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This is a reproduction of a book published before 1923....)
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The Construction Of The Panama Canal
William Luther Sibert, John Frank Stevens
D. Appleton and Company, 1915
Panama Canal (Panama); Panama canal; Panama canal (Panama)
The construction of the Panama canal - Scholar's Choice Edition
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A Sketch Of The Panama Canal: Its Past, Present And Possible Future (1908)
(This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of th...)
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A Sketch Of The Panama Canal: Its Past, Present And Possible Future, January 1908
(This is a reproduction of a book published before 1923. T...)
This is a reproduction of a book published before 1923. This book may have occasional imperfections
such as missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. that were either part of the original artifact,
or were introduced by the scanning process. We believe this work is culturally important, and despite the imperfections,
have elected to bring it back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed works
worldwide. We appreciate your understanding of the imperfections in the preservation process, and hope you enjoy this valuable book.
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A Sketch Of The Panama Canal: Its Past, Present And Possible Future, January 1908
John Frank Stevens
s.n., 1908
History; Latin America; Central America; History / General; History / Latin America / Central America; Panama Canal (Panama)
John Frank Stevens was an American civil engineer and railroad executive, who built the Great Northern Railway in the United States and was chief engineer on the Panama Canal between 1905 and 1907.
Background
John was born on April 25, 1853 on his father's farm near West Gardiner, Maine, United States, the son of Harriet Leslie (French) and John Smith Stevens and a direct descendant of Henry Stevens, who emigrated in 1635 from Cambridge, England, to Boston.
Education
He attended local schools and the State Normal School in Farmington, Maine, graduating in 1872.
Career
After several months of schoolteaching, Stevens decided to become an engineer and found work on a field crew in Lewiston, Maine, making surveys for mills and industrial canals.
In 1873 he went to Minneapolis, Minnesota, where an uncle, himself an engineer, helped him get a job as a rodman for the city engineer. By studying assiduously at night, he advanced in 1874 to assistant city engineer. In 1875 Stevens decided to seek his fortune in railroading. After two years as a junior engineer on various railways in Minnesota, he moved to northern Texas, where he made several surveys for the Sabine Pass & Northwestern Railroad.
He was promoted to chief engineer, but when the company failed in 1878 he had to accept employment as a trackhand. He soon worked himself up to roadmaster, and in 1879 became assistant engineer for location and construction of the New Mexico and Durango extensions of the Denver & Rio Grande Railroad. Similar positions followed with the Chicago, Milwaukee & St. Paul Railroad (1881-82 and 1885 - 86), working chiefly in Iowa; with the Canadian Pacific Railroad (1882 - 84), in Manitoba and British Columbia; and, beginning in 1886, with the Duluth, South Shore & Atlantic Railroad.
On this last, given complete charge of a project for the first time, he conducted the initial surveys and line location and supervised the construction of a road stretching almost four hundred miles from Sault Ste. Marie to Duluth through the dense forests and swamps of the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. Stevens next worked briefly as assistant engineer of the Spokane Falls & Northern Railway, where he gained valuable knowledge of the Pacific Northwest, and then began an important association with the Great Northern Railway and its president, James J. Hill.
Hill was building an unsubsidized transcontinental railroad through the northernmost tier of states, and one of Stevens' first assignments was to explore the route west from Havre, Mont. Over a period of weeks and in the bitterest winter cold, he established the feasibility of the now famous Marias Pass, which provided the key passage across the Continental Divide. Sent next to Washington to explore the Columbia River and the Cascades for the final route down the western slopes of the Divide, he located another important pass, later named Stevens Pass, near Lake Wenatchee. He then worked on the western part of the Great Northern's "Pacific Extension, " from Stevens Pass to Everett, Washington, laying out at the summit of the Cascades a switchback route that could be used temporarily until a tunnel was completed. His work attracted the personal attention of Hill.
When the Pacific Extension was completed in 1893, Stevens became assistant chief engineer on the regular staff of the Great Northern. He was dropped the following year, chiefly because of the depression, but was rehired in 1895 as chief engineer and, except for a brief absence in 1898-99, remained with the railroad until 1903, from 1902 as general manager.
Stevens left the Great Northern in 1903 to become chief engineer (in 1904, second vice-president) of the Chicago, Rock Island & Pacific Railway. The following year he was named to the federal Philippine Commission, to head its railroad building program. Before he could serve, however, Secretary of War William Howard Taft named Stevens, on Hill's suggestion, as chief engineer of the Isthmian Canal Commission.
