Women in Engineering:

Emily Roebling

By: Katelin Kukk

The construction of the Brooklyn Bridge took the exhausting effort of a multitude of men. However, Emily Roebling was the woman who made sure it got finished.

Born in New York in 1843, Emily Roebling was known to be a woman of strong character and of posessing an “almost masculine intellect”. While she may have not received an engineering degree, she studied alongside her husband, who was the chief engineer of the construction of the Brooklyn Bridge.

Emily’s husband Washington fell sick to caisson disease, or decompression sickness, during the construction of the bridge leaving no one to lead the project. While confined to his sick bed, Emily Roebling worked closely with her husband to see the project through. Her vast engineering knowledge was the key component to the completion of the longest suspension bridge of the 19^th century.