By P. Lynn Knee Jean-Pierre Blanchard was a

French inventor and pioneer balloonist. Together with the Ameri-can loyalist John Jeffries, Blanchard made the first flight over the English Channel in 1785, less than two years after the first manned balloon flight had been accomplished in Paris.

Blanchard made a total of forty-four balloon ascents before the summer of 1792, when he decided to sail to America to attempt the first successful manned flight in the United States. The thirty-nine-year-old balloonist set sail from Hamburg, Germany, on September 30, with his balloon and hydrogen-generating apparatus.

On December 9, Blanchard’s ship docked in Philadelphia, which was then the capital of the United States. There Blanchard placed an advertisement in Dunlap’s American Daily Advertiser, announcing that he would inflate his balloon with hydrogen gas and, weather permitting, take flight on January 9, 1793. He intended to launch his balloon from the Walnut Street Prison yard, where the high walls would protect his

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equipment from vandals and would help to deflect any unexpected gusts of wind. He offered reserved tickets for the event at five dollars each for seats inside the walls.

The tickets sold poorly. Blanchard, who could hardly speak a word of English, was not sure what was causing the problem. He got the impression that some Philadelphians felt that it was improper for respectable folk to enter a prison. To counteract that sentiment, Blanchard invited President George Washington to attend the launching. When the president accepted the invitation, Blanchard spread the word, but he still sold insufficient tickets to offset the cost of his hydrogen-generating chemicals, which he had purchased in Europe. He lowered the price to two dollars, but sales remained dismal. Most of the city’s residents had realized that they would be able to see the rising balloon from almost any location in the city, and that purchasing a ticket for an inside seat was therefore unnecessary.

Although he expected to lose money, Blanchard remained determined to accomplish the first manned flight in North America, and he did not postpone his scheduled ascent. As the day grew closer, excitement in the city rose to a fever pitch, but ticket sales still fell short of Blanchard’s break-even point.

Some men declared they would follow the balloon on horseback. Not wanting to share his glory, Blanchard openly discouraged that idea. He put an advertisement in the Federal Gazette that stated: “[I] advise you not to attempt to keep up with me, especially in a country so intersected with rivers and so covered with woods.”

On the morning of the ascent, the weather was fair and calm. Before dawn two artillery cannons in a cemetery near the prison commenced firing at fifteen-minute intervals. When the sun rose, it lifted the

temperature of the still air slightly above the freezing point. Across the city, shops and businesses failed to open as their proprietors joined the city’s residents in climbing onto rooftops to watch the balloon’s ascent. In the prison yard, a small band played rousing military music.

At mid-morning, Blanchard appeared in the prison yard. He wore a large hat with white feathers, a bright blue waistcoat, and matching knee breeches. He saluted the cheering crowd within the walls, and then set to work with two assistants filling the balloon. He made hydrogen gas by mixing iron bits and shavings with sulfuric acid in sealed barrels lined with lead. The gas flowed by hose from the barrels into the balloon, slowly inflating it.

At 9:45 a.m. the presidential carriage pulled into the prison yard. President George Washington, his wife, Martha, and the French ambassador emerged as fifteen cannons saluted their arrival. Other dignitaries who entered the prison yard included Vice President John

Adams, Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson, Chief Justice John Jay, Dr. Benjamin Rush, and Betsy Ross.

The president handed Blanchard a “letter of safe passage” addressed “to all the citizens of the United States and others” requesting them to assist the balloonist in his mission. With this letter in hand, Blanchard boarded the basket of his balloon.

An onlooker ran toward him and thrust a small black dog into his arms. Surprised, Blanchard lowered the dog into the basket. Then Blanchard threw out some ballast and signaled to his aides to cast off tethers.

Slowly the balloon began to ascend. Dunlap’s American Daily Advertiser reported that the “immense concourse of spectators was notable for its awed silence” as the ascent began. “The attention of the multitude was so absorbed, that it was considerable time before the silence was broken by the acclamations which succeeded.”

When the applause finally began, Blanchard waved his hat in one hand and a flag in the other. The flag included both the seal of the United States and the tricolor of the revolutionary government of France.

As Blanchard’s balloon rose above the prison walls, he was astonished at the number of people he saw staring with amazed upturned faces.

President Washington Applauds Balloon Pilot

Jean-Pierre Blanchard.

President George Washington.

Illustration from a pamphet published by Jean Blanchard, in which he described his American balloon flight.

People covered the rooftops, the church steeples, the trees, and the open places. Dr. Benjamin Rush, making an estimate from ground level, believed that the crowd numbered forty thousand.

The feelings of most onlookers were summed up by John Steele, the comptroller of the United States Treasury, who wrote in a letter: “Today a balloon about the size of a small hay stack went up with a man in it. . . . Seeing the man waving a flag at an immense height from the ground was the most interesting sight I ever beheld, and though I had no acquaintance with him, I could not help trembling for his safety.”

The basket rose smoothly to about 1,200 feet, where Blanchard encountered a thick flock of passenger pigeons. This species, now extinct, was so plentiful in 1793 that clouds of migrating birds often blotted out the sun like storm clouds. “They appeared to be much frightened,” Blanchard later wrote. “Alas, it was never my intention in traversing the ethereal regions to disturb the feathered inhabitants thereof. They separated into two parties and left open a passage for me.”

When the pigeons finally passed beyond him, Blanchard saw that he had drifted east and was hovering directly above the Delaware River. “At the height I was then at,” he noted, “this river appeared to me like a ribbon of the breadth of about four inches.”

He released some ballast and rose to the height of one mile. The dog felt uncomfortable at the height.

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Blanchard wrote: “The whining of this little animal raised reflections in my mind which would have affected me very much, had not the view of the country, whose vast extent was expanded before my eyes, opened my mind to softer and more agreeable contemplations.”

He then took some measurements that Dr. Rush and other American scientists had asked him to make. He recorded changes in air temperature and barometric pressure. He took his heart rate and found that it was elevated to “ninety-two pulsations” per minute as compared to eighty-four on the ground. He weighed a stone to see if the pull of earth’s gravity had measurably declined. He filled six bottles with the thin air around him and sealed them tightly.

After pausing to eat some biscuits and drink some wine, Blanchard mistakenly thought that he saw the Atlantic Ocean looming on the eastern horizon. He decided to land at once, to avoid being carried out to sea.

Using a valve, he released some of the hydrogen gas from the balloon, until he found himself nearing the treetops of a forest. He threw out enough ballast to begin rising again, and looked for a clearing in which to land. The first clearing he encountered was so studded with tree stumps that he feared that they would wreck his balloon if he tried to land there. He passed over more forest, and then spied a field that looked relatively smooth.

A veteran of dozens of landings, Blanchard skillfully worked the gas valve and set down with no difficulty.

As he made contact with the earth, the dog bolted from the basket and ran toward the woods; but after pausing to drink from a puddle, the dog returned to Blanchard, who was quickly releasing all the gas from the balloon so that it would not drag his gondola across the field. The only damage caused by the landing was a broken barometer. He had been airborne for forty-six minutes and had traveled close to fifteen miles.

Getting back to Philadelphia was his immediate goal. As Blanchard was using his compass to determine his bearings, a lone farmer appeared in the distance. When Blanchard shouted a greeting in French, the man turned to flee. Blanchard still had two and a half bottles of wine: he waved one of the bottles with one hand and beckoned with the other.

The farmer then approached. Blanchard displayed his letter from the president, but the man shrugged; he could not read. He nevertheless sampled Blanchard’s wine and reacted with great enthusiasm.

Soon another local man appeared, looking wary and carrying a musket. He could not read either, but after a discussion with the first man, he also sampled the wine.

Some men and women on horseback then approached. One of them read Washington’s letter aloud to the others. The only word that Blanchard understood was “Washington.” At that word, everyone in the crowd seemed to suddenly come to attention.

“How dear is the name of Washington to these people!” Blanchard wrote. “With what

eagerness they gave me all possible assistance, on account of his recommendation.”

The farmers joined together and helped Blanchard fold his balloon and put it and the basket in a wagon. He and the dog were driven to Cooper’s Ferry on the Delaware River. From there they made their way back to Philadelphia late in the afternoon, where they were greeted with great fanfare. Lines of people formed to shake Blanchard’s hand, and donations were collected to reimburse him for the cost of his flight.

Blanchard remained in Phila-delphia for several more months, trying to raise the funds for another flight, but his plans were thwarted when an epidemic of yellow fever broke out in the city during the summer of 1793, preventing crowds from forming in the streets. As business and government shut down due to the rising deaths, Blanchard returned to Europe, where he spent the rest of his life as a professional balloon pilot.

SOURCESBlanchard, Jean-Pierre. Journal of My Forty-Fifth Ascension, being the first Performance in America, on the Ninth of January, 1793. Philadelphia: Charles Cist, 1793.Glines, C.V. “First in America’s Skies,” Aviation History, September 1996: 26-32.Holmes, Donald. Air Mail. New York: Crown, 1981.

Americans Search Arctic For Lost British Explorer

By Paul ChrastinaIn 1850, at the age of thirty, Elisha

Kent Kane joined an expedition to search for Sir John Franklin, a British explorer who had gone missing in 1845 with two ships and 129 men in the Canadian Arctic.

