American Civil Engineering History: The Pioneering Years

John Smeaton was not a product of his time. He qualifies as a true, quiet giant in history, who was able to alter the times in which he lived, thus altering all the times that followed. This genuine, proverbial, historic hero is underrated, unheralded, and unsung. Adam Smith published his Wealth of Nations also in 1776, but all that socioeconomic advocacy would have been at least another century in materializing were it not for John Smeaton's efforts that same year at delineating its enabling profession, Civil Engineering.

This paper will not examine, in any depth, the personal and family background of Benjamin Wright, for either his childhood or his adult life. These periods are viewed briefly to provide context in which to frame his overall character. The reader is referred to the specific works of Charles Stuart and Neal FitzSimons, listed following the text of this paper, for further detail as to both Wright's genealogy and his immediate family. It is the intent of this paper to examine the professional career of Benjamin Wright. In so doing, the significant projects from the complete body of his work will be discussed and the impact he had upon American Civil Engineering.

The story of the founding of the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) is widely known. Still it bears retelling on the occasion of the sesquicentennial of the Society, for it is a story of emulation, of slow and difficult beginnings, of halting early progress, of overcoming adversity, of learning from failures, and, ultimately, of monumental achievement. In short, the story of the founding of the ASCE mirrors the story of a great engineering project.

In 1741, the Royal Military Academy was established at Woolwich, England for officer training for artillery and public works. Louis XV appointed Louis Perronet as chief engineer of bridges and roads in France, and he established a three- year program at the Ecole des Ponts et Chaussees, the first formal school of civil engineering. In 1802, the U.S. Congress established the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, NY, with a four year program on bridges, roads, canals and fortifications developed in 1817 by Claude Crozet. In 1835, Rensselaer School/University awarded the first U.S. civil engineering degrees to four students. The history of other early civil engineering education development in the U.S., Canada, and Mexico is summarized in an expanded Civil Engineering History Module, ending with the 1893 Chicago World Columbian Exposition (and Congress on Engineering Education) by Ira O. Baker, University of Illinois civil engineering faculty member. The 1893 Education Congress presentations led to the founding of the American Society for Engineering Education.

Structural engineering did not move from a rule of thumb/experience-based discipline until early engineers began to develop functional relationships between some of the observed behavior of columns, beams, tension members and trusses. Men such as Archimedes, Hero of Alexandria and Vitruvius were the earliest to put into writing some of their observations around the time of Christ. They were giants, but for almost 15 centuries little progress was made in quantifying the relationships needed. DaVinci and Galileo in the late 15^th century and early to mid 17^th century paved the way for the development of modern Analytical Modeling. This paper primarily traces the development of Analytical Modeling in the period of the 18^th and early to mid 19^th century.

This paper brings out a historical perspective of testing techniques as they were evolved. It is not implied that there were no instruments used prior to 1852, when ASCE was born; however, the emphasis is placed on the developed from that point on mainly in the United States in various aspects of testing. Testing was conducted for full scale if there was any doubt of its service life, since the structures were designed for such loads. In some cases, testing was resorted to as a means to prove the point in the court of law about the structure. This paper presents a view of the individuals who have seen development of testing and related tools both in the laboratory and in the field for the purpose of investigations. It is meant to be educational paper for the inquisitive and curious individual who would be interested in such history. List of references and in some cases websites in the end, make this paper further useful with today's technology. Some lessons learnt from the past history conclude the paper.

