The following sketch of one of the greatest marvels of modern engineering skill, is taken from the columns of the Denver Republican and The Scientific American

Never in the history of bridge building have giant cables been hung so swiftly as they were on New York's new suspension bridge over the East River. Those four cables contain 7,796 wires, each three thousand feet long, making 4,429 miles of wire. The seven months occupied in the work is exactly three times as fast as any similar work has ever been accomplished.

No serious accident, not a single interruption of the vast traffic of the roaring strait that is called East River, not a sound that could be heard, has marked the work. Yet those black atoms, looking more like insects than men from below, threw forty-five hundred tons of cable through the air in that time.

So high in air hang those great ropes of iron, so airy and lovely in outline are those vast towers, that no man gazing upward from river or shore can realize the monstrous dimensions of everything connected with that giant swing. Somehow, despite the fact that all about it is so motionless and still, the sight of those beautifully true and perfectly sweeping cables gives one an impression as if he were looking at the swoop of a bird suddenly fixed miraculously in mid-air in all its grace. Standing deep in the rushing green water, the two steel towers stand sturdy and powerful, like men at arms in metal harness. From every aspect one sees the blue sky shine through their open grillage work, softening their mighty trusses and girders and making them look, not as if they were dead tons of weight, but as if they might be swayed by the lightest airs.

It is only when one is high on the structure itself and can look downward from the towers that the true proportions of the great roadway become apparent. Then they become apparent overwhelmingly. The anchorage, a pile of granite, looks more like a busy shipyard than an edifice of the land. Diving into subterranean caverns beneath the tons of stone are great fifteen-foot links—link bolted to link with bolts as thick as a man's arm. This immense chain of tempered steel, held in place by the superincumbent mass of rock, a veritable anchor, only of enormous size, holds the cables proper, which themselves cease some distance away from the anchor. Their connection with the chain is made by simply passing the endless strands of wire around the outer links.

The individual wires in the cable are not as thick as a lead pencil. But out of them have been spun cables that are eighteen inches in diameter.

Although the anchorage itself rises high over surrounding buildings, the senses refuse to give the impression of height, for just ahead there springs the vast tower over which the cables are hung. Up, up, rising to its top with a swing so abrupt and great that one feels as if they were actually climbing visibly before one, go the four great cables. The top of the Brooklyn tower—332 feet above high water, higher by twenty-four feet than the gigantic St. Paul Building—seemed as high as a snow-capped mountain to us as we stood on the unfenced, unguarded summit, with all New York, Long Island, the Sound, the rivers, and the bay at our feet like a neat map.

Human hands, not as big by many inches as any one of hundreds of rivets around us, have hurled this mass of iron and steel across an arm of sea. Before these tiny two-legged animals that are hanging like flies to dizzy places all around us are through, they will have hung twelve thousand tons to these cables that they have spun.

The total weight of the bridge when completed will be sixteen thousand tons with the live load that it is designed to carry. But that will be play for the cables, for their total strength is expressed in about one hundred thousand tons.

Gazing down at them as they sweep in four glorious masses down and far out over the river and then up again, they seem to dart straight at the sky as they reach bravely for the top of the New York tower. Four torrents of metal, spouting out from steel embrasures! If architecture is frozen music, here, in this engineering feat, is Wagnerian opera transformed at the moment of its wildest revelry, into rigid steel. That giant swing, caught in its upward sweep, might, indeed, be the thunder itself, caught and transfixed to hang there, visible forever. As well might one expect the eye to note a fly when looking at Niagara as to see anything here except those noble spans, hanging serene and beautiful, high over the city's smoky atmosphere.

The breaking strength of each cable is twenty-five thousand tons and their combined weight is five thousand tons. The actual dead load which they will carry when the bridge is completed is eight thousand tons, and they are calculated to carry a maximum moving load of forty-five hundred tons. Each of the four cables contains 10,397 No. 8 steel wires. The specifications called for a strength of two hundred thousand pounds per square inch, but the actual breaking strength of the wire as determined on test, shows that the cables have an average breaking strength of two hundred and twenty-five thousand pounds per square inch; a truly marvelous result, and one which places these cables far ahead in point of tensile strength of any other structural material yet used in bridge building.

The cable wires, which are about three-sixteenths of an inch in diameter, were made at the mills in four thousand-foot lengths and reached the site of the bridge on sevenfoot wooden reels. Each reel contained twenty-four of these lengths of wire, which were coupled at the ends with sleeve nuts, the joints being designed to give the full strength of the unbroken wire.

The rate of progress of the work has been about fifty wires in each strand in ten hours, or a total of about four hundred single wires each working day. When the end of the coil of wire was reached it was placed in a vise opposite to the end of the next coil of wire and the two were connected by a sleeve nut. A perfectly even tension was secured in each wire by adjusting it so that it conformed to the curve of a guide wire, which had been accurately adjusted in position by the engineers.

One of the best features of the new cables is the very excellent system of protection against weather which has been adopted. The wire is thoroughly coated at the mills with a heavy mixture of graphite and oil, and although its greasy condition rendered it extremely disagreeable to handle, the benefit will be found in the practically indestructible nature of the work.

To complete the cables it will next be necessary to place around them the clamping bands, which will form also the saddles in which the suspender cables will rest. Then the cables will be covered with protecting shields which will consist of half-round troughs of sheet steel, semi-circular in cross section, one half of which will lie below, and the other half above the cables. Between them and the cables will be run in a hot mixture of cable preservative similar to that in which the individual wires were soaked as they were manufactured.