Review of An elementary course of civil engineering (Wheeler, 1877), Chapters 11 and 12

By Michael Bennett, P.E., M.ASCE (Gannett Fleming TranSystems, Audubon, PA)

 

The 1870s were a boom time for infrastructure construction in the United States. As the nation turned 100, technical advances in civil engineering and materials science mixed with a healthy helping of American optimism meant that projects long dismissed as pipe dreams were finally getting underway. In New York, Manhattanites and Brooklynites watched in amazement from their then-separate cities as construction slowly but steadily progressed on the East River (now Brooklyn) Bridge. Residents of St. Louis were similarly awestruck as crews there built the St. Louis (now Eads) Bridge across the mighty Mississippi. Americans from coast to coast could track the construction progress of both behemoths in real time through general and engineering publications made readily available by railroad postal service, and even quicker updates could come over the telegraph wires running alongside tracks. (The wires also started crackling with other signals once Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone in 1876.)

Major, later Colonel, Junius Wheeler followed both projects with acute interest, as he taught civil and military engineering at the US Military Academy in the 1870s. He had joined the Army during the Mexican War and had won several decorations before attending West Point and graduating in 1855. When the Civil War erupted, Wheeler, a North Carolinian, had stayed loyal to the Union and had once more served with distinction. After the war, he became a professor at his alma mater and authored several textbooks, including 1877’s An elementary course of civil engineering. Wheeler wrote the 24-chapter work for West Point cadets, but civil engineering professors at civilian universities soon began using it as well. Wheeler devoted Chapter 11 of his text to foundations built on land and Chapter 12 to those constructed in or under water, and he prominently discussed the Brooklyn and Eads Bridges (Parramore 1996, Wheeler 1877).

 

 

The seeds of future geotechnical innovations are sown throughout Wheeler’s chapters on foundations. He instructed his cadets to investigate sites during design using test pits, along with auger borings for more critical structures, and recommended performing static load tests on bedrock if it were encountered. For construction, Wheeler suggested dealing with saturated soils using underdrains – anticipating the principle of effective stress by nearly half a century – and noted that engineers could stabilize foundation excavations in soft soils by compacting sand into them. Wheeler, in a line that would fit neatly into any modern geotechnical report, advised that the sand be “spread in layers of about nine inches in thickness [with] each layer well rammed before the next is spread.” He also observed that engineers could handle soft soils during construction using mat foundations, long piles driven to firm strata, or short piles driven for densifying the soft layer (Wheeler 1877). 

 

 

Still, plenty has changed in civil engineering since Rutherford Hayes was president, and Wheeler’s book reflected some then-common fallacies in the field. For instance, he proposed a three-group soil classification system:

 

1. First-class soils that were firm and uninfluenced by groundwater, such as rock and gravels;

2. Second-class soils that were firm but affected by groundwater, such as sands and clays;

3. Third-class soils that were soft, such as peats.

 

While the system never caught on, its flaws – most notably lumping sands and clays into the same grouping – are apparent. Similarly, Wheeler’s suggestion that wooden piles could be made from any timber available near a site failed to account for some woods being stronger or less rot-prone than others. Nor was he correct that it was “not probable” that the cast- and wrought-iron piles coming into vogue by 1877 would “ever supersede those made of wood.” Yet even many of Wheeler’s errors represented steps in the right direction. His soil classification system, imperfect though it was, represented an earnest attempt at solving a tough problem. Similarly, Wheeler recommended an early dynamic formula for estimating pile capacity but added the caveat – ignored by most Gilded Age civil engineers – that “the manner of driving piles, and the extent to which they may be forced into the subsoil, will depend on local circumstances.” The wave equation analysis of piles (WEAP) would only appear in 1960, but Wheeler clearly recognized the inaccuracies of the “one size fits all” approach inherent in dynamic formulas (Wheeler 1877). (See Hool and Kinne (1923), Sec. 3, Pt. B.)

