Daniel E. Moran, II was born on April 12, 1864, in Orange, New Jersey, the second son and fourth of five children of Daniel Edward Moran, I and Annie Augusta Blake. His grandfather, Daniel Moran, a successful English leather tanner who had spent some time in Belgium, came to the United States in 1820 with his Belgian wife, settling eventually in Brooklyn, New York.
Moran's father was a banker, a partner in the firm of Moran Brothers.
Young Moran grew up in Brooklyn, where he attended local schools and the Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute.
Entering the School of Engineering at Columbia (then known as the School of Mines) in 1880, he graduated in 1884 with the degree of civil engineer.
Columbia conferred the honorary degrees of Master of Science (1911) and Doctor of Science (1930) on Moran, II.
For the next several years he worked at a variety of jobs - apprentice in an iron works, railroad surveyor in the West, map-maker in New York, and draftsman for the engineer William Barclay Parsons.
He was more or less at loose ends when, in 1889, he chanced to meet Charles Sooysmith. Sooysmith was a pioneer American designer and builder of foundations, specializing in pneumatic and other difficult foundation work. He engaged Moran, II as assistant and sent him to Iron Mountain, Michigan, where a mine shaft was being sunk through a deep quicksand formation by the freezing process. Other challenging foundation assignments followed, including the Deer Island Lighthouse in Boston Harbor, piers for the McComb's Dam drawbridge over the Harlem River in New York and for a railroad bridge over the Missouri at Sioux City, Iowa, and, finally, the foundation work for the American Surety Building in New York City, the second building in the world to rest on pneumatic foundations. It was during this period that Moran, II devised and patented the Moran air lock, a chamber so designed that it was possible in pneumatic work to hoist buckets of excavated material directly by cable from the working surface under air pressure at the bottom of a caisson to the free air above.
Sensing, as Sooysmith did not, the coming importance of the skyscraper, Moran, II in 1897 became a special partner and consultant with a more progressive firm, John Monks and Son.
Four years later, together with Franklin Remington and Edwin S. Jarrett, he organized the famous Foundation Company, which soon emerged as the foremost builder of deep and difficult foundations in the country.
After this association terminated in 1910 due to a disagreement among the partners, Moran, II conducted his own private practice for another decade, then organized the firm of Moran, Maurice and Proctor (later Moran, Proctor and Freeman), which continued until his death. During the period of his greatest activity scarcely any difficult foundation was built in the United States without Moran's personal inspection and approval. The projects on which he was consulted include the major great buildings in New York City, from the Woolworth and the Equitable buildings through the remarkable caisson-cofferdam foundations of the Federal Reserve Bank and the New York Telephone buildings to the Bank of the Manhattan Company and the Farmers' Trust Company of later days. Moran's firm was also called upon in connection with buildings in Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Canada.
Similarly in the bridge field, he was consultant on practically all the record-breaking bridges of the day, from the Delaware Suspension Bridge of 1926 to the George Washington span of 1932 and - what was probably his most notable foundation innovation - the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge of 1935. The center pier of the last, a common-center anchorage for a double-span suspension, involved sinking the largest caisson ever used, 92 by 197 feet in size. It was successfully placed in over a hundred feet of water and sunk to a depth of over two hundred feet below tide level. The problem of guiding and sinking this huge box into position was solved by the unique plan of using no less than fifty-five separate dredging cells, each of which could be capped with a steel dome and used under air pressure to maintain proper buoyancy and stability.
While an expert in pneumatic work, Moran, II recognized the hazards and costliness of this process, and whenever possible he used other methods, sometimes of a pioneering nature. Thus the foundations for the Yankee Stadium in New York, one of his last and most daring innovations, were spread footings on a fill consisting of a mixture of broken rock and mud, but so designed that the inevitable settlement could be nullified by jacking up the superstructure as experience might require.
He died on July 3, 1937, at his home in Mendham, New Jersey, and was buried there in the family plot. Fondly known to his many friends and associates as "Uncle Dan, " he was widely recognized at the time of his death as the dean of American foundation engineers.
In 1896 Daniel Edward Moran, II married Sarah V. Kelly of Glasgow, Scotland, by whom he had five children.
Charles Sooysmith was an American civil engineer.