The American Society of Civil Engineers was organized in 1852. But American civil engineering began much earlier. To understand the beginning of American civil engineering, it is useful to look at America when civil engineering and American civil engineers did not exist but were coming into existence. The history of the Potomac Company, established in 1785, provides us with a vehicle for examining America without civil engineers and civil engineering. As the company's first president, it was George Washington who first tried to hire American civil engineers to undertake the planning, design and construction of the Potomac Canal — but there were none. England and France had engineers but the company was not willing to pay foreign engineers to come to America. The company did occasionally use English engineers already in America as consultants. It was Washington and his Board of Directors who made the engineering decisions for the canal. The principle engineering decision was the decision to use sluice navigation as a means of improving the Potomac River navigation. In engineering terms, as shown later by early American engineers Thomas Moore and Isaac Briggs, this decision was not only wrong but counter-productive—sluice navigation made the river more dangerous and difficult to navigate. By 1823 the Potomac Canal was widely viewed as a major failure, not only financially (which it was) but also from an engineering perspective. The failure of the Potomac Company was directly related to the lack of engineering expertise used in its planning, design and construction. It was decided that the Potomac Company had to be abandoned and replaced by a new stillwater canal, the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal. The new canal was to be planned and designed by an army of civil engineers from the Erie Canal and elsewhere, under the direction of Benjamin Wright, the father of American civil engineering. These men employed totally different methods than were used on the Potomac Canal. Detailed plans were prepared. Levels and other precise survey instruments were used. Work was broken into individual contracts monitored by a large corps of engineers. Between the beginning of the Potomac Canal (1785) and its demise (1828), civil engineering had come to America and Americans had become civil engineers.

The history and prosperity of the United States has been greatly impacted by the transportation systems that have evolved over time. Early public leaders recognized the importance of internal improvements and how the development of an integrated national transportation network must necessarily include navigable waterways and land routes connecting the eastern seaboard with the "western waters." It was within the framework of a national "internal improvements" movement that the federal government built the nation's first intestate highway, a formidable undertaking in the context of its time. The project represents the young nation's earliest attempt to minimize sectional differences through internal improvements and cement a tangible bond between transportation systems and settlements on opposite sides of the Appalachian Mountains. Alternately referred to as the National Road, Cumberland Road, Great Western Road, Uncle Sam's Road, or simply The Road, it was the most ambitious—and costly—public works project of its day. Occupying a unique place in our nation's transportation heritage, no other route has played a larger role in the growth and development of the United States than this landmark highway.

The Baltimore and Ohio Railroad has long been regarded as the first "modern" railroad in America and an important work of civil engineering, but its true significance has been clouded by 150 years of myth, assertion, and unreliable history. A careful review of the evidence reaffirms the engineering significance of the B&O and its stature as one of America's most complex and innovative antebellum projects. The B&O Railroad demonstrates the profound effect civil engineering has had on our landscape, culture, and development. Assessing the mythology surrounding the company offers a model for how works of civil engineering acquire mythic or iconic status.

Natural cement was indeed a magic powder during most of the 19^th century when it was used extensively for a myriad of public works and buildings but it had an especially significant synergistic relationship with the construction of canals. The network of canals provided a relatively inexpensive means of shipping cement to market; on the other hand hydraulic cements were essential for the construction of locks, dams, and other canal structures. The synergistic relationship is explored in terms of the Erie, Lehigh, Delaware and Hudson, Chesapeake and Ohio canals and the navigation on the Ohio River.

In 1894 Fritz Von Emperger presented a paper on concrete-iron bridges at the International Engineering Congress. Von Emperger showed examples of European reinforced concrete arch bridges and extolled the qualities of German cement. He described tests that showed the superior performance of the Melan reinforcing system, which was patented in the U.S. in 1893. Late in 1894, Von Emperger built the first Melan arch in the U.S. at Rock Rapids, Iowa. Although a few reinforced concrete arch bridges had been built in the U.S. prior to 1894, Von Emperger's efforts in promoting the Melan system as a "permanent", cost-effective alternative to products of bridge companies initiated a sustained, rapid development of technologies related to reinforced concrete arch bridges. Reinforced concrete systems were enthusiastically adopted and entrepreneurial designers such as Edwin Thacher and Daniel Luten developed and patented their own proprietary systems. Engineering literature of the period contains revealing opinions on the nature of composite action, advantages and disadvantages of various arch forms, "proper" shapes for arch axes and suitable design methods. The evolution of reinforcing systems is followed and pioneering examples of reinforced concrete arch bridges are given.

