Background
George Blakeley was born on April 19, 1865, on a farm between Hanover and Livingston, New Jersey, United States; his parents were Joseph H. and Mary Ann (Gibson) Blakeley.
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George Blakeley was born on April 19, 1865, on a farm between Hanover and Livingston, New Jersey, United States; his parents were Joseph H. and Mary Ann (Gibson) Blakeley.
George attended Rutgers College, graduating from the scientific department in 1884 with a B. S. degree. Rutgers University awarded him an honorary D. Sc. degree in 1924.
Blakeley’s career followed an established pattern of apprenticeship training. After three years with a survey crew, he advanced to chief draftsman of the Riverside Bridge and Iron Works in Paterson, New Jersey, where he specialized in the structural design of bridges and buildings. In 1888 the Erie Railroad acquired his services, and two years later he became chief engineer of the Passaic Rolling Mill Company. For that company he designed and supervised the construction of the 155th Street Bridge over the Harlem River in New York City, the heaviest swing span thus far built and the first to have both a double drum and a double ring of bearing wheels.
During the 1890's architects and engineers began to apply the framing principles of bridge building to commercial architecture, and Blakeley contributed to this transition by publishing in 1900 the first of three handbooks he wrote on the uses of structural steel. While making a survey for the Passaic Rolling Mill of the different methods for processing steel, Blakeley became acquainted with Henry Grey, an American engineer who had designed a mill for rolling steel beams with wide flanges. Blakeley sought to interest the Passaic Rolling Company in adopting Grey's innovations, but without success, and Grey built an experimental mill in Germany.
In 1906, after Charles M. Schwab had acquired the old Bethlehem Iron Company and the American rights to the Grey process, he hired George Blakeley as a structural engineer and two years later placed him in charge of promoting the use of the new steel sections. The thin-web, wide-flange girders, beams, and H-columns (later called Bethlehem sections) contained less than 11 percent of the steel used in traditional steel members, and engineers and architects were at first reluctant to employ them in public buildings. They were first used in the Spencer Optical Company factory near Boston and in the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago; subsequently, because of their wide acceptance, Bethlehem Steel Company became one of the largest producers of commercial steel.
Blakeley was well rewarded for his contributions. In 1916 he became president of the new Bethlehem Steel Bridge Corporation, a post he retained until this Bethlehem subsidiary was dissolved in 1923. He was made vice-president of Bethlehem Steel Company in 1927, and when Bethlehem acquired the McClintic-Marshall Company, he became its president (1931 - 1935). As such, he was the administrator of an annual fabrication capacity of 700, 000 tons, one-sixth of the nation's total steel production capacity. He died at the age of seventy-seven at the home of his son in Newport, Rhode Island.
(Unlike some other reproductions of classic texts (1) We h...)
Blakeley was a member of the Episcopalian Church.
Blakeley was a member of the Republican Party.
Blakeley was known for his Lincolnesque humor.
On April 12, 1893, Blakeley was married to Grace Delia Bogart, daughter of Gilbert D. Bogart, a leading promoter of the growth and development of Passaic, New Jersey. They had one son, George Bogart.