Kane was a United States Navy surgeon, but he and other officers got permission from the navy to participate in the civilian rescue mission, which was organized by an American shipping magnate, Henry Grinnell.

Kane joined the expedition because he wanted to live heroically and become famous. Born into a wealthy family, he had been a sickly child, barely surviving a case of rheumatic fever in his late teens. William Elder, Kane’s biographer, noted that Kane’s physician had warned him that because of his weakened heart, he should not pursue any active occupation for he could die “as suddenly as from a musket shot.” Kane expected to

die young, so he was in a hurry to achieve fame.

Kane and the other members of the Grinnell Expedition hoped to find not only Franklin but also the hypothetical “Northwest Passage” that Franklin had been seeking when he vanished—a passage that would provide an ice-free route for ships to travel between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans by sailing north of Canada.

According to many prominent scientists and geographers, the icebergs and floes that threatened ships in Arctic waters were the product of freshwater glaciers along the world’s northernmost coastlines. These researchers believed that beyond the so-called “ice barrier” there lay a warm, navigable ocean surrounding the North Pole. Kane imagined that if Franklin and his men had managed to penetrate the ring of ice surrounding the open Polar Sea, they might have become stranded on an island, where they could be waiting patiently for help to return home. Elisha Kent Kane.

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Dreaming of discovering this fabled Polar Sea, Kane and sixteen other explorers departed from New York in May of 1850 aboard the ship Advance, commanded by Lieutenant Edwin Jesse De Haven of the United States Navy. The expedition included a second ship, the slightly smaller Rescue.

Captain De Haven set a course for the area where Franklin’s ships had last been seen by the captain of a North Atlantic whaling ship in Baffin Bay, midway between Greenland and Baffin Island. De Haven’s two ships became locked in ice near Baffin Island on July 8, but on July 29 they broke into open water and resumed sailing north. On August 19 they reached the northernmost tip of Baffin Island and turned west into Lancaster Sound, a strait between Baffin Island and Devon Island to the north.

In Lancaster Sound the Americans encountered eight ships from three separate British expeditions that were also searching for Franklin. W. Parker Snow, the surgeon of the British ship Prince Albert was surprised to encounter a man as “exceeding slim and apparently fragile” as Kane in the American expedition, but he found the

American surgeon to be a cheerful fellow, full of entertaining stories. “Time flew rapidly as I conversed with him,” Snow later recalled.

On August 25 parties from two of the British search ships and the Rescue found traces of small campsites on the rocky shore of Devon Island. Two days later the ships anchored together in a cove on tiny Beechey Island, just off the western tip of Devon Island. There the officers of the American and British ships held a conference to discuss their options, while a shore party was sent to investigate Beechey Island.

Kane wrote in his journal:

I was still talking over our projects with Captain Penny when a messenger was reported making all speed to us over the ice. The news he brought was thrilling. “Graves! Captain Penny, graves! Franklin’s winter quarters!” We were instantly in motion. Captain De Haven, Captain Penny, Commander Phillips and myself, joined by a party from the Rescue, hurried on over the ice [and] the loose and rugged slope that extends from Beechey to the shore. . . . Here,

amid the sterile uniformity of snow and slate, were the head-boards of three graves, made after the old orthodox fashion of gravestones at home.

The inscriptions on the headstones identified three sailors from Franklin’s expedition who had died during the winter of 1845-46.

Rescue parties from the ships quickly fanned out over Beechey Island and discovered the stone foundations of several huts, a blacksmith’s forge, carpenter’s workshop, and fragments of canvas, rope, cordage, sail-cloth, tarpaulins, and other debris. Kane wrote in his journal that about a quarter-mile from the graves, he had come upon

“a deposit of more than six-hundred preserved meat cans, arranged in regular order.” The empty tin cans had been cleaned and filled with pebbles, possibly, Kane speculated, to serve as “ballast on boating expeditions.”

Although it seemed that Franklin and his men had spent their first Arctic winter more or less comfortably on Beechey Island, the searchers found no indication of the direction in which the Erebus and Terror had gone in the spring of 1846. In light of Franklin’s reputation as a meticulous and methodical explorer, the lack of a “written memorandum, or pointing cross,” seemed to be “an incomprehensible omission,” Kane wrote.

The regions where American explorers searched for the lost expedition of Sir John Franklin.

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During the next few days, the search parties were joined by the rest of the British ships in the small harbor off Beechey Island. Teams from the ships minutely explored the surrounding area but found only one clue to indicate the possible course of Franklin’s ships. Leading away from the abandoned winter encampment to the north were the faint imprints of sled runners in the snow, suggesting that Franklin had sent reconnaissance parties to look for a passage to the hypothetical ice-free Polar Sea.

De Haven, Kane, and the British officers supposed that Franklin’s scouts must have found a way through Wellington Channel, the usually frozen seaway running north between Devon Island and Cornwallis Island to its west. They guessed that Franklin had been in such a hurry to follow an opening through the shifting ice that he had neglected to leave behind any record of his intentions. The captains of the rescue ships agreed to work together to find a way through the ice blocking Wellington Channel. They tried to work their way north, hoping

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to reach the long-sought ice-free Polar Sea, the Northwest Passage, and perhaps the marooned survivors of the Franklin expedition. Instead, they were driven south by strong winds, and then were carried west in Lancaster Sound.

On the afternoon of September 12, a blizzard engulfed the ships as they lay close together moored to the ice. Kane watched from the deck of the Advance as the storm intensified and edges of the floe began to break apart. The heavy ropes securing the Rescue to the ice snapped, and the ship was carried into open water. Soon afterward one of the Advance’s anchor cables broke. The vessel swung out into the choppy sea but was held fast to the ice by its remaining cable. Nearby, the British ships were all in similar peril. Kane wrote: “I have seldom seen a night of greater trial. The wind roared over the snow floes, and every thing about the vessel froze into heavy ice stalactites.” At midnight he noted: “The gale has increased, the floes are in upon us from the eastward, and it is evident that we are, all of us,

drifting bodily. God knows where, for we have no means of taking observations.”

By morning the storm had passed. After clearing ice from the decks and rigging of the Advance, De Haven set out in search of the Rescue. The British ships, meanwhile, attempted to push farther west, to see what they could find in that direction.

The Rescue was found later that day about fifteen miles from the previous night’s ice-anchorage. The ship had safely ridden out the storm, but its rudder had been severely damaged by collisions with drifting ice. The Advance took her battered companion in tow, and Captain De Haven decided that it was time to return to New York.

The next day the skies cleared, the wind freshened, and the temperature plummeted as De Haven set a course homeward. Kane stayed below in his bunk, keeping warm and listening to the monotonous rasping of ice against the ship’s hull. “Presently it grew less,” he wrote, “then increased, then stopped, then went on again, but jerking and irregular; and then

it waned, and waned, and waned away to silence.”

Captain De Haven came below deck and said: “Doctor, the ice has caught us. We are frozen up.”

Kane wrote:

On went my furs at once. As I reached the deck, the wind was there blowing stiff, and the sails were filled and puffing with it. It was not yet dark enough to hide the smooth surface of ice that filled up the horizon, holding the American expedition in search of Sir John Franklin embedded in its center.

The Advance and Rescue spent the next nine months trapped in the drifting Arctic ice pack. At first a strong south wind propelled them north into Wellington Channel, where De Haven and Kane observed heavy fog ahead that they interpreted as a sign of the ice-free Polar Sea that they were seeking. Before they could reach the fog bank, however, the wind died. The churning ice pack reversed course back to the south, and then carried the ships steadily east toward Baffin Bay.

On November 12 the sun disappeared below the horizon, and the three-month polar night began. In mid-January of 1851, the vessels entered Baffin Bay locked in the middle of a fifteen square-mile ice floe. They drifted slowly southward as the sun rose above the horizon for a few more minutes each day. To maintain the men’s fitness and morale, Kane organized ball games, foot-races, and sledding and skating competitions on the surrounding ice fields. He increased rations to prevent malnutrition, but the painful symptoms of scurvy began to affect most of the officers and crew, and cases of frostbite became more common.

By June 7 the ships drifted about five hundred miles south from Lancaster Sound when the ice around them began to break up, and the Rescue broke free from the pack. The next day the Advance was released, and the ships headed for the nearest settlements on the west coast of Greenland, arriving on June 16.

Once ashore, the crews rested and renewed their strength. “We made the most of it,” Kane wrote. “We ate inordinately of eider and codfish and seal, [and] chewed bitter herbs, too, of every sort we could get; drank largely of the smallest of small-beer, and danced with the natives.” Graves on Beechey Island.

The men quickly recovered their health, and De Haven was able to restock the ships with food and other supplies to last for several months. He changed his mind about returning to New York and decided to resume the search for Franklin.

Despite the severe trials of the previous winter, Kane wrote, “there was no one on board who did not enter heart and soul into the scheme.” The next two months were spent searching for a way back north across the ice-jammed waters of Baffin Bay, but in late August, De Haven gave up and ordered the ships to head for home.