In his 1974 work, From Know-How to Nowhere: The Development of American Technology, Professor Elting E. Morrison of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology cited the 1857 development of the "three-high rail mill" by John Fritz of the Cambria Iron Company in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, as a seminal event in the development of American Technology and as an illustration of the effectiveness of the trial and error methods of early American engineers. Other American technological historians have made similar statements concerning the significance of the three-high rail mill. Invariably these accounts have been predicated on the examination of a limited number of available sources, chief of which is the Autobiography of John Fritz. Historians have long considered this 1911 work to be the most thorough and accurate account of the creation of the three-high rail mill, and since it is also widely available, his autobiography has been utilized by modern scholars.

In June of 1975 the American Society of Civil Engineers honored the Philadelphia Water System as a "National Historic Civil Engineering Landmark...a tribute to its great early engineering years". I take particular pleasure, therefore, in being able to share the history of the Philadelphia Water Department with the Society during its Sesquicentennial Celebration. I will focus on the early years of water supply in Philadelphia, but will bring you up to the present discussing both the engineering achievements and environmental issues which have shaped the Department's development.

New York City became the nation's largest city at the end of the 18^th century. Its population exploded after the completion of the Erie Canal in 1825 opened its protected port to midwestern markets. But without a dependable, adequate water supply system, the city could not grow. That water supply system was due to the engineering genius of John Bloomfield Jervis (1795–1885). Jervis, the leading American civil engineer of the antebellum period, built or managed three canals, seven railroads and two major urban water supply systems. In addition to the original Croton Water Supply System, Jervis engineered other projects important to the city, including the Delaware and Hudson Canal and the Hudson River Railroad. His career spanned more than half a century. The Croton Water Supply System (1842) was the most outstanding municipal water supply system in the United States at the time and was the prototype for later projects throughout the world.

Washington Aqueduct is the name given by Montgomery C. Meigs in November 1853 to the water supply for the nation's capital. Meigs was the principal individual responsible for the development of this significant engineering achievement. This paper will describe how Meigs and his team of engineers designed and built the original elements of the water system that would serve Washington, DC from 1860 to 1900 with little modification. It will also examine the farsightedness of the design and how it has been successfully and economically adapted to meet the ever-increasing need to provide abundant water to the national capital area. As we approach the 150^th anniversary of the founding of the Washington Aqueduct in 2003, with many of the original structures still in use, the current challenge for engineers assigned to the Washington Aqueduct is to continue to accommodate the future of water treatment into these historical elements.

When the young Yale history-professor Hiram Bingham came upon Machu Picchu in 1911, he was impressed with the quality of engineering that had gone into the site some four centuries before by early Americans. Bingham went back to Machu Picchu in 1912 as director of a Yale/National Geographic Society expedition to clear and document the ruins. Bingham's description of his explorations filled the entire April 1913 issue of National Geographic Magazine and brought Machu Picchu to the world's attention; Bingham opined that, "The Inca were good engineers." He could also have stated that the Inca civil engineers were good road builders because by the time Conquistador Pizarro arrived, the Inca were operating and maintaining some 14,000 miles of road system that stretched from Ecuador to Chile and from the Pacific Ocean to high Andean settlements after crossing mountain passes with 18,000-foot elevations. Bingham described the main Inca Trail leading into Machu Picchu. It was a masterpiece of prehistoric Inca road building.

