For bridges like those that connect New York and Brooklyn, the towers of which rest on bed-rock below the river’s bottom, caissons are sunk and the massive masonry is built upon them.  If you take a glass and sink it in water, bottom up, carefully, so that the air will not escape, it will be noticed that the water enters the glass but a little way:  the air prevents the water from filling the glass.  The caisson works on the same principle, except that the air in the great boxlike chamber is highly compressed by powerful pumps and keeps the water and river ooze out altogether.

The caissons of the third bridge across the East River were as big as a good-sized house—­about one hundred feet long and eighty feet wide.  It took five large tugs more than two days to get one of them in its proper place.  Anchored in its exact position, it was slowly sunk by building the masonry of the tower upon it, and when the lower edges of the great box rested on the bottom of the river men were sent down through an air-lock which worked a good deal like the lock of a canal.  The men, two or three at a time, entered a small round chamber built of steel which was fitted with two air-tight doors at the top and bottom; when they were inside the air-lock, the upper door was closed and clamped tight, just as the gates leading from the lower level of a canal are closed after the boat is in the lock; then very gradually the air in the compartment is compressed by an air-compressor until the pressure in the air-lock is the same as that in the caisson chamber, when the lower door opened and allowed the men to enter the great dim room.  Imagine a room eighty by one hundred feet, low and criss-crossed by massive timber braces, resting on the black, slimy mud of the river bottom; electric lights shine dimly, showing the half-naked workmen toiling with tremendous energy by reason of the extra quantity of oxygen in the compressed air.  The workmen dug the earth and mud from under the iron-shod edges of the caisson, and the weight of the masonry being continually added to above sunk the great box lower and lower.  From time to time the earth was mixed with water and sucked to the surface by a great pump.  With hundreds of tons of masonry above, and the watery mud of the river on all sides far below the keels of the vessels that passed to and fro all about, the men worked under a pressure that was two or three times as great as the fifteen pounds to the square inch that every one is accustomed to above ground.  If the pressure relaxed for a moment the lives of the men would be snuffed out instantly—­drowned by the inrushing waters; if the excavation was not even all around, the balance of the top-heavy structure would be lost, the men killed, and the work destroyed entirely.  But so carefully is this sort of work done that such an accident rarely occurs, and the caissons are sunk till they rest on bed-rock or permanent, solid ground, far below the scouring effect of currents and tides.  Then the air-chamber is filled with concrete and left to support the great towers that pierce the sky above the waters.