On September 30 the Advance sailed into New York harbor, with the Rescue following a week behind. Although the American ships had failed to find Franklin or to make any independent discoveries, they returned to New York before any of the British ships made port, so the Americans were the first to break the news of the campsites and graves that they had helped the British to find. The news created a sensation, and the officers and crews of the Advance and Rescue were welcomed home as national heroes.

Kane was elated by the reception. With the permission of Lieutenant De Haven, who had no interest in public relations, he gave interviews and wrote accounts of the expedition that appeared in New York newspapers. In December he began giving public lectures to raise public support for another expedition. At these lectures Kane argued that Franklin and his men were probably languishing on an island in the “warm Polar Sea.” When Grinnell offered to fund another search for Franklin, and the Navy again agreed to provide officers for the search, De Haven declined Grinnell’s offer to lead another expedition north.

Kane immediately volunteered for the job and was accepted. For the next year and a half, he toured the East Coast at his own expense, recounting the thrilling adventures of the Advance and Rescue to civic and scientific organizations. He received contributions from the Smithsonian Institution, the American Geographical Society, and private donors.

In March, Congress officially authorized the Second Grinnell Expedition. Grinnell, meanwhile,

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had the Advance refitted for duty, returning the battered Rescue to his merchant fleet.

The Advance left New York bound for the Arctic on May 30, 1853. Hoping to find a more direct route to the Polar Sea, Kane decided to continue due north along the coast of Greenland, instead of turning west into Lancaster Sound. The expedition stopped at fishing ports in Labrador and Greenland, where Kane bought sleds and dogs to make further progress north in the likelihood of winter ice trapping the ship.

By mid-September, Kane and his men had sailed farther north than any previous Arctic expedition when the Advance became stuck in ice on the northwest coast of Greenland. After strenuous efforts to free the ship failed, Kane told the men that they would wait for warmer weather to continue their mission. On November 27 he wrote in his journal, “the thermometer was in the neighborhood of forty degrees below zero, and the day was too dark to read at noon.” The Advance was anchored to the ice in a sheltered bay, and a camp of tents and supply huts was established on shore. “The great difficulty,” Kane wrote, “is to keep a cheery tone among the men.”

Kane’s plan to use the Advance as a base camp and to continue the journey north by dogsled was foiled when all but six of the dogs died from exposure in the extreme cold. In the spring of 1854, a few small reconnaissance parties explored the area north and west of the immobilized ship. Men from one of these teams reported seeing open water on the far northern horizon. Kane believed that the men had seen the open Polar Sea, which he still hoped to reach. The return of the summer sun, however, offered no relief from the sub-zero temperatures, and the sea ice remained firm. In early August, Kane and seven men hiked south nearly a hundred miles, hoping to obtain help from whaling ships in Baffin Bay, but they encountered ice extending far to the south, and returned to the Advance.

After spending a second grueling winter on the Greenland coast, Kane and his men abandoned the Advance on May 17, 1855, and headed south, using sleds and boats to work their way down the shore of Baffin Bay. They reached the Danish settlement at Upernavik on August 9 and boarded a Danish ship that was heading south. Farther down the coast they were relieved to encounter two American rescue ships that had been sent to find them.

On October 11 the survivors of the Second Grinnell Expedition returned to New York. Kane was disappointed to learn that during his absence, a Canadian search party had found human remains and papers from the Franklin Expedition on King William Island, four hundred miles south

of the previously discovered Beechey Island campsite.

Although Kane had again failed to make any discoveries, his accounts of his adventures were so entertaining that he was hailed as a hero throughout the English-speaking world. His two-volume account of the expedition, which sold sixty-five thousand copies in its first edition, made such a powerful impression on the American writer Henry David Thoreau that Thoreau spent days talking of nothing else, and tried to build an igloo in his yard. Kane’s delicate appearance and fragile health, combined with his courageous exploits and his wonderful storytelling skills, left many observers in a state of almost worshipful admiration. The English writer William Makepeace Thackeray, after listening to Kane’s lecture at the Century Club in New York, asked, “Do you think the doctor would permit me to kneel and lick his boots?”

Although Kane thoroughly enjoyed his celebrity, he remained dissatisfied with his accomplishments as an explorer. He was eager to set off on some new quest, but his failing health did not permit it. In the winter of 1857, he traveled to Cuba to recuperate, and died there of a stroke on February 16, 1857, at the age of thirty-seven.

His body was brought to New Orleans and carried by a funeral train to Philadelphia. Crowds of mourners met the train at every stop along the way. Kane’s was the best-attended funeral in American history prior to that of President Abraham Lincoln.

After his death, Kane’s fame rapidly faded as the search for Franklin was gradually abandoned during the 1860s and 1870s.

In 1981, over a hundred years after the last previous search, a new search party was organized by Owen Beattie, a professor of anthropology at the University of Alberta. He and his students located artifacts and skeletal remains of some of Franklin’s crewmen at King William Island.

Searches for Franklin’s lost ships resumed in 1997. With the help of modern sonar equipment, searchers located the wreck of HMS Erebus in 2014 in the eastern portion of Queen Maud Gulf. In 2016, the Arctic Research Foundation expedition found the wreck of HMS Terror south of King William Island.

SOURCES:Kane, Elisha Kent. The U. S. Grinnell Expedition in Search of Sir John Franklin, A Personal Narrative. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1854.Kane, Elisha Kent. Arctic Explorations: The Second Grinnell Expedition in Search of Sir John Franklin, 1853, ’54, ’55. Philadelphia: Childs & Peterson, 1856.Robinson Michael F. The Coldest Crucible: Arctic Exploration and American Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006.Smucker, Samuel Mosheim. Arctic Explorations and Discoveries during the Nineteenth Century. New York: Miller, Orton, 1857.

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The Advance trapped in ice.

After abandoning their trapped ship, the crew of Advance heads south.

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Rome Invades BritainBy Paul Chrastina

In 55 B.C. Roman General Julius Caesar served as the military governor of Gaul, a vast region of Europe that included present-day France and Belgium, as well as western portions of Switzerland and Germany. Caesar was authorized by the Roman Senate to collect tribute payments of gold, silver, and slaves from the Celtic tribes that inhabited Gaul, but he was not satisfied with the wealth his position afforded him. He knew that to the north, across an ocean strait that narrowed to twenty-one miles, lay the land of Britain, at the far limit of the known ancient world. According to Gallic merchants, Britain was rich in precious metals, pearls, and other valuable goods. Caesar believed that British tribes were harboring Gallic refugees who had fled there rather than submit to Roman rule, and he suspected that rebellions against his authority in Gaul were being organized on British soil. Caesar decided to conquer Britain and exact tribute payments from its vanquished tribes.

In early August of 55 B.C., Caesar sent out a ship to reconnoiter the British coast in search of a place to land his army. While waiting for the ship to return, he received a delegation claiming to represent the chieftains of several British tribes. The ambassadors offered to submit to the government of Rome instead of risking war. Caesar encouraged them to convince their people to accept Roman colonization of their lands. He sent them back to Britain with a Gallic chieftain, Commius, who would explain both the benefits of Roman administration and the futility of resisting Caesar’s legions.

When the reconnaissance ship returned after surveying the British coast in mid-August, Caesar had not yet heard back from Commius or the British ambassadors. He decided to proceed with the invasion. At about midnight on August 23,

he left the Gallic port of Portius Itius, near the present-day city of Boulogne, France, with eighty war galleys carrying two legions, a force of about ten thousand veteran foot soldiers. An auxiliary force of several hundred cavalry troops was to follow from another nearby port aboard eighteen transport ships. Caesar intended for the two fleets to rendezvous off the British coast within view of the white cliffs of Dover, where the invasion was to be launched, but the transport ships carrying the cavalry had not arrived by the following morning. Along the tops of the hills, Caesar could see an army of Britons drawn up and ready for battle. He concluded that Commius and the British ambassadors had failed to pave the way for an unopposed takeover of British tribal territories.

In his firsthand account of the invasion, Caesar wrote: “The sea was overlooked by cliffs so closely that a javelin could easily be thrown from their summit down to the shore. Considering this an altogether unsuitable place for landing, we remained at anchor, waiting for the other ships to arrive.”

When the missing cavalry transports failed to appear by mid-afternoon, Caesar decided to proceed with the invasion without his cavalry. He ordered his pilots to sail further up the coast in search of a safer place to disembark. The Britons, Caesar wrote, “upon perceiving our plan, followed us with their cavalry, charioteers, and the rest of their forces, determined to prevent us from landing.” About seven miles from Dover, Caesar found a cobblestone beach on which to land his troops, but his ships were too deep to reach the shore; they ran aground in chest-deep water.

Caesar wrote:

Our soldiers were burdened by the weight of their armor and had to leap from the ships, gain

a footing in the waves, and fight the enemy; whereas the Britons, either remaining on dry ground or advancing partway into the shallows, were unen-cumbered by armor and could confidently throw their spears and spur on their horses, which were trained to fight in this manner. Our men were terrified by these circum-stances, and being unused to this type of battle, they did not exert the same vigor and eagerness that they usually showed on dry land.