 

Wheeler’s technical acumen shone through most clearly in his detailed sections on cofferdams and pneumatic caissons. By the late 1870s, cofferdams were increasingly being built of sheet piles, as their modern counterparts almost always are. However, most were still constructed of two rows of timber piles connected using cross-bracing and sheet piles. The interior spaces formed by these piles, cross-braces, and sheet piles resembled coffers, the small boxes then often used to store valuables (hence the phrase “filling one’s coffers”). The structure was thus called a “coffer-dam,” as Wheeler spelled it, and the hyphen was eventually dropped. Per Wheeler, the coffers were typically filled with a material known as “puddling,” a mixture of clay with sand or gravel (Wheeler 1877).

 

 

Wheeler went into more detail on pneumatic caissons than on any other foundation engineering topic. The term caisson comes from the French word for “box” or “chest,” as Wheeler likely knew; the US Army already used the term for its artillery ammunition lockers (as in “those caissons go rolling along”). The construction of a pneumatic caisson in a waterway begins with floating a large timber or iron structure out to the desired construction site of, for instance, a bridge pier. The structure is partitioned vertically in two; its lower half is the working chamber, while its upper half is the caisson proper. When the pneumatic caisson is in position, the working chamber is carefully filled with water and masonry is placed atop the caisson. The structure thus gradually sinks to the bottom of the waterway; guide piles or cofferdams may be installed to keep it sinking in the correct location (LOC 2025 A, Wheeler 1877).

 

Once the pneumatic caisson rests securely upon the bottom of the waterway, water is pumped from the working chamber and replaced with compressed air. Workers then enter the chamber through pressure-regulating airlocks and access shafts in the caisson, remove the chamber floor, and excavate material from beneath the structure. The material may be removed via extraction shafts in the caisson or may be stockpiled in the working chamber. Additional tubes run through the caisson to supply compressed air and communications channels to the chamber. The compressed air both maintains a healthy atmosphere in the chamber and regulates the rate at which the caisson descends, and its exhaust vents can also be used to suction excavated material out of the chamber. Finally, the pneumatic caisson reaches its completed depth when the chamber is excavated to a suitable stratum. The compressed air is then pumped out and the chamber is backfilled with concrete, stockpiled material, or a combination thereof (Jackson 2001, McCullough 1972, Wheeler 1877).

 

 

Wheeler’s book is 472 pages long, which left him little space to cover the entirety of civil engineering, let alone the Brooklyn and Eads Bridges. Thus, his spending several pages on each project, albeit at a general level, indicates that he took a keen interest in them. One particularly intriguing note Wheeler shared on the Eads Bridge was that “the health of the workmen was greatly affected by the high degree of compression of the air in which they had to work … and several lost their lives in consequence.” He quickly continued from this jarring observation to his next point, but it naturally rouses a reader’s curiosity about the rest of the story regarding the geotechnical construction of the bridges’ pneumatic caissons. Fortunately, other sources flesh out Wheeler’s cursory accounts of how they were built (Wheeler 1877).

 

By the mid-1800s, St. Louis was a frontier town no longer. As the US had steadily pushed westward, the Mound City had become a midwestern hub of people, commerce, and industry. However, St. Louis – unlike its emerging rival, Chicago – still lacked a grand entrance. The mighty Mississippi River brought travel and trade to the young metropolis but also forced those from east of the city to enter on slow ferries that were often bedeviled by low water and the river freezing. The ferries and commercial ships caught fire and sank so often that they presented an economic opportunity, and native St. Louisan James Eads took advantage. Starting as a teen, he taught himself engineering, and he eventually launched a successful business salvaging sunken goods and ships from the Mississippi. During the Civil War, Eads built vaunted gunboats for the Union Navy. His salvage activities and wartime work made him many powerful friends in local and national business and politics. Thus, people listened when he began making the case in the mid-1860s that St. Louis needed a railroad bridge across the Mississippi to maintain its commercial prominence in the midwest US (Jackson 2001, PBS 2000).

