors and construction officials over technical details while also managing the board of directors and the mayor of New York over commercial management of the project, and would be the first woman to address the American Society of Civil Engineers. After the completion of the bridge Emily would also go on to obtain a degree in Law from NYU.

We also get into some greater detail on the construction of the caissons and the technical specs behind the bridge including the many redundancies built into the design. John Roebling had famously said that even if the cables snapped the bridge would not fall, which would prove to be particularly important when some of the materials would turn out to be counterfeit due to contractor negligence and lead to cables snapping in the 1980s.

Later we speak with Chris Mealing, Unit Managing Director for Mott MacDonald. Chris began his career as a bridge engineer. We talk about the projects Chris is most proud of and how the scope and complexity of engineering projects have changed as the tools available to Engineers have become much more advanced: 

“We can brute force stuff today that would’ve had to have been done elegantly 30 or 40 years ago”

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Learn more at: MeasuredInMetric.com

Edited by: Astronomic Audio

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