Brooklyn Bridge caisson workers - decompression sickness

Used as the headline example of a large-scale engineering marvel where the engineering challenge (compressed-air foundation) carried a hidden physiological cost (the bends). Lead engineer ill for 30 years.

The Brooklyn Bridge is actually very interesting — if someone were looking for a project, the building of the Brooklyn Bridge would be a good one. The foundation: they started out with essentially putting some stone on the floor of the river, and then they had little locks where people could go down, they ran compressed air, so the people would be working in digging out and taking the dirt out, and the caisson, which was the foundation, would just sink further and further into the mud as they dug out underneath it. But as it got deeper and deeper, they had to go up in pressure with the compressed air, until they actually got to pressures where, when the workers came back up — this is in the 1880s — they would get the bends.