 

 

Not everyone considered Eads’s idea sound, including one detractor who lambasted it as “entirely unsafe and impracticable.” Despite the naysayers, though, Eads’s robust self-confidence – or, as his critics saw it, unbearable arrogance – carried him forward, and he drafted a three-span design involving two piers smack in the middle of the Mississippi channel. Eads initially planned to use cofferdams for the piers’ foundations, a risky proposition at best in the turbulent, sediment-laden Mississippi. However, he changed his mind during a trip to Europe after witnessing the installation of pneumatic caissons in France. Captivated, Eads subsequently spoke with several British civil engineers well-versed in the technology and learned it had been in use for nearly 20 years. He decided it was time to bring pneumatic caissons across the Atlantic and, upon returning to the US, drafted plans for them for his bridge (Jackson 2001, PBS 2000).

 

Eads’s design called for pneumatic caissons on a scale far beyond anything tried in Europe. The working chamber for the eastern pier would measure 82 feet by 60 feet; that of the western pier, 82 feet by 48 feet. The chambers themselves would measure 9 feet high and would be made of thick oak beams covered with plate iron. The caissons would be similarly massive; the eastern one would measure 50 feet by 35 feet and would be built of cast iron 3/8 of an inch thick. The structures would be kept in place during sinking using timber guide piles and would each be held level by 10 suspension screws along their sides measuring 20 feet long. Eads’s crews began sinking the eastern pier caisson in October 1869 and its western counterpart in January 1870. As the caissons sank through the Mississippi’s 35-foot channel, masons placed and cemented layers of stone atop them, gradually building the piers and sinking the structures. Ironworkers toiling alongside the masons bolted sheet iron plates onto the caissons’ sides to keep the masons’ work as waterproofed as possible (Jackson 2001, Wheeler 1877).

 

 

 

Eads’s crews took just three weeks to sink each pneumatic caisson to the bed of the Mississippi. The working chambers were then pumped out and the excavators began their digging. Most material was removed from the chambers using suction pumps Eads himself had devised. Larger debris was brought up through the airlocks, while the crews stockpiled stones and bricks in the chambers for their eventual refilling. The chambers’ tight confines meant that excavation was performed largely by hand, and conditions were not for the faint of heart. The chambers were perpetually warm and humid, and condensation dripped constantly from their roofs. Many workers doffed their shirts in vain attempts to beat the heat, and the resulting scent was nearly unbearable, especially when mingled with the odors of burning lamps and river-bottom detritus. The flickering, smoky lights that illuminated the chambers cast long shadows all around and gave everyone, as one observer put it, the “feeling of having descended into the underworld.” The chambers’ interiors gradually became covered with a grimy ooze of water and mud. Many of the St. Louis workers would likely have agreed with a mechanic in the Brooklyn Bridge’s working chambers that “one might, if of a poetic temperament, get a realizing sense of Dante’s inferno” from the scene (Jackson 2001, McCullough 1972).

 

Far more serious problems soon appeared in the Eads Bridge working chambers. They started innocuously, as Eads’s men noticed that their voices were shrill there. The compressed air was constricting their vocal cords, which was harmless by itself but foreshadowed worse. Roughly 40 feet below the river bottom, laborers in the eastern chamber began experiencing stomach cramps and temporary paralysis in their legs . Affected workers walked in a crouch as they grappled with their discomfort, which their peers jocularly tagged the “Grecian bend” after a popular fashion trend. Soon, though, the symptoms worsened and the laughter stopped. As the eastern chamber reached 60 feet below the Mississippi River’s bed, workers were hit with bouts of joint, back, and head pain and paralysis of the arms. By the time the 65-foot mark was reached, cases of the mysterious affliction were starting to require hospitalization. Laborers, engineers, doctors, and even James Eads were puzzled, if not terrified, by the condition and had no idea how to handle it (Jackson 2001, McCullough 1972).

 

 

A century and a half on, the nature of the excavators’ illness, now known as decompression sickness, is as straightforward as it is sorrowful. The condition is explained by Henry’s Law, the principle of chemistry dictating that the amount of gas dissolved in a solution is directly proportional to its partial pressure over the solution. As the working chambers had descended, the pressure of the compressed air within them had steadily risen, increasing the quantities of gases – particularly nitrogen – dissolved in the workers’ bloodstreams. Then, when the laborers left the chambers after each day’s work, the rapid decrease in atmospheric pressure they experienced led the dissolved nitrogen in their bloodstreams to bubble rapidly out of solution. It was agonizing when it happened in the muscles and joints and frequently deadly when it occurred in the brain. The condition – soon renamed “caisson disease” or, as it remains known, “the bends” – killed six excavators in two weeks in March 1870, and it took 12 lives overall by the time both pneumatic caissons were finished (Jackson 2001, McCullough 1972).