Caesar decided to drive the British warriors back by running several of his warships aground on the beach and launching a

barrage of arrows, spears, sling stones, and larger projectiles, hurled from portable shipboard catapults. As the Roman warships ran onto the beach, the Britons retreated a short distance from the water’s edge. Caesar ordered his legions to jump overboard and storm the shoreline. Some of his legionaries hesitated, however, until a standard bearer jumped onto the gunwale of his ship and shouted, “Jump down, my fellow soldiers, unless you want to lose your standard to the enemy!” The standard bearer then leaped into the water and waded to shore alone.

Caesar wrote:

The rest of the troops called out to one another that such a disgrace must not be allowed, and jumped from their ship. When those in the other vessels saw them, they speedily followed and rushed at the enemy. The ensuing battle was maintained vigorously on both sides. . . . The Britons’ method of fighting with chariots is as follows: at first they ride about in all directions and throw their weapons and generally break up the ranks of their enemy with the dread of their horses and the noise of their wheels. After they work themselves in between the troops, the warriors leap from the chariots and fight on foot. The charioteers then withdraw from the battle and wait nearby, so that if their masters are over-powered, they may have a safe retreat. By constantly training, the charioteers are accustomed to control and turn their horses at full speed, even on steep sloping ground, and the warriors learn to run alongside them, jump up onto the pole and stand on the yoke in order to return to the chariots again.

Although the Romans were unable to maintain the orderly battle formations that usually gave them an advantage over less disciplined adversaries, the superiority of their arms and armor eventually prevailed. The Britons broke and ran. Caesar’s legionaries, encumbered by their heavy armor, could not pursue the Britons very far. As dusk fell, Caesar sent a ship to search for his tardy cavalry transports, while his legionaries established a large encampment within sight of the beached and anchored ships. Soon afterward, a group of British ambassadors approached the camp to negotiate a truce. They brought with them the Gallic chieftain Commius, who had been arrested for treason by the Britons while trying to persuade them to surrender to Caesar. According to Caesar, the ambassadors blamed the arrest of Commius and their initial resistance to the Roman invasion on the “common people” of their tribes.

The ambassadors begged Caesar’s pardon for their “indiscretions,” and promised to respect whatever peace terms Caesar demanded.

Doubting the ambassadors’ sincerity, Caesar immediately took some of them into custody, a common Roman practice designed to ensure the future good behavior of enemy tribes. He sent the rest of the ambassadors back to their respective tribes with orders to bring back more hostages.

Caesar decided to remain in his camp to wait for the hostages and the arrival of his missing cavalry transports. On the morning of August 30, the overdue fleet was spotted on the horizon, but as Caesar watched the ships approach, a strong wind rose suddenly from the east and swept them westward until they were lost to sight.

That night there was a full moon that caused a high tide. Caesar’s men were caught unawares.

Caesar wrote:

The tide began to float our beached warships, and a storm rose that dashed the other ships riding at anchor against one another. . . . A great many ships were wrecked, and the rest, having lost their cables, anchors, and rigging, were made unfit for sailing. Great anxiety swept through the army; for there were no other vessels in which they could be conveyed back to Gaul.

The next morning Caesar ordered some of his men to begin repairing the damaged ships and others to go into the surrounding countryside to forage for wheat from British farm fields. In the general confusion, some of his British hostages managed to escape and inform their tribes of the Romans’ difficulties. The Britons, Caesar wrote, immediately changed their minds about surrendering peacefully. “They thought that the best plan was to renew the war, and by cutting us off from grain and provisions, to prolong the conflict until winter, confident that if we were vanquished and did not return to Gaul, no one would cross over into Britain again for the purpose of making war.”

That afternoon, sentries posted at the gates of the camp reported seeing a cloud of dust in the direction that the foraging legion had gone. Fearing that the Britons were attacking the foraging party, Caesar immediately marched with nine hundred men toward the ominous dust cloud. Caesar wrote: “When we had advanced some little way from the camp, we saw that our men had been ambushed by the enemy and were barely able to stand their ground.” British charioteers had encircled the legion, and warriors riding in chariots were throwing spears into its ranks. Bust of Julius Caesar.

According to Caesar, the ambushed Roman legionaries were “dismayed by the novelty of this mode of battle.” When Caesar’s reinforcements arrived, the Britons retreated and the Romans were able to withdraw safely to their camp.

The first week of September brought torrential rains that prevented the British tribes from attacking the Roman camp and gave Caesar’s men enough time to repair most of the ships. Concerned by the approach of winter, Caesar decided to return to Gaul. In the meantime, he wrote, the Britons “dispatched messengers to all parts, and reported to their people the small number of our soldiers, and the opportunity for looting our camp and preserving their freedom forever if they could only drive us away.” When the weather cleared in the second week of September, a large force of British chariots and foot soldiers approached the camp. The Romans were not yet ready to set sail for Gaul, so Caesar ordered his legions to march out and engage the enemy.

Caesar wrote: “When the action commenced, the Britons were unable to sustain the attack of our men, and turned their backs. Our men pursued them inland as far as their speed and strength permitted, and killed many.”

The Roman legionaries looted and burned the British villages in their path, then returned to camp. Soon afterward a delegation of Britons arrived at camp and appealed to Caesar for peace.

Caesar demanded twice as many hostages as had been seized previously and ordered the Britons to deliver them in their own ships to Gaul. He then sailed with his remaining men back to the continent, where he learned that his cavalry transports had been blown off course and nearly wrecked en route to Britain, but they had safely returned to Gaul. The Gallic tribes, meanwhile, having learned of Caesar’s troubles in Britain, were threatening to revolt. Caesar made a show of force against the northern Gauls, destroying their crops and burning their villages before returning to southern Gaul, which remained firmly under Roman control.

That winter Caesar somewhat misleadingly reported to the Roman Senate that his expedition to Britain had been successful. According to the Roman historian Cassius Dio:

He had won nothing in Britain for himself or for the Republic except the glory of having conducted an expedition against its inhabitants; but on this he prided himself greatly, and the Romans at home magnified his accomplish-ments to a remarkable degree. Considering that a formerly unknown and inaccessible land had become known, they felt certain that it would soon be conquered, and exulted over their expected acquisitions as if they were already won; hence the Senate voted to celebrate a public thanksgiving for twenty days.

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Caesar was disappointed when only two of the British tribes delivered the hostages they had promised to send to Gaul, but he was pleased when a British prince named Mandubracius came in person to offer his allegiance to Rome.

Mandubracius said that he had been exiled to Gaul by a rival British chieftain named Cassivelaunus, who had killed Mandubracius’s father and seized his lands. He said that he would be willing to accept Roman rule if Caesar would help him to depose Cassivelaunus. Caesar welcomed the homeless prince as an ally, promising to return to Britain in greater force the following spring.

During the winter Caesar ordered the construction of six hundred additional transports and twenty-eight new war galleys specially designed to navigate in shallow coastal waters. In July of 54 B.C., this fleet, along with the ships used in the previous expedition, crossed the English Channel carrying ten thousand foot soldiers and two thousand cavalry. The expedition was followed by a number of privately owned vessels commissioned by Roman merchants who were eager to take advantage of Caesar’s anticipated victory over the Britons.

When the ships reached the British coast, Caesar wrote, “not a single enemy was seen in that place.” After capturing some prisoners from a seaside village, he learned that “large bodies of troops had assembled along the shore, but being alarmed by the number of our ships . . . they had withdrawn and concealed themselves further inland.”

Eager to begin his conquest in earnest, Caesar set out with half of his men in pursuit of the British forces, leaving the rest behind to establish a camp and guard the ships. After advancing twelve miles inland, the Romans caught up with the Britons on the banks of the Stour River, near present-day Canterbury. The British warriors “began to annoy our men and give battle,” Caesar wrote. “Being repulsed by our cavalry, they concealed themselves in a forest,” taking refuge in a hill-fort protected by steep earthen embankments. The fortress, Caesar wrote, “must have been built during some previous civil war, for all approaches to it were blocked by a great number of felled trees.”

The Britons initially succeeded in preventing the Romans from entering their fortifications, but Caesar deployed his trained legionaries in a so-called “tortoise” formation, in which a canopy of tightly overlapping shields sheltered construction crews who raised a ramp of packed earth against the embankments. The Britons were unable to stop the methodical advance of the legionaries. They fled from the fort, and early the next morning, Caesar sent three divisions of foot

soldiers and cavalry after them. He wrote, “We had just caught sight of the enemy when messengers came from the coast to report that during the previous night a very great storm had arisen, dashing almost all the ships to pieces and casting them upon the shore.”

Caesar called back his men and returned to the encampment. He was glad to find that only about forty vessels had actually been destroyed by the storm, and the rest seemed capable of being repaired, “though with much labor.” He ordered that the remaining ships be drawn safely onto the beach. For the next ten days and nights he oversaw the refitting of the damaged ships. When they were all repaired, he led his forces back to the British fort to resume the fight with the Britons.

Caesar wrote: “When we arrived, we found greater forces of the Britons had returned to that place, having given the command and management of the war to Cassivellaunus . . . whose territories lay north of a river called the Thames, about eighty miles from the sea.”

Once again the Romans forced the Britons to abandon the fort, but for the next few weeks Cassivellaunus orchestrated a frustrating guerilla-style war against Caesar’s legions. “Our men were disconcerted by the unusual mode of battle, and were poorly equipped to meet this kind of enemy,” Caesar wrote. “The Britons never fought in close order, but rather in small parties with detachments placed in different areas to relieve one another, so that fresh warriors were always available to replace the weary.”

