Free The Great Bridge by David McCullough

time Roebling was ready with a long list of questions carefully thought out in advance. If this was to be his first real chance to converse with “the other side,” he would come to it as he had tried to come to every turning point in life, thoroughly prepared.
    Having determined at the start of the séance that the spirit was indeed that of his wife, Roebling asked for Willie and Mary, their two dead children, for his own mother and father, and for Frederick Overman, a renowned German metallurgist from Philadelphia who appears to have been the one real friend he had ever had time for since leaving Saxonburg. Overman, dead for fifteen years by this time, once told Roebling that life was a result of movement and death only a change of movement and it had made a lasting impression on the bridgebuilder.
    Then Roebling started down his prepared list.
    “Do you remember, my dearest, the conversations I have had with you about the Spirit Land and Spheres? You remember the opinions and view taught by Andrew Davis on the subject?” Having been convinced he could talk again to his beloved wife after three years, his whole line of questioning was designed strictly to verify his own set of beliefs. Was Davis correct on the whole, he wanted to know. Yes. In detail? Yes. And so it went, through the rest of that session and in the eleven others that were to follow. On the night of January 25, 1868, for instance, the conversation had run this way:
    “After your spiritual birth, did you feel like a new being, young, energetic and full of life?”
    “Yes.”
    “Did you find that all disease had left you, and that your new spiritual body was free from pains, rejoicing in youth and vigor?”
    No answer.
    “Do you attend public lectures?”
    “Yes.”
    “Who is your favorite lecturer? Will you spell out his name?”
    “C-H-A-N-N-I-N-G.”
    “Are you taught religion?”
    “No.”
    “Have you got a Bible there?”
    “No.”
    “You are taught without books?”
    “Yes.”
    “Is it taught by your teachers that inspired truth and the truth of nature cannot be at variance?”
    “Yes.”
    “The Christian Bible, the Jewish Scriptures, the Turkish Koran, and all the other books, which lay claim to divine origin and divine inspiration, are all human compositions, therefore liable to error. Is this view correct?”
    “Yes.”
    “Every man has a spark of divine principle within himself, which alone can save him and elevate him, is this so?”
    “Yes.”
    He was getting all the answers he wanted. On the night of March 22, he had a total of sixty-one questions prepared for her. Their discourse should always be “serious,” he said at the start; he should not waste time on trivial talk. Yes, she answered. It was truth he should be in search of, he said. Yes, she answered again.
    Soon she was bringing a number of other spirits along with her, at his request. On the night of June 14, Willie and Mary, Grandmother Herting, Overman, Roebling’s brother Karl, another brother, and three others besides Mrs. Roebling were present, making ten in all. Still Roebling took no time for personal exchanges with any of them, the line of questioning continued exactly as before. But the atmosphere in the dark room remained highly charged. At one point young Edmund exclaimed that he could see Grandmother Herting’s face and that she was reaching out to touch him. Whether or not the new flesh-and-blood Mrs. Roebling was invited to sit in on any of these sessions is not known.
    Had it not been for the bridge, such gatherings with the dead might have gotten to everyone in the household. But by this time the bridge had become the overriding passion of Roebling’s life. It was the summer of 1867, the summer before the séances began, that he had drawn up his plans. In just three months, working at a fever pitch, he had produced the drawings, location plans, preliminary surveys, taken soundings, worked out his cost estimates, and written his proposal, nearly