Background
He was born on January 16, 1836 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States, the son of Frederick Rose and Mary Anne (Shaler) Smith. During his childhood his father died; and his mother, when he was sixteen.
(Excerpt from Comparative Analysis of the Fink, Murphy, Bo...)
Excerpt from Comparative Analysis of the Fink, Murphy, Bollman and Triangular Trusses Under the first and second heads we will then assume, that the Span of the truss is 200 feet, the depth 21 feet, and the width of floor from centre to centre of the trusses 18 feet. These dimensions are taken as a fair average between ordinary spans and those bolder reaches of greater length up to 300 feet, and even beyond, which are coming more into favor of late years. They are also the proportions of the iron bridge over Barren river, on the Louisville and Nashville Rail road, with the details of which the writer is familiar, he having been engaged on that road at the time of its erection. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.
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He was born on January 16, 1836 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States, the son of Frederick Rose and Mary Anne (Shaler) Smith. During his childhood his father died; and his mother, when he was sixteen.
He attended private schools in Pittsburgh until his mother's death, when his formal education ended.
After serving as rodman with a surveying party on the Mine Hill & Schuylkill Haven Railroad in 1852, and subsequently with a railroad survey in the mining regions of Lake Superior, he was made assistant engineer under George McLeod, chief engineer of the Louisville & Nashville Railroad, in 1855.
In 1856 he became resident engineer on the Memphis branch of the Louisville & Nashville, and in 1857, he was transferred from the field to the office as assistant to Albert Fink, engineer of bridges and buildings for the line. This early association had an important effect in shaping Smith's career. In 1859, he was placed in charge of track and bridge construction for the Memphis division, but he left shortly to become chief engineer of bridges and buildings for the Wilmington, Charlotte & Rutherford Railroad in North Carolina.
With the outbreak of the Civil War he entered the Confederate army as captain of engineers, serving with distinction throughout the conflict. Immediately after the war, he built a number of bridges in the South, among them Fink truss spans over the Catawba and Congaree rivers on the Charlotte & South Carolina Railroad.
In 1866, he entered partnership with Benjamin H. and Charles H. Latrobe under the style Smith, Latrobe & Company, soon changed to Baltimore Bridge Company. Among his works were a large bridge over the Missouri River at St. Charles, Mo. ; one over the Kentucky River at Dixville, Ky. ; one over the Mississippi River at Minneapolis for the Chicago, Milwaukee & St. Paul Railroad; and one over the St. Lawrence River at the Lachine Rapids (near Montreal) for the Canadian Pacific Railway.
Though his comparatively brief professional life was too crowded to allow much time for writing, he prepared a short treatise, Comparative Analysis of the Fink, Murphy, Bollman, & Triangular Trusses (1865), and contributed several important papers to the Transactions of the American Society of Civil Engineers.
Smith moved to Missouri in 1868 to supervise the construction of the St. Charles Bridge, and upon its completion in 1871 established his home in St. Louis.
In addition, Smith served as consultant to James Buchanan Eads on the great St. Louis arch bridge. The Kentucky River bridge, built for the Cincinnati Southern Railway in 1876-77, was probably his greatest work.
Smith began preparing plans for the Lachine Bridge in 1880, using a deck truss over two side spans of 270 feet and through trusses over the two 408-foot central spans. The actual construction of this bridge was begun about the time Smith was stricken with his fatal illness, but he retained direction of the work until the critical stages were past. It was completed a few months after his death, and remained for many years the only continuous bridge of importance in America.
Smith died in his early prime.
One of his outstanding achievements was the building, in the Augusta district, of a powder mill with a daily capacity of 17, 000 pounds - one of the largest ever built up to that time. Serving in the Smith, Latrobe & Company, he built a number of the most important structures in the country: a series of iron trestles on the Louisville, Cincinnati & Lexington and the Elizabethtown & Paducah railroads, the first metal viaducts of modern type to be built; a large bridge over the Missouri River at St. Charles, Mo. He was the consulting engineer in an advisory capacity on difficult bridge problems for nearly every important Western railroad - The Kentucky River bridge was probably his greatest engineering achievement. He was the author oh several famouspapers: "Draw-Spans and Their Turn-Tables", "Proportions of Eye-bar Heads and Pins, as Determined by Experiment", and "Wind Pressure upon Bridges".
(Excerpt from Comparative Analysis of the Fink, Murphy, Bo...)
He possessed a nobility of character matching his intellectual gifts. His courtesy, his utter frankness and honesty, his generosity in all matters, won him the complete loyalty of all who served with him (or for him) in any capacity.
He was married on May 23, 1865, to Mary Gordon Gairdner, of Augusta, Georgia, who with several children survived him.