Many Romans were killed in surprise attacks and ambushes, but by the end of the summer with the help of his British ally Mandubracius, Caesar located the principal stronghold and refuge of the British warriors, a hilltop fortress a few miles north of the River Thames. The Romans attacked the fort from two sides, routing its defenders. When the outcome of the battle was reported to Cassivellaunus, he sent ambassadors to Caesar to negotiate a surrender.

Caesar was lenient with Cassivelaunus. He demanded the usual hostages and the payment of an

annual tribute to Rome, and he made Cassivelaunus promise not to make war against Mandubracius. Caesar then returned to Gaul, confident that all obstacles had been overcome and that the colonization of Britain was a matter of course. During the winter of 54-53 B.C., however, Caesar was confronted by another problem. The Gauls rose again in revolt. For the next two years, Caesar was kept busy on the continent putting down the resistance in a series of campaigns that culminated with his victory over Gallic chieftain Vercingetorix in 52 B.C.

As a consequence of Caesar’s victories in Gaul and Britain, his wealth, power, and fame began to alienate many officials in Rome. In 50 B.C. the Senate ordered him to resign his governorship, disband his army, and return to Rome. Instead, Caesar marched to Rome with a single legion and instigated a civil war that spread to Roman provinces throughout the Mediterranean. In March of 45 B.C., Caesar defeated the last of his rivals and was proclaimed dictator for life. He was assassinated a year later.

His successors, Rome’s first emperors, planned several times to officially annex Britain to the Roman Empire, but it wasn’t until 43 A.D. that Roman legions under the command of Caesar’s great-nephew Claudius again invaded Britain, establishing an occupation that lasted until 410 A.D.

SOURCESCaesar, Julius. De Bello Gallico. London: Clarendon Press, 1898.Dio, Cassius. Roman History. New York: Loeb Classical Library, 1914.Ferrero, Guglielmo. The Greatness and Decline of Rome. New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1909.Holmes, Thomas Rice. Ancient Britain and the Invasions of Julius Caesar. New York: Clarendon Press, 1907.Lewin, Thomas. The Invasion of Britain by Julius Caesar. London: Longman, Green, Longman, and Roberts, 1862.Suetonius. The Lives of the Twelve Caesars. London: G. Bell and Sons, 1893.

Natives oppose the first Roman landing in Britain.

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By David VachonIn the spring of 1938, Clark

Eldridge, a civil engineer who worked for the Washington State Highway Department, completed design plans for a suspension bridge to span the Tacoma Narrows of Puget Sound, between the cities of Tacoma and the Kitsap Peninsula.

Heavy traffic was not anticipated over the bridge, so Eldridge’s design called for a two-lane roadway only thirty-nine feet wide. The span between the bridge’s two load-bearing towers would be 2,600 feet long, making the Tacoma Narrows Bridge the third largest suspension bridge in the world.

Despite its projected cost of eleven million dollars, government officials were eager to see the bridge built to link United States Army bases in Tacoma with a navy shipyard in Bremerton on the Kitsap Peninsula. The Public Works Administration offered to reimburse the State of Washington for forty-five percent of the cost of the bridge, if Eldridge’s plans were approved by a consulting engineer chosen by the Public Works Administration. In July of 1938, Eldridge sent copies of his plans to the chosen consultant, Leon Moisseiff of New York City. Moisseiff was one of America’s top bridge designers: he had been a consulting engineer on the Golden Gate Bridge at San Francisco and the Bronx-Whitestone Bridge in New York.

Eldridge expected that Moisseiff might try to lower the cost of the bridge by reducing the amount of structural steel in his design. He was surprised, however, when Moissieff called for a radical redesign that reduced the thickness of the roadway by replacing its twenty-five-foot-deep stiffening truss with an eight-foot truss, slashing the cost of the bridge from eleven million to six million dollars. Eldridge

had specified the stiffening truss to resist the force of strong winds that frequently blew through the Narrows, but Moisseiff felt that the necessary rigidity could be provided by increasing the main span of the bridge from 2,600 feet to 2,800 feet. Moissieff claimed that the extra weight on the cables would stiffen them, making extra reinforcement of the deck unnecessary. In Moisseiff’s opinion, a thinner roadway with a plate girder would be just as rigid as a roadway built with a deep truss. The thin roadway would have the added advantages of being much less expensive and more elegant in appearance.

Eldridge feared that reducing the thickness of the roadway would weaken it. He recommended that the state Toll Bridge Authority reject Moisseiff’s ideas and build the bridge to Eldridge’s own design, which he described as “a tried and true conventional bridge design.”

The Toll Bridge Authority’s advisory board of engineers did not share Eldridge’s concerns. In their report they wrote: “It might seem to those who are not experienced in suspension bridge design that the proposed 2800-ft span with a [roadway width] of 39’ and a corresponding width to span ratio of 72, being without precedent, is somewhat excessive. In our opinion this feature of the design should give no concern.” The board of engineers fully endorsed Moisseiff’s plan. Their report stated: “We have full confidence in Mr. Moisseiff and consider him to be among the highest authorities in suspension bridge design.”

Eldridge, despite his concerns about the design, agreed to act as supervising engineer, overseeing construction of the bridge. Work began in November of 1938.

Three months later, while the towers were being built, Eldridge hired Frederick Burt Farquharson, a professor of engineering at the University of Washington in Seattle, to build a scale model of the bridge. Eldridge wanted to know how the thinned and lengthened roadway would react in high winds. Farquharson and his students began building a fifty-four-foot-long scale model of the proposed bridge in February. To simulate the effects of wind pressure, Farquharson planned to install one hundred electromagnets along the roadway.

Over the next few months, as construction on the bridge advanced, and as the model was being built and tested, Eldridge and Farquharson looked into reports from engineers about movement

in other bridges that Moisseiff had helped design. The most consistent reports con cerned the Bronx-Whitestone Bridge, which was reported to oscillate frequently in wind.

In April, Eldridge wrote to Moisseiff, expressing his concerns about the reports of movement in the Bronx-Whitestone Bridge, and suggesting that the Tacoma Narrows Bridge should be redesigned to prevent the same thing from happening.

Moisseiff did not answer Eldridge directly but wrote to Eldridge’s boss, Lacey V. Murrow, that “reports of undulation [in the Bronx-Whitestone Bridge] were probably erroneous and that in any event this type of motion could be easily corrected and that no change in plan was necessary.” Eldridge was not satisfied with Moisseiff’s answer.

By this time Farquharson had been able to simulate wind pressures on his model. These pressures induced vertical undulations or waves with up to nine segments in the main span of the model. He later wrote, “The realization that a potentially dangerous phenomenon was develop-ing became inescapable.”

In May of 1940, as the roadway on the new bridge was being finished, workmen concreting the deck on the main span reported strong vertical movement in moderate winds—very similar to what Farquharson was seeing in the model. Some workers experienced motion sickness and had to leave the job. They started calling the bridge “Galloping Gertie,” and making bets among themselves as to how long the bridge would survive.

The bridge was scheduled to open on July 1. Eldridge was eager to stabilize the roadway before it was opened to the public. In May he sent a telegram to Moisseiff, urging him to come immediately to Tacoma. Moisseiff traveled from New York to Tacoma and saw the undulating movement of the bridge. He agreed to design remedies. He ordered one-and-a-half-inch-diameter steel cable ties to be installed diagonally, connecting the roadway to the mid-span main cables. Then in late June he had four hydraulic jacks installed at the points where the roadway met the towers, to act as buffers and suppress roadway movement. Despite these corrective measures, the vertical movement continued whenever there was wind.

On July 1, 1940, the bridge was opened to the public with great fanfare. During the festivities there was no wind, and the roadway appeared stable. Officials at the Washington Toll Bridge Authority (WTBA) were pleased because Moisseiff’s innovative design had saved them five million dollars that they would have spent on Eldridge’s more conventional design.

The next day motorists driving across the bridge began noticing

that cars in front of them would slowly disappear into the trough of a wave, and then reappear, as the bridge’s roadway undulated. The WTBA announced in the press that the “bounce” was normal and that there was no reason for the public to become alarmed. Having been reassured by the authorities, people considered the movement to be an amusing, yet harmless quirk of the bridge. As a show of support for the government position, a local bank put up a billboard stating that it was “as safe as the Tacoma Bridge.”

Eldridge did not believe the bridge was in imminent danger of collapsing, but he considered the undulating movement of the roadway potentially dangerous. The span conformed to contemporary norms for static wind pressure and live loads, yet even small breezes were causing it to pulsate. He wanted to stabilize it, yet he did not know how to do so, other than by adding more steel cables. In September Farquharson began testing an eight-foot-long bridge model in the University of Washington’s wind tunnel. Late that month he discovered that random gusts of wind were applying lift forces to the flat-sided eight-foot-thick roadway girder. The girder was acting aerodynamically, being lifted up like the wing of an airplane in some places. This up and down movement rippled through the center span, causing the whole roadway to oscillate. Over the next month, Farquharson tried two remedies on the model. He attached triangular fairings to the side of the girder to deflect the wind. Then in another experiment he cut holes in the model’s girder to allow air to pass through. Both remedies reduced the oscillations; but adding the fairings worked best, virtually eliminating lift in the model tests.