 

Victorian employers often viewed worker safety callously, but James Eads’s unorthodox opinions benefitted his laborers in this regard. His first contribution to their safety came even before excavation in the working chambers began. Prior to Eads’s bridge, most pneumatic caissons had their airlocks at the tops of their access shafts. Eads recognized that this set-up posed several dangers. For one thing, it meant the airlocks had to repeatedly be removed and reinstalled as the chambers descended and the access shafts were lengthened. Widespread decompression sickness among workers, far exceeding that which happened, was likely if a rapid evacuation were needed while the airlock was not in place. Another likely hazard was that all the compressed air could escape from the chamber if it abruptly dropped and the airlock was out of position. Accordingly, Eads designed an access shaft with an airlock at its bottom, immediately adjacent to the chamber. The threat of decompression sickness remained, and air pressure within the shafts themselves was now uncontrolled, but Eads’s innovation still represented a big step forward for safety in pneumatic caisson construction. In August 1871, he successfully patented his design (Eads 1871, Jackson 2001).

 

 

Eads intervened to keep his laborers in the working chambers safe again when cases of decompression sickness began disabling or killing them. He brought his family physician, Dr. Alphonse Jaminet, to the site and even took him into one of the chambers. Jaminet emerged with a severe case of decompression sickness himself but fully recovered in several days, and his experience gave him unique insight into the condition. He autopsied several victims and noted that a number of them had not eaten prior to their final shifts, while others had been heavy drinkers. Eads and Jaminet eventually set rules that the laborers could work no longer than an hour at a time in the chambers and that they had to take 15 to 20 minutes to climb the access shaft stairs on their way out. The precautions were in hindsight insufficient, and workers eager to hurry home or to the nearest pub often ignored them, but they were medically sound. The impact of Jaminet’s instructions is difficult to assess, but in all likelihood, they prevented the impacts of decompression sickness at the Eads Bridge from being even worse (Jackson 2001).

 

 

One factor that definitely curtailed the health impacts of decompression sickness on James Eads’s bridge was when in the project lifecycle it became problematic. Most of the worst cases of “the bends” struck those in the bridge’s working chambers only after the chambers had already been excavated to bedrock and were being backfilled with concrete and masonry. The eastern pier’s pneumatic caisson reached bedrock 68 feet below the Mississippi River’s bed (103 feet below its surface) in February 1870, and the western pier’s caisson followed suit in May 1870 at 51 feet below the river bottom (86 feet below the water line). Reaching bedrock vindicated Eads’s belief in his caissons and brought him a moment of geotechnical triumph as well. His salvaging days had shown him the Mississippi’s power to scour, and he decided that nothing short of bedrock would make a satisfactory bearing layer for his caissons. Eads was vindicated when the bedrock encountered in the chambers showed clear signs of scour. Four more years of arduous construction challenges followed the laborers successfully backfilling both chambers, but the piers represented a huge milestone en route to Eads triumphantly opening his bridge on Independence Day 1874, and he had proven the worth of pneumatic caissons to American civil engineers in the process (Jackson 2001, Wheeler 1877).

