John Augustus Roebling summary

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John Augustus Roebling, (born, June 12, 1806, Mühlhausen, Prussia—died July 22, 1869, Brooklyn Heights, N.Y., U.S.), German-U.S. civil engineer, a pioneer in the design of suspension bridges. He immigrated to the U.S. in 1831. His best-known work is New York’s Brooklyn Bridge. In the 1850s and ’60s Roebling and his son Washington (1837–1926) built four suspension bridges: two at Pittsburgh, one at Niagara Falls (1855), and one at Cincinnati (1866). When his design for a bridge connecting Brooklyn and Manhattan was accepted, he was appointed chief engineer. He died from an injury he received as construction began. Washington completed the project in 1883; himself incapacitated from 1872 by decompression sickness, his completion of the work depended heavily on his wife, Emily Warren Roebling.

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