Alfred Noble was born on August 7, 1844 in Livonia, Michigan, United States. His father, Charles, and his mother, Lovina (Douw) Noble, were the descendants of several ancestors who saw military service in the American Revolution, and his grandfather, Norton Noble, was a soldier in the War of 1812.
Alfred's early education in the public schools of his native town was interrupted when he was eighteen years of age by service in the Civil War. He entered the sophomore class at the University of Michigan, where he was graduated Computer Engineering in 1870, despite an absence of a year and a half as recorder of the federal Lake survey.
Enlisting in the 24th Michigan Volunteers, he participated between October 1862 and February 1865 in most of the important campaigns and battles of the Army of the Potomac. For two years, 1865-67, he was a clerk in the War Department at Washington.
His first work after graduation was in connection with surveys of harbors on Lake Michigan, but from September 1870 until 1882 he was engaged in the improvement of navigation in the St. Mary's River between Lakes Superior and Huron and in the enlargement of the St. Mary's Falls Canal at Sault Ste. Marie, Michugan.
As assistant engineer, 1873-82, under Major Godfrey Weitzel he had an important part in the construction of the Weitzel Lock at the "Soo. " In 1882 he became resident engineer of the Shreveport Bridge across the Red River, and then, 1883-86, was assistant engineer in charge of bridge construction on the Northern Pacific Railroad. Subsequently, he became resident engineer of the Washington Bridge, New York City (1886 - 87), under William R. Hutton; of the Cairo Bridge over the Ohio River (1887 - 89), under G. S. Morison and E. L. Corthell; and of the Memphis Bridge over the Mississippi (1888 - 92), under Morison.
Upon the completion of the last-named work he formed a limited partnership with Morison during which he was assistant chief engineer of bridges at Alton, Bellefontaine and Leavenworth. Upon the expiration of this partnership in 1894, he opened an office as consulting engineer in Chicago.
In April 1895 he was appointed by President Cleveland a member of the Nicaragua Canal Commission, with General William Ludlow and Commander Mordecai Thomas Endicott as his colleagues. The commission visited many points in Central America with a view to the construction of an inter-oceanic canal, and in October 1895 submitted its final report.
Thereafter, Noble was engaged in private practice, mostly as a consulting engineer, until appointed by the secretary of war to membership in the Deep Waterways Commission, to study ship-canal routes from the Great Lakes to the sea (1897 - 1900). By appointment of President McKinley, 1899-1903, he was member of the Isthmian Canal Commission, which was charged with determining the route of the Panama Canal.
Subsequently President Theodore Roosevelt appointed him (1905) to the board of consulting engineers on the Panama Canal. Although a majority of this board favored the construction of a sea-level canal, Noble was one of those who held out strongly for a lock-canal, the type finally adopted. In 1900 he served on a board of engineers to advise the state engineer of New York with regard to plans for the projected State Barge Canal. From 1901 to 1905 he and Ralph Modjeski were associated in the building of a bridge across the Mississippi at Thebes, Illinois, Noble having special charge of the substructure.
From 1902 to 1909 he was chief engineer of the East River division of the Pennsylvania Railroad, supervising important tunnel construction under the river and terminal improvements which included the foundations of the Pennsylvania Station, New York City. As consulting engineer, he was connected with the construction of the Galveston seawall, the New York rapid-transit subways, the Pearl Harbor (Hawaii) Dry Dock, the new Welland Canal and the new Quebec Bridge, the Catskill Aqueduct, and a number of important water-power developments.
Throughout his life, he contributed papers and studies to the Western and the American societies of civil engineers, and to the Chicago Academy of Sciences.
Noble served as president of the Western Society of Civil Engineers in 1897, of the American Society of Civil Engineers in 1903, and of the American Institute of Consulting Engineers in 1913. In 1910, he was awarded the John Fritz Medal of the American Institute of Mining Engineer "for notable achievements as a civil engineer, " and in 1912, the Elliott Cresson Medal of the Franklin Institute "for distinguished achievement in the field of civil engineering. "
Noble married Georgia Speechly of Ann Arbor, Michigan on May 31, 1871. They had one son, also a civil engineer.