His appointment came just after the commission had been reorganized, giving the chief engineer control over both the construction and engineering phases of the Panama Canal. When Stevens arrived at the Canal Zone in the early part of 1906, he found conditions chaotic. Equipment, largely inherited from the French, was antiquated, housing and food were inadequate, and the labor force of about 17, 000 was demoralized by frequent outbreaks of yellow fever and malaria.
Drawing on his years of railroad experience, Stevens immediately set about reorganizing the work force and engineering staff. He developed supply lines to bring food into the area, constructed commissaries and mess halls to deliver it at reasonable cost, and rebuilt existing housing. Recognizing that progress on the canal depended upon efficient transportation, he gave most of his time to organizing and building an extensive system of railroads to carry out the soil and rock from the Culebra (now Gaillard) Cut at the interoceanic divide. He also accepted the theory of the mosquito as the vector for yellow fever and malaria and aided Colonel William C. Gorgas, head of the sanitation department, in implementing adequate sanitary and health measures. Although Stevens had at first favored a sea-level canal, his own investigations soon convinced him that only a locked canal was feasible. In the Report of the Board of Consulting Engineers for the Panama Canal (1906), he therefore concurred with the minority opinion in opposing a sea-level canal, and he was instrumental in persuading President Theodore Roosevelt to accept this view. To facilitate construction, Stevens successfully sought a reorganization of the Canal Commission giving the chief engineer, in the absence of the chairman (who was usually resident in Washington), complete control over the Canal Zone.
By the end of 1906 construction was under way; but Stevens - frustrated by political maneuvering in Washington, including the award of the principal contract to a firm he considered of questionable reliability, and eager to return to a less strenuous position - resigned a few months later. Upon returning to the United States, Stevens became vice-president of the New York, New Haven & Hartford Railroad.
He made a systematic valuation of the company's steam railroad properties and, as part of a modernization program, electrified the trackage from Woodlawn, New York, to Stamford, Connecticut But the railroad was in poor financial condition, principally because of excessive investments in outside properties, and in 1909 he accepted an offer to rejoin Hill in a new project. This was the building of a southward extension of the Hill lines from the Columbia River through central Oregon, the first step toward a connection with San Francisco. The plan was sharply challenged, both in the courts and through the construction of a competing line, by the Union Pacific and Southern Pacific interests of Edward H. Harriman, but Stevens, as president of the Oregon Trunk Railway Company, successfully completed the new line in 1911.
He then moved to New York City, where for several years he was a private consultant. In 1917, following the collapse of the Czarist regime in Russia during World War I, Stevens was appointed by President Wilson as chairman of an advisory commission of American railway experts to study the Russian railway system. The United States was interested in ensuring the continued participation of Russia in the war, and the commission was charged with the task of keeping railroad and supply lines open. Having completed his study, Stevens went to Siberia, later in 1917, as head of a second American commission, the Russian Railway Service Corps, and, with a force of about two hundred engineers, began reorganizing the Trans-Siberian and Chinese Eastern railways.
His last major project was a feasibility study for a new, longer tunnel at the Stevens Pass. The report was completed in 1925, and the new Cascade Tunnel, with its 7. 8-mile bore, was constructed between 1926 and 1928.
Stevens spent his last years in Southern Pines, North Carolina, where he died at the age of ninety of pulmonary infarction.
Achievements
John Frank Stevens supervised the planning and construction of more than a thousand miles of new track, much of it in Minnesota, where he built a line serving the iron-bearing Mesabi Range with a lower maximum grade than any other railroad in the area. Another of his major projects was the completion of the first Cascade Tunnel, a 2. 6-mile rock bore built between 1897 and 1900.
Stevens also was named president of the Technical Board of the Inter-Allied Railway Commission, an international body set up to supervise railways in those parts of Siberia and Manchuria where Allied troops were stationed. He also improved the operation of the railways by such steps as installing a telephone system on the main line from Vladivostok to Omsk, introducing the more efficient American system of train dispatching, and reorganizing the railway repair shops.
In 1925 a statue of Stevens was erected at Marias Pass. Stevens was awarded the Distinguished Service Medal by the War Department for his service in Russia. He was awarded the Franklin Institute's Franklin Medal in 1930.
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Membership
He became a member of the American Society of Civil Engineers in 1927.
Personality
An extremely able engineer, with a gift for organization, he was nevertheless regarded by some acquaintances as authoritarian and temperamental.
Quotes from others about the person
His successor, George W. Goethals, later said of Stevens, "The Canal is his monument. "
Connections
On January 6, 1876, he had married Harriet O'Brien of Boston. They had five children: Frank and Abby, both of whom died in infancy, Donald French, John Frank, and Eugene Chapin.