Washington Roebling
American civil engineer (1837–1926)
Washington Augustus Roebling (May 26, 1837 – July 21, 1926) was an American civil engineer who supervised the construction of the Brooklyn Bridge, designed by his father John A. Roebling. He served in the Union Army during the American Civil War as an officer at the Battle of Gettysburg.
Education and military service
The oldest son of Johanna (née Herting) and John A. Roebling, Washington was born in 1837 in Saxonburg, Pennsylvania, a town co-founded by his father and his uncle, Carl Roebling. His early schooling consisted of tutoring by Riedel and under Henne in Pittsburgh. He was sent to stay with Professor Lemuel Stephens of the Western University of Pennsylvania (now known as the University of Pittsburgh), where Roebling also attended some classes. Roebling eventually attended the Trenton Academy and acquired higher education in engineering at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) in Troy, New York, from 1854 to 1857. He wrote a thesis titled "Design for a Suspension Aqueduct."
Following his graduation as civil engineer (C.E.), Roebling joined his father to work as a bridge builder. From 1858 to 1860, he assisted his father on the Sixth Street Bridge project to replace an older bridge over the Allegheny River. During that period, he lived in a boarding house on Penn Street. Following completion of the bridge, Roebling returned to Trenton, where he worked in his father's wire mill.
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This entry incorporates text from “Washington Roebling” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.