Hugh Lincoln Cooper was an American hydroelectric engineer.
Background
Hugh Lincoln Cooper was born on April 28, 1865 in Sheldon, Minnesota, United States. He was the oldest child of George Washington and Nancy Marion (Parshall) Cooper. The elder Cooper, whose grandfather had emigrated from England, operated a flour mill in Rushford, Minnesota.
Education
Like many engineers of his generation he did not attend an engineering school, his formal education ending upon graduation from the Rushford high school in 1883. Cooper received several honorary degrees.
Career
Cooper's first engineering employment was with a field party assigned to construct a bridge on the Chicago, Milwaukee & St. Paul Railway. Given responsible charge of completing this work when the contractor failed, he decided to specialize in bridge work, and by 1890 he had become chief engineer and superintendent of the Chicago Bridge and Iron Company. Soon afterwards, however, apparently impressed with the possibilities of the awakening electrical age, he developed an interest in hydroelectric engineering. Hydroelectric power in the United States was at this time in its infancy, the first notable development, that at Niagara Falls, being completed in 1894. Determined to master this new technique, Cooper abandoned bridge work and sought employment with a company in Dayton, Ohio, which manufactured water wheels and built small hydroelectric plants, becoming in time assistant chief engineer.
In 1898 he joined the well-known firm of Fred S. Pearson in New York, a step that may be said to mark the beginning of Cooper's career as a hydroelectric engineer. In 1905 he opened his own office in New York and was soon taking a leading part in advancing hydroelectric developments at home and abroad. Hydroelectric plants are characterized as high-head or low-head, depending upon the head or height of water acting on the water wheels. Each type poses different problems in the adjustment of mechanical and electrical equipment to hydraulic conditions and to electrical requirements.
One of Cooper's earlier projects involved a high-head plant in Mexico, and he also served as consultant on the design of the remarkable Canadian development at Niagara Falls.
Cooper visited Japan as consultant on the Lake Biwa project and also advised the Egyptian government on the possible use of Nile water at Aswan for power. In some of these earlier works his brother acted as his assistant, but their paths apparently separated in later life, when Dexter Cooper threw his energies into the much-disputed and never-completed Passamaquoddy tidal project in Maine.
World War I interrupted but briefly Hugh Cooper's career as a hydroelectric engineer. He served as major (later colonel) of engineers in France and consultant to the American Expeditionary Forces, but was soon ordered back to the United States to undertake the construction of a hydroelectric plant at Muscle Shoals on the Tennessee River in Alabama. This involved the construction of the famous Wilson Dam, which later became the first unit of the Tennessee Valley Authority's widespread and multiple-purpose development in this area.
Cooper also made, during the 1920's, a study for the federal government of the power and navigation possibilities of the St. Lawrence River.
Cooper's most memorable foreign engagement began in 1926, when he was asked by the Russian government to study and report on the famous Dneprostroi development in the Ukraine. He was retained the following year to design and supervise the construction of this 800, 000-horsepower plant, which, with locks for navigation, cost over one hundred million dollars and was completed in 1932.
He died at his home in Stamford of arteriosclerosis and was buried in Lakeview Cemetery, New Canaan, Connecticut.
Achievements
Membership
He was a member of leading engineering associations.
Personality
A man of determined and rugged personality, outspoken in opinion, sometimes described as blunt and gruff in his contacts with others, he possessed at the same time a remarkable capacity for leadership and inspired those who worked with him with a strong esprit de corps.
Connections
On October 12, 1892, he married Frances Bliss Graves of Rochester, Minnesota by whom he had three children, Agnes Lillian, Hugh Lincoln, and Elizabeth Graves.