 

 

 

John Roebling, the chief designer of the Brooklyn Bridge, had needed no persuasion from Eads about the merits of pneumatic caissons. Unlike the self-taught Eads, Roebling had studied engineering at a university in his native Prussia before immigrating to the US and working on a variety of projects, including the Allegheny Portage Railroad (see Johnstown Flood, Part 1). In fact, Roebling had decided to use pneumatic caissons in his bridge well before Eads first considered the idea. Alas, in 1869, just after Roebling had completed his designs, he died of tetanus. Into his role on the project stepped his son, 32-year-old Washington Roebling. He also had a university education in engineering, in his case from RPI. Moreover, he – like Junius Wheeler – had distinguished himself in the Civil War, rising from private to lieutenant colonel as he saw combat with Union forces in six major battles and campaigns. It was Roebling who had turned the tide at Gettysburg by noticing Confederate forces surging toward Little Round Top and persuading his commanding officer to rush Union troops to its summit. Finally, he had the singular advantage of being John Roebling’s son and having worked alongside him on several projects. The younger Roebling thus had unsurpassed insight into exactly how his father had envisioned construction proceeding on the Brooklyn Bridge (McCullough 1972, NPS 2024).

 

 

Early in 1870, as the pneumatic caissons of the Eads Bridge were completed, assembly began for the Brooklyn caisson of Roebling’s bridge. That April, Washington Roebling spent two days in St. Louis visiting Eads’s bridge site. Eads meticulously reviewed his project plans with Roebling and even took him down into the working chambers. Roebling appears to have taken careful notice of everything he saw, particularly the airlocks. He had already located those for the Brooklyn caisson atop the working chamber, but when the Manhattan caisson was built a year later, he shifted them to the chamber’s interior in line with Eads’s design. (Eads noticed this modification and sued Roebling – although his patent was still pending – and eventually got Roebling to settle the case.) If Roebling’s airlock designs weren’t original, though, his caisson designs sure were. The working chamber of the Brooklyn caisson would measure 168 feet by 102 feet, and that of its Manhattan counterpart would be 172 feet by 102 feet. The two chambers, triple the size of Eads’s, could each cover half a city block. Work in Roebling’s chambers would be illuminated not by flickering, foul-smelling oil lamps and candles but by far brighter and cleaner calcium carbide lamps, also known – in an expression that has outlived them – as “limelights” (McCullough 1972, Wheeler 1877).

 

 

Washington Roebling’s crews sank the Brooklyn caisson of the Brooklyn Bridge in May 1870, shortly after their chief engineer returned from St. Louis. Even as the pneumatic caisson slipped beneath the East River, it was already an engineering marvel. It was made of interlocking layers of heavy timber and cast iron that tapered in thickness from 9 feet at the structure’s roofline (the roof itself was 15 feet thick) to 8 inches at its base. This created a wedge to help the caisson advance as its workers excavated underlying material within the 9 foot, 6-inch-high working chamber, which was fortified with sturdy timber partitions. Roebling was acutely aware of the damage shipworms could cause his caisson, so he had its lumber caulked with oakum and soaked with hot tar, pine sap, and varnish. His caisson also had another key advantage over its St. Louis rivals. While Eads had placed his bridge’s caissons in the center of the Mississippi River channel, Roebling placed those of the Brooklyn Bridge much closer to the East River’s banks. Thus, the notorious East River tides only restricted the excavation schedule to low tide for about a month, after which work rapidly picked up steam (McCullough 1972, Wheeler 1877).

 

Washington Roebling was likely chagrined that the accelerating work on the Brooklyn caisson did not necessarily accelerate its descent. The excavators soon found that the underlying soil was strewn with boulders left over from Ice Age glaciation. These were particularly tough to extract from beneath the working chamber’s edges and partition beams. The need to remove the boulders while keeping the pneumatic caisson descending uniformly slowed work to a literal crawl. During one stretch, the Brooklyn caisson was descending less than 6 inches per week. Eventually, though, Roebling and the crews figured out that when a boulder was encountered, they could use oak blocks to jack an edge or partition against terra firma beneath it. The laborers could then excavate the boulders either manually or with carefully controlled blasting. This innovation allowed work on the caisson to proceed apace, which proved critical when a fire damaged the working chamber’s roof and forced months of painstaking repairs. The chamber reached bedrock 45 feet below high tide in early 1871 and was successfully backfilled and completed by that March. Assistant engineer Francis Collingwood, for whom ASCE later named its Collingwood Prize, estimated that the skin friction on the Brooklyn caisson came out to about 900 pounds per square foot (Collingwood 1874, McCullough 1972).

