Infrastructure is the theme for two stamps I offer #stampoftheday for Sunday, May 24, 2020. The first is a 3-cent stamp issued in 1944 to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the day that Samuel F.B. Morse, who invented the telegraph, sat in the Supreme Court chamber of the Capitol and tapped out the message to a colleague at the Mount Clare railroad station in Baltimore.

Morse, who had gotten $30,000 in funding from Congress to build the line, typed out Morse code for “What hath God wrought!.” The phrase is from the Bible’s Book of Numbers (also known by its Hebrew name, Bemidbar, which means “Wilderness.” In fact last week’s Torah portion, which is always read just before Shavuot, is the first portion from the book.

Using the phrase supposedly was by Annie Ellsworth, whose husband Henry Leavitt Ellsworth, a friend and supporter of Morse’s who was the first commissioner of the U.S. Patent Office. (The dozen or so astute followers of #stampoftheday will realize this is the second time patents have been mentioned in the the last three postings).

Oddly, the copy of this stamp in my father’s collection is on a first-day envelope from later in 1944, for a new parcel post stamp. Perhaps, they had to put a 3-cent stamp on that cover so it could be mailed collectors.

Today’s other stamp is a 20-cent stamp from 1983 marking the 100th anniversary of the opening of the Brooklyn Bridge. When that iconic structure opened on May 24, 1883 it was the longest suspension bridge in the world and was the world’s first completed steel-wire suspension bridge.

Thousands of people came to bridge’s opening. President Chester A. Arthur and New York Mayor Franklin Edson crossed from Manhattan to then independent city of Brooklyn, where they met Brooklyn Mayor Seth Low. President Arthur and Mayor Edson were followed Emily Warren Roebling, wife of the bridge’s chief engineer, who, reportedly, carried a rooster for good luck. She was followed by 1,800 vehicles and, over the course of the day, more than 150,000 people.

Why was Emily there but not her husband or her father-in-law, who had conceived of the bridge and drew up its initial designs? Well, her role in in the bridge is one of most amazing of the many extraordinary stories associated with the bridge’s construction. In 1869, her father-in-law, John A. Roebling, died of tetanus contracted after his foot was crushed in an accident at the docks where he was doing surveying for the bridge. Washington Roebling (his son and her husband) became the bridge’s chief engineer. But in 1872, while helping fight a fire in one of the two large pneumatic caissons that became the foundations for the bridge’s two towers, John Roebling got quite ill, probably with decompression sickness (“the bends”). The incident (and possibly side effects from the treatments he received) left him bedridden and unable to leave the house even to visit the worksite of the far-from-completed bridge.

With her husband incapacitated, Emily Warren Roebling stepped in. Emily, who in addition to housekeeping and needlework, had studied history, astronomy, French and algebra when she was younger, began working as John’s secretary, taking copious notes, apparently from comments he made as he (and she) used a telescope in his bedroom to watch the construction of the bridge.

Over the next 11 years, her roles grew. According to an obituary published in the New York Times in 2018 (115 years after she died), she “went back and forth to the construction site. She negotiated the supply materials, oversaw the contracts, and acted as liaison to the board of trustees. Eventually, she became a kind of surrogate chief engineer…[who used her]…superb diplomatic skills to manage competing parties – including the mayor of Brooklyn, who tried to have her incapacitated husband ousted as the project’s official chief engineer.

At the completion of the project, Congressman Abram Hewitt, the future Mayor of New York, called the Brooklyn Bridge “…an everlasting monument to the sacrificing devotion of a woman and of her capacity for that higher education from which she has been too long disbarred.”

And a plaque dedicated to Emily Warren Roebling, her husband Washington and his father John Roebling, stands on the crossing to this day and says, in part, “Back of every great work we can find the self-sacrificing devotion of a woman.” For her part, Emily Roebling, wrote (in an 1898 letter to her son): “I have more brains, common sense and know-how generally than have any two engineers, civil or uncivil, and but for me the Brooklyn Bridge would never have had the name Roebling in any way connected with it!”

The stamp marking the bridge’s 100th anniversary was one of the many of the 4-stamp plate blocks and larger sheets that my father acquired from the late 1960s until the late 1990s. He never organized or carefully mounted these stamps. I’ve been using some on cards and letters to friends and colleagues and I’ve given some away to friends and colleagues with an association to the places or things commemorated in those stamps (e.g. by giving stamps marking Iowa’s joining the union to colleagues from Iowa.) They seem to enjoy getting them and are always amazed that for the most part, stamps from the last several decades basically are worth their face values, sometimes less. But, as I’ve been learning in this project, they can be a lot of fun (and also a major-league time-sink)

Be healthy and stay well!