While Farquharson was testing these prospective remedies, Eldridge had four 45-tonne concrete blocks built into the slopes on each side of the bridge’s side spans. Using steel tie-down cables, he connected the roadway to the massive concrete blocks. These cables helped stabilize the side spans, but the center span remained in motion. One of the cables snapped during heavy winds on November 1 and was re-installed three days later.

On November 2, Farquharson pub-lish ed his findings. He recommended attaching fairings along the sides of the roadway to deflect the wind. Eldridge welcomed Farquharson’s proposals, and acted immediately. He found a contractor to build and install the fairings at a cost of eighty thousand dollars. The contractor assured him that in two weeks the south side of the center span would be fully covered with wind deflectors, and within forty-five days the entire bridge would be protected.

New Bridge Sways In Wind

From left to right: Clark Eldridge, Ralph Keenan (of the Pacific Bridge Co.), and Leon Moisseiff. Photo by James Bashford, courtesy of Harbor History Museum.

Eldridge was hopeful that the problem was close to being solved.

The weather forecast that night was for storms. The next morning, November 7, strong winds raced through the Tacoma Narrows. Eldridge decided to drive over to the bridge and see how it was reacting to the wind. At 8:30 a.m. he drove across the bridge. It was undulating but no worse than on previous windy days. He then drove to his office in Tacoma to coordinate work with the fairings contractor.

Farquharson woke up early and drove from his home in Seattle to Tacoma, about an hour away. He wrote, “When I arrived at about a quarter to ten o’clock, the bridge was moving in the familiar rippling motion that we were studying and seeking to correct.”

Shortly after ten, Farquharson observed a completely new move-ment. The roadway began twisting from side to side. “It tilted up as much as 28 feet on one side, then it went down and the other side twisted up,” he wrote.

WTBA officials closed the bridge to the public, admitting only Farquharson and reporters to document what was going on. But there were still a few vehicles with drivers and passengers on the bridge when the violent twisting motion began.

Ruby Jacox and Walter Hagen were crossing in a panel truck. “All of a sudden the bridge began to rock,” Jacox later recalled. “We were afraid the truck would turn over so we . . . jumped out. We could only crawl on our hands and knees and got about ten feet away when the truck fell over. . . . I kept thinking that this bridge was something that couldn’t break. It had been inspected by government engineers. And experts had planned it so it could stand any strain.” Jacox and Hagen were rescued by two electricians, Robert Hall and March Wilson, who backed their truck onto the west side span to pick them up, then drove away safely.

Newspaperman Leonard Coats-worth was crossing in his 1936 Studebaker sedan, on his way to his fishing camp. “In the car with me was my daughter’s cocker spaniel, Tubby…. Just as I drove past the [east] towers the bridge began to sway violently from side to side. Before I realized it, the tilt became so violent that I lost control of the car…. I jammed on the brakes and got out, only to be thrown onto my face against the curb.

“Around me I could see concrete cracking. I started back to the car to get the dog, but was thrown before I could reach it. The car itself began to slide from side to side on the roadway. I decided the bridge was breaking up and my only hope was to get back to shore. On hands and knees most of the time, I crawled 500 yards or more to the towers. . . . My breath was coming in gasps; my knees were raw and bleeding, my hands bruised and swollen from gripping the concrete curb. . . . Toward the last, I risked rising to my feet and running a few yards at a time. ”

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Coatsworth staggered back to the east tower, where Farquharson was absorbed in making technical observations and taking pictures. Coatsworth was upset about having left Tubby. He told Farquharson that the dog was still in the car. Then Coatsworth walked along the east span to the toll booth at the end of the bridge, where he called his newspaper, the Tacoma News Tribune, telling his colleagues to send photographers, because the bridge looked like it was going to collapse.

At around 10:15 Eldridge returned to the bridge from his office and walked out to the east tower where Farquharson was taking pictures. Although the center span was “swaying wildly,” the two men assured each other that the bridge would soon settle down and they would have another chance to fix it.

Eldridge then walked back to the east end of the bridge to warn people away. He also alerted the U.S. Coast Guard and the Northern Pacific Railroad of potential danger to ships or trains passing beneath the bridge.

Farquharson remained on the bridge at the east tower. He could see three vehicles on the center span: a logging truck that had tipped over and lost its load (the driver had escaped); the panel truck that Ruby Jacox and Walter Hagen had abandoned; and Coatsworth’s Studebaker with the cocker spaniel Tubby still inside.

At around 10:30 the wind dropped, and Farquharson decided to take advantage of the period of calm to walk out onto the center span and rescue Tubby. He reached Coatsworth’s car just as the wind picked up again. The roadway twisted, and the Studebaker lurched across the roadway, jamming up against the curb. When Farquharson grabbed at Tubby through an open rear window, the frightened dog bit his hand. Shocked by the bite and disturbed by the movements of the roadway—it was now twisting back and forth fourteen times per minute by his calculations—Farquharson decided to return empty-handed to the east tower. As he walked back, straddling the center line, Farquharson observed that the span was now twisting at an unprecedented rate of twenty times per minute. Nonetheless, he still believed that the structure could withstand that movement and that it would eventually settle down.

Local radio reports brought out hundreds of sightseers. Nineteen-year-old newlywed Jeanette Taylor described the roadway this way, “It looked like an undulating piece of chiffon.”

At 10:55 Farquharson was back standing on the roadway at the east tower, when he saw a large chunk of concrete pavement fall from the center span into the Narrows. Sensing now that the bridge was beginning to break up, and realizing that it might soon collapse, Farquharson decided to make a last attempt to save the dog. He walked out onto the center span, but the motion of the roadway was so violent

that he made no headway, and was forced to stumble back to the relative stability of the piece of road directly between the two pillars of the east tower.

Then, as he watched, a six-hundred-foot length of roadway, with the car and dog on it, fell in a cloud of dust into Puget Sound. Farquharson turned and started running toward the east end of the bridge. The vertical suspender cables snapped with the sounds of machine-gun fire as the structure flexed and redistributed its weight. The two side spans had been held in tension by the weight of the center span. When the center-span weight was reduced, each of the side spans dropped thirty feet into a low sag. Farquharson wrote, ‘The bridge dropped from under me. I fell and broke one of my cameras.”

More sections of the center span fell, taking with them the logging truck and the panel truck abandoned earlier by Ruby Jacox and Walter Hagen. Farquharson was the last man off the bridge. No one was seriously injured.

News of the bridge collapse made headlines around the world. When reporters asked Leon Moisseiff, the bridge’s designer, what had gone wrong, he responded that he was “completely at a loss to explain the collapse.”

The question that needed to be answered was: Why did this bridge, designed using modern principles, self-destruct in a relatively light wind? The federal Public Works Administration (PWA) appointed a board of engineers to answer that question. Reporting in March of 1941, the board cited the roadway’s “excessive flexibility” as a principal

cause. The roadway structure was too light in weight and too shallow in depth (as Eldridge had pointed out in the beginning). The eight-foot-deep solid plate girder had acted like an airfoil in the wind (as Farquharson had discovered using a wind-tunnel model). The board concluded that aerodynamic forces on bridges were little understood, and that no one person was to blame for the bridge’s collapse. Moisseiff was exonerated. The report conveniently blamed the whole engineering profession.

Clark Eldridge was less circum-spect. In newspaper interviews he blamed Leon Moisseiff and the federal officials at the PWA who wanted the construction cost reduced from eleven million to six million dollars.

The Tacoma Narrows Bridge at 10:45 a.m. on November 7, 1940. Photo by Howard Clifford, courtesy of Harbor History Museum.

Collapse of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge. Photo by James Bashford, courtesy of Harbor History Museum.

Tacoma Narrows Bridge, 1940. Tie-down cables attached to the side span in foreground are visible. Courtesy of Washington State Archives.

By Matthew SurridgeAt a meeting held in Detroit,

Michigan, on November 20, 1893, the Western League of Professional Baseball Clubs elected a new president—Byron Bancroft “Ban” Johnson. Twenty-nine years old, Johnson was a Cincinnati sportswriter and a former university ballplayer who had been recommended for the job by his friend Charles Comiskey, a potential investor in the Western League and the manager of the National League’s Cincinnati Reds.

Despite a lack of managerial experience, Johnson cut an impressive figure. Tall and heavyset, he radiated self-assurance and enthusiasm.

He confidently told the team owners that their Western League, which had been experiencing financial troubles, could grow so great and wealthy that it would ultimately become a rival to the

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National League, which was then the only major league in professional baseball.

Professional baseball had develop ed in the 1860s, and since that time numerous leagues had appeared and collapsed. By 1893 the twelve-team National League, which had been founded in 1876, was the only remaining “major league” according to the terms of a loose compact called the National Agreement. Most other professional leagues, including the Western League, were signatories to the agreement, which was renewed annually and regulated the leagues’ territorial rights and contracts. The agreement gave the National League, as the sole major league, the right to draft players from the minor leagues.