The Chesapeake and Ohio Canal was constructed between Washington, D.C. and Cumberland, Maryland from 1828 until 1850. This construction was an early marker of the beginning of American civil engineering. The Chief Engineer of the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal was Benjamin Wright, the Father of American Civil Engineering. The legislative charter for the new canal company stipulated that 100 miles of the canal had to be constructed in the first five years. There were two obstacles for the company to meet this mandate: the legal blockade put in its way by the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad and the construction of the Monocacy Aqueduct, one of the largest bridges built in the United States at that time. Wright couldn't do anything about the legal battles of the company but he could about the Monocacy Aqueduct. He designed the Monocacy Aqueduct in the autumn of 1828, only a few months after he started working for the company. Construction began the next year. Wright visited the construction site in July 1830. What he found was that the first three piers had been constructed of inferior stone. This inferior stone had not been detected by Wright's resident engineer, Herman Bőye, as Bőye was on his deathbed in Georgetown. Nor had it been detected by the Assistant Engineer, Charles Ellet. Ellet would go on to a distinguished engineering career but in 1830 was only nineteen years old and inexperienced. The bad stone should have been detected by Wright's supervisor of masonry, Robert Leckie, but wasn't. Leckie would resign a short time after. Wright ordered the piers torn down and rebuilt. Two of the five years to build the Monocacy Aqueduct had thus been lost. More problems hindered construction. The first two contractors, Hovey and Osborne, walked away from the project. Hydraulic cement was in desperate short supply and efforts to develop alternative sources proved inadequate. These and other problems were overcome by the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal and the Monocacy Aqueduct was opened in the required five years. The canal company thus met the requirements of their legislative charter. On seeing the aqueduct, Robert McFarland, the Superintendent of Masonry, wrote, "...in point of beauty and perfection of workmanship, (it) will ... compare with any work of the kind either in this Country or in Europe..."

The Capitol has undergone numerous alterations, expansions, additions and renovations since the laying of the cornerstone by George Washington in 1793. Congress decided that the Capitol should be a working building rather than a museum or a monument fixed in time. As such, the Capitol has been almost continually changed and modified over time to meet the changing needs of the Congress and the People. Advances in technology have also caused and allowed modifications to the building.

Many factors have influenced development of the Monumental Core in Washington, DC. Soil and groundwater conditions have influenced the foundations, and in one case the location, of the monuments and memorials. Foundation construction techniques have progressed with advances in the state of the art. The history and development of the Mall have also played an important role.

Consideration of selected remarks of leading British engineers D. Stevenson and T. Telford on this theme has enabled the essential contribution of timber construction to America's early public works infrastructure to be better understood. As an example, L. Wernwag's 1810 Neshaminy River timber and iron truss bridge, of which I.K. Brunel possessed a lithograph, is discussed as an innovative achievement in bridge development.

Civil Engineering is an International Profession. It is a collaborative profession, we seldom keep secrets from each other and we learn from the experiences of our colleagues around the world. In the 150 years since the establishment of the American Society of Civil Engineers, the profession has benefited from the international interchange of technology and with the common border between the United States and Canada and the generally similar development needs, the interchange of technological information and of engineers between the two countries has been particularly significant. The result is that the history of Civil Engineering in both countries has many commonalities in the development of technology and in the sharing of experience and knowledge between many of the best-known Civil Engineers in the history of both countries. A study of the careers of several of these engineers provides a picture of how information and technology is transferred between countries. Sometimes, however, it has been the competing national interests of each country that has spurred the initiation of a particular project and forced a learning experience that has been of benefit in developing technological expertise.

Prior to statehood in 1959, Alaska was a territory. Comprising a 656,000-square-mile area characterized by vast and remote wilderness with major climatic and terrain challenges, civil engineers and civil engineering have played a major role in Alaska's development. To commemorate the Alaska Section's 50th anniversary in 2001 and the Society's 150th anniversary in 2002, the Alaska Section of ASCE decided, as a volunteer effort, to assemble a PowerPoint presentation portraying highlights of the state's civil engineering history over the past 100 years or more. A major purpose of the project was to inform and encourage young people contemplating an engineering career and, to date, the presentation has been well received in a number of schools in the state. For convenience, the presentation is subdivided into Mining, Rail, Military, Highways, Dams, Oil & Gas, Ports & Harbors, Aviation, and Public Health and Sanitation. It also includes segments on the 1964 Earthquake, Alaska's two. Outstanding Civil Engineering Achievement (OCEA) award-winning projects, and several proposed projects that were either abandoned or have not yet been constructed. Assembled from a variety of sources including members' project files, many of the photos have never before been published. The following presents highlights of the presentation including several of Alaska's "engineering heroes" down through the years. A bibliography at the end provides additional recommended reading.