Brooklyn Bridge caisson workers - decompression sickness

Historical origin of medical knowledge about the bends. Caisson workers digging in compressed air at the river floor, ascending without decompression protocols, developing cramps. Dated to 1880s.

To build the Brooklyn Bridge, which was a major engineering feat at the time, they basically floated a structure in the river — is the Hudson on that side, or is that the East River? Whichever river. It was a diving-bell type of structure that they put down on the river floor. They had some hatches, people would go down, they'd pump the water out, they'd have compressed air coming in, and people would dig down. This very heavy caisson would slowly sink into the mud. These things went down five, six hundred feet or so — I don't remember exactly. Just a bunch of men in there with shovels, with little miners' helmets and air blowing in, a pretty miserable environment. But they noticed, as they were getting deeper, that some of them were starting to get cramps as they came up. That's when people learned about the bends. They were breathing regular old air, and they were getting deep enough to get the bends. It was back in the 1880s.

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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.