JemmyDying from The Bends on a bridge construction job is some terrible luck
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Meme Curator
PugJesushttps://media.piefed.social/posts/Y7/jH/Y7jHydxDP372zpL.webp
The idea of job safety was unknown in those days. .
Housemaids were routinely scalded by tubs of hot water that had to be carried up stairs for bathing purposes. Homeowners would leave the fire burning until just before the chimney sweep arrived. “The Real McCoy” referred to a train coupling system that didn’t cost people fingers.
This is why unions came about.
edit =
https://www.grunge.com/887424/the-historical-origin-of-the-phrase-the-real-mccoy/
An oiling system. My bad.
Elijah McCoy was known for inventing automatic lubrication in steam engines. Afaik he had nothing to do with coupling systems.
And the phrase probably wasn’t about him originally.
Edited.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brooklyn_Bridge#Caissons_2
Fun fact: the leading engineer also became decompression disease and was almost entirely unable to work. Like you said, the disease was unknown, so not only the workers catched it, although they obviously were affected the most. The project was actually finished by his wife, who unofficially took over as chief engineer and stemmed most of the work. Of course a women as chief engineer was unthinkable for her 19th century contemporaries, so it was just known that „she helped her husband.“
Emily Warren Roebling
It is an extraordinary story. But in fairness reading about this, her husband hadn’t died, he was paralysed, likely due to decompression sickness affecting his spine. So it sounds like it was a joint success between husband and wife. The determination of the couple to finish the bridge together is incredible.
“We made an air-filled box at triple pressure under a river, people get wrecked when they leave, what a mystery!”
Seriously how the fuck did they not manage to figure this out for so long?
Everything is obvious in hindsight. “The room with extra air? Why would they be an issue?”
I get that hindsight is a bitch, but the cause and effect should have been painfully clear.
It wasn’t a matter of descending/ascending 24 meters, as the pressure was uniform, and people who stayed topside also experienced the bends.
The pain was instant; the moment the door was cracked and the pressure dropped, it was like opening a can of soda. (Its worth noting that carbonated water was all over America at this stage).
Sure you might not understand the biological reason for why this occurred but when you have a compressed environment rapidly becoming uncompressed and people double over in pain instantly, you might think “hey, maybe this two things are correlated”.