 

 

Washington Roebling’s laborers began sinking the Manhattan caisson of the Brooklyn Bridge in September 1871. This pneumatic caisson was an engineering improvement over its Brooklyn predecessor in several ways. The Manhattan caisson featured a more robust anti-shipworm protective coating; its wooden exterior was slathered with a mixture of coal tar, rosin, and cement, which in turn was covered with soldered tin, which was itself covered in creosote-drenched pine. Its timber roof was an astonishing 22 feet thick, nearly 50% thicker than that of the already hefty Brooklyn caisson. The Manhattan caisson also featured a fireproof interior sheath of plate iron, more air compressors and extraction shafts, improved communications tubes, and (to James Eads’s chagrin) airlocks immediately adjacent to the working chamber. Work on the Manhattan caisson initially went far more smoothly than that of the Brooklyn caisson, and the only obstacle at first was digging through several feet of putrid garbage from a former municipal dump. The sinking initially progressed downward at 6 to 11 inches daily, which Roebling likely found reassuring. He knew from preliminary soil borings that bedrock on the Manhattan side was roughly 40 feet deeper than on the Brooklyn side, which had driven his decision to give the Manhattan caisson a thicker roof (Collingwood 1874, McCullough 1972).

 

Ironically, the ease of sinking the Manhattan caisson led directly to the attacks of decompression sickness for which the Brooklyn Bridge’s construction has long been infamous. As the pneumatic caisson steadily sank, its 13 air compressors (compared to 6 for the Brooklyn caisson) pumped 3 cubic feet of pressurized air per stroke into the working chamber. This air and the pressure difference to which it exposed Roebling’s excavators upon exiting the chamber soon caused them the same maladies that had befallen Eads’s men. The Brooklyn Bridge laborers’ initial amusement at having high-pitched voices in the chamber and being unable to blow out candles there (due to the air’s elevated oxygen content) quickly faded when several of them began suffering from joint pain, paralyzed limbs, and digestive tract woes. The breakdown in Roebling’s professional relationship with Eads probably stymied the sharing of information about the ailments that had now tormented both sets of caisson laborers, which in turn likely impeded medical treatment of the illnesses among the New York workers. However, this stovepiped approach to problem-solving reflected the perspective among US civil engineers in the Gilded Age that, as one historian noted, “minding one’s own business was considered among the basic rules of business.” The geotechnical papers then appearing in the Transactions of ASCE reflected this philosophy, as most were case studies rather than examinations of particular technical principles (Collingwood 1874, McCullough 1972).

 

 

At any rate, Washington Roebling soon concluded, as James Eads had, that medical intervention was needed to address decompression sickness among his workers. Unlike Eads, he appreciated this firsthand, having had a nasty case himself after battling the Brooklyn caisson fire in late 1870. (Its lingering effects ultimately confined him to home for most of the bridge project, but he gradually recovered his health.) In January 1872, as the Manhattan caisson continued descending toward bedrock and the excavators’ health woes multiplied, Roebling brought ear and eye specialist Dr. Andrew Smith onto the project as a medical officer. Smith promptly gave each caisson worker a physical exam and allowed only those he deemed fit back into the working chamber. When laborers came down with decompression sickness, he had them hospitalized and had their doctors send careful records of their cases. Smith could not figure out the precise cause of the malady but knew it was more easily prevented than cured and used his meticulous observations to compile health rules for the excavators. These included not to enter the caisson without eating, to exercise for an hour after exiting it, or to drink alcohol. Smith also observed, as did Francis Collingwood, that “most of the sick … were fleshy men, of full or large size.” Modern medicine supports Smith’s conclusions that adipose tissue (which readily stores nitrogen), alcohol consumption, and overexertion too soon after depressurizing all exacerbate decompression sickness (Collingwood 1874, Jackson 2001, McCullough 1972).

