Background
James Dix was born on May 11, 1848 at Ithaca, New York, United States, the youngest of nine children of Philip Church and Lucy M. (Dix) Schuyler, and a descendant of Philip, younger brother of Peter Schuyler.
James Dix was born on May 11, 1848 at Ithaca, New York, United States, the youngest of nine children of Philip Church and Lucy M. (Dix) Schuyler, and a descendant of Philip, younger brother of Peter Schuyler.
His early education was received at Friends College, but for the most part his professional attainments and achievements were the result of his own constant study and reading and of his long and varied experience.
Schuyler began his engineering career in 1869 as assistant on the location and construction of the Kansas Pacific Railway in Western Kansas and Colorado, and thereafter the West became his home. For six years he continued in railroad work, serving the Denver & Rio Grande Railroad, the North Pacific Coast Railroad in California, and the Stockton & Ione Railroad, of which he was chief engineer. In 1877 he was made chief assistant state engineer of California and placed in charge of irrigation investigations in Great Central Valley.
Resigning this position in 1882, he became chief engineer and general superintendent of the Sinaloa & Durango Railroad in Mexico. Returning to California, he undertook contract work in San Francisco. He built a section of the sea wall on the water front of the city (1884 - 85); raised the Sweetwater dam (1887 - 88); and constructed the Hemet dam, at that time the highest masonry dam in western America.
His field of activity including Mexico, British Columbia, Japan, Brazil, and Hawaii. Among the projects with which he was connected were water supply systems for Denver; Ogden, Utah; and Los Angeles. As one of three consulting engineers appointed to report on plans for the Los Angeles aqueduct, fed by the Owens River some 250 miles distant, he made suggestions that ultimately resulted in the avoidance of twenty-five miles of heavy construction, and a saving of several million dollars.
He was one of the commission of consulting engineers appointed by President Theodore Roosevelt in 1909 to judge the feasibility of the Gatun Dam and the other structures for the Panama Canal.
He was the author of the book entitled Reservoirs for Irrigation, Water-Power, and Domestic Water Supply, published in 1901, with a second edition in 1908. He served as vice-president and director of American Society of Civil Engineers.
He died at Ocean Park, California.
James Dix Schuyler was a pioneer and leading authority in dam designing, construction and especially in the development of the use of hydraulic fill dams. He contributed extensively to technical and scientific journals, but his best-known work is his book was Reservoirs for Irrigation, Water-Power, and Domestic Water Supply (1901), His paper upon "Recent Practice in Hydraulic-Fill Dam Construction" received the Thomas Fitch Rowland Prize for the best paper of the year and did much to stimulate the use of this important method of earth dam construction. It is noteworthy, that he was twice winner of this prize, his first success having occurred in 1889, when he presented a paper on "The Construction of the Sweetwater Dam".
(Lang:- English, Pages 656. Reprinted in 2015 with the hel...)
Schuyler was a prominent member of the American Society of Civil Engineers.
In July 1889 Schuyler was married to Mrs. Mary Ingalls Tuliper of San Diego, California, who survived him.