Johnson believed that many of the financial difficulties of the Western League were the result of its “minor league” status. According to the National Agreement, a National League team could draft any player it liked from the minor leagues, and had to pay minor league teams only five hundred dollars for each player it drafted. Johnson felt that this fee was inadequate compensation for the loss of star talent, and soon after being established as president of the Western League, he asked the National League to double the fee to one thousand dollars for each player that it drafted from a Western League team. But the National League refused to renegotiate its price.

Johnson was annoyed by the National League’s intransigence. Because the best players in the Western League were constantly being drafted away by the National League, it was difficult for the Western League to build consistently good teams to attract loyal fans. In 1896 the Minneapolis Millers won the Western League pennant; the next year, it was one of the worst teams in the league, because the National League had drafted all the stars of its championship team.

In addition to the issue of the

player draft, another problem facing the Western League was the smaller size of its markets. Unlike the teams of the National League, which were based in major population centers like New York and Chicago, the eight teams of the Western League were located in medium-sized cities: Minneapolis, Kansas City, Milwaukee, Sioux City, Indianapolis, Toledo, Grand Rapids, and Detroit. With modest populations of potential fans in their home cities, the teams of the Western League had difficulty attracting big crowds to their ballparks.

From the beginning of his tenure as president, Johnson tried to attract new fans by making the Western League more family-friendly than the National League, which was notoriously rowdy at that time. “There must be no profanity on the ball field,” Johnson decreed. He promised that the Western League would support and protect its umpires, who were routinely bullied and physically intimidated by National League players. “The umpires are agents of the league, and must be treated with respect,” Johnson announced.

By promoting what he called “purified baseball,” Johnson built significant fan support for the Western League in the 1894 season. Despite an overall poor economy, the league prospered, and ticket sales increased from 1894 through 1899. The Western League was one of the few minor leagues to consistently turn a profit during these years.

Although the Western League was on a solid financial footing thanks to Johnson’s reforms, the National League was in decline. Players and managers openly bet on games, owners were able to choose their own umpires, and the same teams tended to win and lose each year. Respected baseball manager/player Adrian “Cap” Anson of the league’s Chicago Colts wrote that the National League operated as nothing less than “a gigantic monopoly,

intolerant of opposition and run on a grab-all-there-is-in-sight basis that is alienating its friends and disgusting the very public that has so long and cheerfully given to it the support that it has withheld from other forms of amusement.” Average annual attendance for National League clubs declined from a high in the mid-1890s of over two hundred and fifty thousand to below two hundred thousand in 1898.

Seeing the National League’s troubles, Johnson believed that he might turn the tables and start stealing star athletes from their teams. He knew that the National League owners kept a tight control over their players’ salaries, capping their pay at twenty-four hundred dollars per season. He also knew that many players were unhappy at the salary cap, which had actually decreased over the past few years. Johnson believed that if his league could offer players a few hundred dollars more per season, enough star National League players would defect to enable his league to quickly reach a major-league level.

For this strategy to succeed, however, the owners of the Western League clubs would need to turn even greater profits to pay the higher salaries.

In Eldridge’s opinion, they had sacrificed good engineering for cost reductions. In April of 1941, when the board’s report was made public, Eldridge resigned from the State Highway Department and took a job with the U.S. Navy on Guam.

Studies published years later found that in the 1930s, modern engineers like Moisseiff did not consider the dynamic effects of wind, even as they were building lighter structures. They had forgotten the lessons of the early nineteenth century when light spans with flexible decks proved vulnerable to dynamic wind pressures and failed catastrophically. Late nineteenth-

century engineers like John Roebling consciously built heavy, rigid bridges that would resist the stresses of winds—structures like Roebling’s Brooklyn Bridge reflect that concern.

Immediately following the Tacoma Narrows Bridge collapse, engineers took second looks at several recently built bridges. They added stiffening to the trusses of the Golden Gate Bridge. To the Bronx-Whitestone Bridge they attached stiffening cables; then in 1943, they added fourteen-foot-high trusses on either side of the deck to stiffen and weigh down the bridge in an effort to reduce oscillation.

In 2005, the trusses were removed and replaced by fairings, similar to those that Farquharson had suggested for the Tacoma Narrows Bridge in 1940.

A thorough inspection of the collapsed Tacoma Narrows Bridge in 1940 revealed that the roadway, the towers, and the main cables were all irreparably damaged. Everything down to the concrete piers was removed. The metal was sold for scrap.

In 1950 a new bridge design was approved after a model passed tests in Farquharson’s wind tunnel. The new bridge was built with its

towers standing on the original piers designed by Eldridge.

Currently all bridges built with federal funds must pass wind-tunnel analysis.

SOURCES:Hobbs, Richard S. Catastrophe to Triumph: Bridges of the Tacoma Narrows. Pullman, Washington: Washington State University Press, 2006.Scott Richard, In the Wake of Tacoma: Suspension Bridges and the Quest for Aerodynamic Stability. Reston, Virginia: American Society of Civil Engineers, 2001.

Charles Comiskey.Byron Bancroft “Ban” Johnson.

Professional Baseball Clubs Form “American League”

Having a level of play equivalent to the National League would help, but moving the Western League teams into larger cities with bigger fan bases would be essential if the Western League was to be transformed into a major league that would compete directly with the National League.

In the fall of 1899, Johnson learned that the National League planned to eliminate four franchises and operate in the 1900 season as an eight-team league. Up to that time, National League owners had been allowed to have an ownership stake in more than one club, but the National League was now acting to outlaw that practice, fearing that it was impeding competition—an owner with multiple teams would move players to the most profitable of the teams, enhancing that team’s drawing power but weakening the other teams. The result was that a few teams had most of the talent and were perennial pennant winners, while other teams stood no chance of winning. The National League was therefore eliminating its franchises in Baltimore, Cleveland, Louisville, and Washington, leaving teams in New York, Brooklyn, Philadelphia, Boston, Chicago, St. Louis, Pittsburgh, and Cincinnati.

Johnson decided to take advantage of the National League’s contraction. However, rather than refuse to renew the National Agreement for the next season, which would have effectively declared the Western League as a major league rival to the National League, he decided to reorganize the Western League, to prepare it to face what Johnson knew would be a battle against the National League.

He began by renaming the Western League on October 11, 1899, giving it a more universal-sounding name—the American League. He established a new team in Cleveland, a city that the National League had just left. He also set out to convince James Hart, the owner of the National League’s Chicago Colts, to waive his territorial rights to allow the American League to place a team in Chicago. Hart agreed, allegedly after a long drinking session with Johnson, on the condition that the National League team could draft two players a year from the American League team, and that the American League team would play on the city’s South Side, away from the Colts’s ballpark in the northern part of the city.

The 1900 season coincided with an economic boom across the United States and was a financial success for the American League. Johnson’s longtime friend Charles Comiskey, who had bought the Western League’s St. Paul team, moved his franchise to Chicago and renamed his team the White Stockings. This new Chicago team finished first in the American League, and drew 120,000 fans, half as many fans as the National League’s Chicago Colts, even though the White Stockings were a minor-league team.

Late in the year, it came time for Johnson to decide whether to sign

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the National Agreement for the next season or to take the plunge and operate the American League as an independent major league in the 1901 season. He decided to give the National League one last chance to agree to raising the draft fee. If they refused, he would not sign the National Agreement, and he would operate in open rivalry with the National League.

Johnson asked to address the National League owners’ annual meeting late in 1900. The National League owners agreed, but when Johnson showed up at their meeting, they asked him to wait in the hall outside while they discussed other matters. Johnson waited for several hours, until the owners finally adjourned and left their meeting without giving him the chance to speak to them.

Angered, Johnson decided to move forward with his new league. He found owners for franchises in several new cities, and on January 28, 1901, he announced to the press that the American League would play the 1901 season as a major league, and would not renew its membership in the National Agreement. He also announced that several franchises would relocate, others would be eliminated, and some new teams would be created.

The new American League would include teams in two cities that the National League had recently abandoned: Baltimore and Washington. The league would also invade four cities where National League teams existed: Boston, Cleveland, Detroit, and Philadelphia. The American League Chicago White Stockings were already positioned to compete directly for fan loyalty and fan dollars with the National League’s Chicago Colts. Only the Milwaukee franchise was not located in a city that either had a National League team, or, in the case of Baltimore and Washington, had recently had a National League team until that league’s recent contraction.

To prevent any National League club from simply buying out an American League rival, or even bribing an American League owner to make player moves or other transactions that might harm the league, Johnson required each owner to assign him fifty-one percent of all stock in their franchises, to be held in escrow by the league. As Johnson put it, during the upcoming conflict with the National League, each American League club would be “fully protected and in no danger of desertion by the other clubs in the event of a baseball crisis.” Essentially, each of the clubs would have to gain Johnson’s approval for any significant player transactions or management hiring.

Johnson urged his owners to try to sign players away from the National League by offering them higher salaries. Some National League owners fought back by arranging to pay their star players clandestine bonuses to get around their salary cap, but other owners believed that the American League would soon

collapse, so they refused to raise the salaries of their stars. As a result, during the spring of 1901, many National League players signed with American League teams, including stars such as Joe “Iron Man” McGinnity, John J. McGraw, and Cy Young. The National League Philadelphia Phillies lost star Napoleon Lajoie, whom they had paid twenty-six hundred dollars per season, to the American League Philadelphia Athletics, who paid him four thousand dollars.