 

The continued descent of the Manhattan caisson was, of course, what was most exacerbating the ailments of the crew. Three men died of decompression sickness in early 1872, and many others had milder cases that left them badly shaken long after they had recovered. A turning point came at a depth of 67 feet below high tide, when Collingwood had the crews take several test borings within the working chamber. These revealed that bedrock lay at least 10 to 13 feet below the chamber beneath a glacial till layer of cemented sand interspersed with boulders. Collingwood had observed anthropogenic debris in the excavated material, including brick and pottery fragments and even a sheep bone, as far down as 65 feet. The borings thus convinced him and Roebling that they had finally reached material undisturbed by either tidal or human activity. Furthermore, Roebling estimated that excavating through this material to bedrock would take another year and cost $500,000 ($12.9 million in 2025) and 100 workers’ lives. He concluded that the very dense glacial till would be more than strong enough to bear the immense weight of the bridge tower and decided excavation could be halted. In mid-May 1872, the crews stopped work at 78 feet, 6 inches below high tide in the East River. The working chamber was filled by July, and Roebling’s geotechnical gamble was vindicated as the Manhattan tower was built and remained stable without noticeable settlement. Dr. Smith then returned to private practice, but shortly thereafter drew upon his Brooklyn Bridge experiences to propose a decompression chamber for making pneumatic caisson work safer. His chamber bears a striking resemblance to those used by scuba divers 150 years later (Collingwood 1874, McCullough 1972, Webster 2025).

 

 

 

Junius Wheeler’s excellent summation of the construction of the Eads and Brooklyn Bridge caissons in An elementary course of civil engineering opens the door to two fascinating stories of Victorian geotechnical history, or geo-history. That said, any solid study of geo-history must consider how its human dimension complements the profession’s technical evolution. A few notes scribbled into one copy of Wheeler’s textbook by its original owner ably underscore this. The book’s front endpaper is inscribed, in crisp Palmer penmanship, “Lewis J.H. Grossart, Allentown, PA, Sep. 9, 1884, L.U. ’86.” Grossart, an 1886 Lehigh University graduate, was in 1885 among the seven students inducted in the inaugural class of the engineering honor society Tau Beta Pi. His abundant annotations in his copy of Wheeler’s textbook suggest that he studied it diligently. Grossart’s subsequent 60-year career mainly involved municipal engineering in Pennsylvania’s Lehigh Valley for the towns and cities of Bethlehem, Allentown, and Hellertown. Notably, his role as a municipal engineer looked quite different from its modern equivalent. A 1914 news account on Grossart noted that his “wide experience” included plenty “in the construction of foundations for bridges, buildings, and machinery,” for which Chapters 11 and 12 of Wheeler’s book presumably prepared him well (Hur 1886, Whelan 1990).

 

 

 

Equally fascinating is a short article on timber pile preservation that young Grossart taped into the front cover of his copy of Wheeler’s book. Its provenance is unknown, but internet archives indicate that the blurb appeared in multiple publications in the 1880s. Ads for Ulster hats and cashmere clothes are visible on the back of the article, suggesting it came from a newspaper rather than one of the staid engineering periodicals of the day. The press clipping reviewed how timber piles could be preserved using a coating of boiled linseed oil mixed with pulverized coal. The efficacy of this treatment compared to current preservatives for timber piles, such as creosote or chromated copper arsenate, remains open to speculation, as do the relative impacts on groundwater of timber piles treated with the older and newer methods. Such questions, coming 150 years after Wheeler published An elementary course of civil engineering and 75 years after Lewis Grossart drew up his final blueprint, provide an excellent reminder of the value of studying geo-history.

 

 

Acknowledgments

Sebastian Lobo-Guerrero, Ph.D., P.E., BC.GE, F.ASCE (A.G.E.S., Inc.: Canonsburg, PA), the author’s former colleague, reviewed the entry’s technical content. Thomas Kennedy (Geopier: Davidson, NC), the author’s Virginia Tech classmate, co-authored a 2021 version of the entry posted on an independent webpage. James Martinson, E.I.T. (Atkinson Construction: Lynchburg, VA), and Andria Zaia (National Museum of Industrial History: Bethlehem, PA) provided valuable leads on sources for the article. Angela Saade, P.E., M.ASCE (Gannett Fleming TranSystems, Audubon, PA), an experienced scuba diver and the author’s colleague and Virginia Tech classmate, answered questions about decompression sickness.

 

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