Joseph Palmer Frizell

Background

Joseph Palmer Frizell was born on 13 March 1832, at Barford, Quebec, Canada. His parents, Oliver and Mary Beach Frizell, were natives of Vermont.

Education

Frizell attended schools at Brownington, Vermont, and Richmond, Canada, where he was especially apt in mathematics.

His schooling was elementary, but he continued to instruct himself along the lines of mathematics and engineering and is said even to have devised and put to practical use a certain form of calculus.

Career

In 1850, Frizell went to work in one of the cotton-mills at Manchester, New Hampshire. The hours of labor were long and little time was left for pleasure or study. Nevertheless, he continued his studies and in 1854, entered the office of the city engineer as an assistant.

He remained there for two years and then moved down the river to Lowell, where he became an engineering assistant with the “Proprietors of the Locks and Canals on the Merrimack River, ” under James B. Francis, the engineer of this company, and undoubtedly the foremost hydraulic engineer of his day in the United States.

Nowhere could a young engineer have found a teacher so skilled both in the theory and practice of hydraulics. Francis, having just completed and published The Lowell Hydraulic Experiments (1855), was busily carrying out additional work, and under his tutelage, Frizell worked and studied from 1857 to 1861 and from 1866 to 1867.

During the Civil War as an assistant civil engineer of the United States army, Frizell engaged largely upon work on fortifications along the Gulf Coast.

After the war, he returned to Lowell for a year and then with his wife, Julia A. Bowes, whom he had married in 1864, he went to Davenport, Iowa. Returning to the East, from 1870 to 1878 he engaged in the practice of consulting engineering in Boston, and in the latter year patented an air compressor utilizing the direct action of falling water, which proved to be successful.

He went West again in 1878 as an assistant civil engineer in the United States Engineers Department and was concerned with hydraulic investigations on the headwaters of the Mississippi.

In 1903, he retired from active practice and from that time until his death he lived in Dorchester, Massachusets.

Achievements

• Frizell was chief engineer of the board of public works of Austin, Texas, from 1890 to 1892, but in the next year, he returned to Boston and reopened his engineering office. In 1900, he published the results of some of his researches in a thorough study entitled Water Poiver, an Outline of the Development and Application of the Energy of Flowing Water. It was the first practical book of its kind published in the United States and showed that its author was well abreast and in some ways in advance of his contemporaries. In later life, he contributed many technical papers to various engineering societies.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Water-Power: An Outline of the Development and Application of the Energy of Flowing Water.

Personality

Frizell was the most able member of engineers class, largely self-taught, who established the basis upon which the modern science of hydraulics rests.

Connections

Frizell married Julia A. Bowes in 1864.

Father:

Oliver Frizell

Mother:

Mary Beach Frizell

Wife:

Julia A. Bowes