Background
John Vipond Davies was born on October 13, 1862 in Swansea, Wales. He was the first son and fourth of eleven children of Andrew Davies, a physician, and Emily (Vipond) Davies.
John Vipond Davies was born on October 13, 1862 in Swansea, Wales. He was the first son and fourth of eleven children of Andrew Davies, a physician, and Emily (Vipond) Davies.
Davies was educated at Wesleyan College, Taunton, England, and, reportedly, at the University of London, though he did not receive a degree.
For the ten or twelve years after University Davies followed a varied career, at first, beginning in 1880, as apprentice to an engineering contracting firm engaged in dry-dock, engine-building, and structural work, then in the employ of two coal-mining companies in Monmouthshire. His mining and mechanical experience provided a useful background for his later work in the field of sub-aqueous tunneling and difficult foundation undertakings.
In 1889 he came to the United States, where his first employment was with the Philadelphia & Reading Railroad on the development of a coal-briquetting plant. His work for this railroad brought him to New York City, where he met and became chief assistant to Charles M. Jacobs, who was then constructing the East River Gas Tunnel, a pioneer venture in what was to become the most tunneled city of the world. Soon after its completion, in 1893, the two men formed the firm of Jacobs and Davies, which throughout the earlier years of the twentieth century occupied a leading position in the development of sub-aqueous and pneumatic foundation work in the New York area.
As early as 1879 an attempt had been made to supplement or replace ferry service by means of a tunnel under the Hudson River from Manhattan Island to the New Jersey shore. The technique was both hazardous and new to American engineers, and the project came to a standstill after a sudden "blow" trapped twenty workers. British engineers, on the other hand, had had long experience with this type of work, dating back to the first notable sub-aqueous tunnel, the Thames Tunnel, completed in 1843.
Thus it came about that a famous firm of British contractors, Pearson and Sons, with Jacobs and Davies as consultants, took up the task of completing the first Hudson River tunnel, and it was finally "holed through" in 1904. This was the first in the extensive Hudson-Manhattan system of tunnels. In their work in the Hudson silt, Jacobs and Davies originated the technique, since followed where conditions permit, of simply shoving aside the greater part of the silt ahead of the tunneling shield and taking in but a small fraction of the displaced material.
The firm later went ahead with the uptown tunnels at 33rd Street and also designed and supervised the construction of the remarkable foundations for the Hudson-Manhattan Terminal building on Church Street. Here a complete enclosing ring of fifty-one pneumatic caissons, sealed on rock 110 feet below curb level, provided not only terminal facilities but a power station seventy-seven feet below street level and fifty-eight feet below water level--a plan later followed in building the Federal Reserve, the New York Telephone, and other buildings where space below street level was essential. While Davies will be recalled largely because of this early work in New York, he was consultant on a number of other major undertakings, including virtually every notable tunnel project during the period of his active career.
As president of his firm from 1917 until his death, he planned or advised on a water-supply tunnel under the Detroit River, on power station intake and discharge tunnels for the New York Edison Company, on the difficult and hazardous Consolidated Gas Company tunnel under Hell Gate at New York City, on projected tunnels at New Orleans and San Francisco, and on the Moffat Tunnel in the Rockies.
Davies was a charter member of the American Institute of Consulting Engineers.
Davies, quiet, slender "gentleman of the old school" achieved an outstanding position for his skill in one of the most difficult and dangerous construction techniques devised by man. Davies was deeply interested in the professional and ethical standards of his profession.
In 1895 Davies married Ruth Ramsey of Pottsville, Pa. They had two daughters, Margaret and Muriel, and a son, John Vipond.