At the start of the 1901 season, over half of the American League’s athletes—111 out of 182 players—had defected from the National League, at salaries averaging five hundred dollars more than they had been offered by the National League. Johnson was pleased. “If we had waited for the National League to do something for us,” he said, “we would have remained a minor league forever. The American League will be the principal organization of the country within a very short time. Mark my prediction.”

The Philadelphia Phillies went to court to try to prevent Lajoie playing for the American League. The court refused to issue an injunction preventing Lajoie from playing while the case was argued, but other legal suits in other cities followed. Johnson decided to fight them, knowing that even if they were decided against him, they would not be settled until the end of the 1901 season.

As play began in the 1901 season, Johnson found that the

main issue for him to deal with was maintaining the decorum of the American League, then numerically dominated by players from the more rough-and-tumble National League. Johnson had always presented his league’s brand of baseball to the public as a family-friendly sport, without the frequent brawls, physical abuse of officials, and gambling in the stands that were common in the National League and other leagues. The National League players attempted to play the sport in their accustomed style.

Johnson made public statements in support of his umpires, and when necessary he suspended players. His efforts paid off, and the American League maintained its “clean” reputation. The Chicago White Stockings finished first in the league in 1901, followed by the Boston Americans, for whom pitcher Cy Young posted a 33-10 record. Napoleon Lajoie led the league in most offensive categories, hitting .422, with 14 home runs and 125 runs batted in (as calculated by later statisticians). Some critics tried to argue that Lajoie’s success, well above his usual level in the National League, was proof of an inferior level of competition in the American League. Nevertheless, the general perception was that the American League had achieved a level of play comparable to the National League. By the end of the season, the American League had drawn 1.7 million fans to the National League’s 1.9 million.

The Polo Grounds, where the New York Giants played.

Highland Park, which was built to house New York’s first American League team. The team was at first called the “Highlanders,” but fans unofficially called them “the Americans” because of their league affilia-tion. Newspapers started calling them the “Yanks” or “Yankees” as early as 1904, and the team officially adopted the name “Yankees” in 1913.

After the season ended, Johnson moved his Milwaukee franchise to St. Louis. That meant that all but two American cities with populations above three hundred thousand had a team in at least one of the major leagues. The American League had teams in every National League market except Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, and New York City. Of those, New York was the largest and most important. Johnson wanted to put a team there, but he knew that Andrew Freedman, owner of the National League’s New York Giants, was politically connected to the Tammany Hall faction that controlled New York’s municipal government. Freedman had sworn to “run a street through” any site proposed for a stadium to house an American League team in the country’s largest city.

Two days before the start of the American League’s 1902 season, the Pennsylvania courts ruled in favor of the Philadelphia Phillies in the Napoleon Lajoie case, and Lajoie was barred from playing baseball with the Athletics. Johnson, reviewing the case, realized that the court’s jurisdiction only covered the state of Pennsylvania. He arranged a trade that sent Lajoie to Cleveland. Lajoie was thus able to continue as an American League athlete, playing in all of Cleveland’s games except those in Philadelphia.

Subsequent cases were found in favor of the American League, as courts cited the Sherman Anti-Trust Act, viewing the National League’s actions as equivalent to trying to enforce a monopoly, and the 14th

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Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, which abolished involuntary servitude. The National League contracts bound a player for life but gave the team the ability to fire him on ten days’ notice, and the courts interpreted this one-sided deal as unconstitutional.

Although the legal issues concerning the former National League players were being settled in his favor, Johnson still had difficulty getting those players to maintain proper discipline on the field. As the 1902 season got underway, Johnson found that the Baltimore Oriole’s star infielder John McGraw’s abuse of officials had become an intractable problem. On June 28, McGraw was ejected from a game against the Boston Americans after allegedly threatening an umpire. Despite the umpire’s command, he refused to go to the dugout. When McGraw continued to refuse to vacate the field, the umpire declared the game a Boston victory by forfeit. Johnson upheld the umpire’s decision and suspended McGraw indefinitely. “Rowdyism will not be tolerated,” Johnson proclaimed, “and the men who disregard the organization rules must suffer the consequences.”

On July 8, Johnson was stunned to learn that McGraw had resigned from Baltimore, and had agreed to manage Freedman’s New York Giants. McGraw told the press: “I am to get a contract calling for as much money as any ball player ever drew, and am to have practically unlimited funds at my command for securing players which will put New York well up in the National race instead of down at the bottom.” Johnson further found out that McGraw, owed seven thousand dollars by the Baltimore franchise, had negotiated a deal with the Baltimore owners in which the team sold him the contracts of several Baltimore players in exchange for the money the team owed him. McGraw had apparently planned this move with Andrew Freedman, who had immediately signed the former Baltimore players to contracts with the New York Giants. As a result, Baltimore was left with so few players on its roster that the American League was barely able to field a team there.

Johnson immediately took control of the Baltimore Orioles on behalf of the league. He stocked the Baltimore club with players contributed by other teams in the American League,

which allowed Baltimore to continue to play throughout the 1902 season, but it appeared that the long-term stability of the franchise was at risk.

Despite the fiasco in Baltimore, by the end of the 1902 season, the American League had outdrawn the National League by 2.2 million to 1.7 million tickets.

American League franchises in the same cities as National League franchises had outdrawn their crosstown rivals by margins of four-to-one in Philadelphia and three-to-one in Boston. But Johnson was worried because player salaries had doubled, and the American League, having taken control of the Baltimore team, was on the hook for expenses relating to the franchise; as the de facto owner, Johnson would have to find and pay players for next season.

Rather than fold the Baltimore franchise, Johnson decided to go on the offensive against the National League. As he had taken control of the Baltimore team away from its former owners, and could manage it as he pleased on behalf of the American League, he decided to try to move the Baltimore franchise to New York for the 1903 season.

Johnson contacted Freedman’s political rivals, who he believed had the power to block attempts by Freedman to re-zone any potential site for a new baseball field. He found new owners for the Baltimore team in former police chief Bill Devery and casino operator Frank Farrell of New York, who had the political clout to resist Freedman’s Tammany Hall allies.

They bought the Baltimore team from Johnson for eighteen thousand dollars at the end of the 1902 season, on the understanding that they would move it to New York for the next season. They bought a parcel of land only a few blocks from the Giants’ home field, and they successfully withstood Freedman’s attempts to block their projected stadium. The stadium land, located on one of the highest points on Manhattan Island, gave the team its name—the New York Highlanders. The American League had established a franchise in New York City.

With Johnson now controlling a team in New York, and thus gaining access to a market twice the size of the next largest city in the United States, the National League had to accept the American League as an equal. On December 11, 1902, as Johnson ate dinner in the dining room of the Criterion Hotel in New York, he was visited by a group of National League owners. “I knew in an instant the purpose of their visit,” he later wrote, “and after greetings all around they informed me [that] they composed a committee of the old league to wait on me and see if peace terms could be arranged.” Johnson agreed to end the conflict between the two major leagues, and to establish a framework for the National League and American League to operate together in the future.

A meeting in Cincinnati in January of 1903 produced the rough outlines of a deal between the two leagues, according to which each would

maintain its independence but would coordinate schedules. A three-man commission—the presidents of the two leagues and a mutually agreed third person—would oversee major league baseball. The agreement also established a new structure for minor leagues, and reformed the major leagues’ ability to draft players from the minors. Johnson had won, and the American League was established as a major league in full partnership with the National League.

Near the end of the 1903 season, the leading teams of the two leagues—the Boston Americans of the American League and the Pittsburgh Pirates of the National League—agreed to play a nine-game “world championship” series. Boston won five games to three. Although the National League refused to take part in a similar series in 1904, popular demand was such that the “world series” was brought back in 1905, and has been played between the champions of the two major leagues in every year since.

Ban Johnson continued to serve as president of the American League. He was the dominant commissioner of major league baseball until 1927, when he resigned. During Johnson’s tenure, baseball grew in importance, and became widely recognized as America’s “national pastime.” New and larger stadiums were built, and in 1922 the major leagues were given exemption from the Sherman Anti-Trust Act, which had originally allowed the American League to raid the National League for players. Johnson died in 1931 at the age of sixty-seven. In 1937 he was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame, which had been founded one year earlier.

SOURCES:Koppett, Leonard. Koppett’s Concise History of Major League Baseball. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1998.Morris, Peter. A Game of Inches: The Game Behind the Scenes. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, Publisher, 2006.Okrent, Daniel, and Harris Lewine, eds. The Ultimate Baseball Book. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1979.Rader, Benjamin G. Baseball: A History of America’s Game. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002.Sullivan, Dean A., ed. Early Innings: A Documentary History of Baseball, 1825-1908. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995.

Hot-tempered John J. McGraw, who was reluctant to conform to Johnson’s rules of polite conduct on the ballfield.

John J. McGraw discussing a call with umpires during the 1905 World Series, when he was manager of the New York Giants. Napoleon “Nap” Lajoie.