(This book was originally published prior to 1923, and rep...)
This book was originally published prior to 1923, and represents a reproduction of an important historical work, maintaining the same format as the original work. While some publishers have opted to apply OCR (optical character recognition) technology to the process, we believe this leads to sub-optimal results (frequent typographical errors, strange characters and confusing formatting) and does not adequately preserve the historical character of the original artifact. We believe this work is culturally important in its original archival form. While we strive to adequately clean and digitally enhance the original work, there are occasionally instances where imperfections such as blurred or missing pages, poor pictures or errant marks may have been introduced due to either the quality of the original work or the scanning process itself. Despite these occasional imperfections, we have brought it back into print as part of our ongoing global book preservation commitment, providing customers with access to the best possible historical reprints. We appreciate your understanding of these occasional imperfections, and sincerely hope you enjoy seeing the book in a format as close as possible to that intended by the original publisher.
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Leon Solomon Moisseiff was born in Riga, Latvia (then part of the Russian empire). He was the only child of Jewish parents, Solomon and Anna (Bloch) Moisseiff, whose families had been natives of the Baltic area for several generations. His father was a merchant.
Leon attended the Emperor Alexander Gymnasium (1880 - 87) and the Baltic Polytechnic Institute (1889 - 91), both in Riga. In 1891, the family emigrated to the United States, having been compelled to leave their native land because of the young student's activities in liberal organizations, and settled in New York City. Leon Moisseiff enrolled in Columbia University in 1892, graduating with the degree of civil engineer in 1895, and received his citizenship in 1896.
Typical of the talented young graduate searching for his métier, Moisseiff held a variety of positions in his first professional years. He began as a draftsman with the New York Rapid Transit Railroad Commission, became a designing engineer with the Dutton Pneumatic Lock and Engineering Company in 1896, then returned to the position of draftsman with the Bronx Department of Street Improvements the following year. Less than a year later, he found work more suitable to his abilities: he joined the New York Department of Bridges as chief draftsman and assistant designer, a position which he held from 1898 to 1910, and then moved up to the level of an engineer of design, where he remained until 1915. During this period, the three East River bridges following the Brooklyn span were constructed the Williamsburg (opened 1903), Queensboro (1908), and Manhattan (1909) and Moisseiff was consequently associated with their design. The experience thus gained emboldened him to try his own hand, and in 1915, he established an independent office as a consulting engineer. This marked the beginning of a career that was to take him to the very top of his profession as the designing engineer for a number of the largest and most spectacular bridges in the world.
The Tacoma Narrows Bridge was destroyed by wind in November of the year it was opened as a result of the aerodynamic instability of the plate-girder stiffening structure, but neither Moisseiff nor any of the other engineers can be charged with irresponsibility in this totally unexpected failure. It led Moisseiff, however, to devote the remaining three years of his life to an investigation of aerodynamic problems and to a reexamination of the fundamental assumptions and principles underlying the design of suspension bridges. The Mackinac Strait Bridge was not built until 1954-57, and the office of David B. Steinman was placed in charge of design and construction. Moisseiff was appointed consulting engineer to the Soviet Commissariat of Transportation in 1929, a position which he held until 1932 but which did not require his continuous presence in Russia. He acted as a consultant on structural design for the Century of Progress Exposition in Chicago in 1931-33 and was specifically involved in the design of the Travel and Transport Pavilion, the first building to be constructed with a cable-suspended roof.
His immensely productive life ended at the age of seventy with a heart attack suffered at his summer home in Belmar, New Jersey. He was buried in Cedar Grove Cemetery, Flushing, New York.
By 1920, Moisseiff was sufficiently well known to be appointed chief designer of the Delaware River Bridge at Philadelphia, which remained the major project of his office until the span was completed in 1926. From this date until 1940 his name was associated as consulting engineer of design with many of the greatest works of the bridge-building art, among them the George Washington at New York City (1927 - 31); the Bayonne or Kill van Kull, between Staten Island and Bayonne, New Jersey (1928 - 31); the Ambassador, Detroit (1928 - 30); the Maumee River or Anthony Wayne, Toledo (1929 - 32); the Triborough, New York City (1934 - 36); renewal work on the older East River group (1934 - 37); the Bronx-Whitestone, New York City (1936 - 39); the Tacoma Narrows, Tacoma, Wash. (1938 - 40); and the Mackinac Strait Bridge Authority (1938 - 40). Although he did not always receive formal credit, Moisseiff was the principal designer of the George Washington, Bronx-Whitestone, Tacoma Narrows, and Mackinac bridges. During the middle years of this period, he acted as a member of the board of consulting engineers for the two huge San Francisco bridges, the Golden Gate (1929-37, construction beginning in 1933) and San Francisco-Oakland Bay (1931-37, construction also beginning in 1933). Of the various bridges with which Moisseiff was associated, all but one (the Kill van Kull arch) were suspension structures, characterized by successively longer spans. Moisseiff made a valuable contribution to engineering literature early in his career when he translated Armand Considère's Experimental Researches on Reinforced Concrete (1906). He was the author of numerous papers published in engineering and scientific journals on individual suspension bridges, cable wire, the action of bridges under lateral forces, the properties of high-strength steels, the theory of elastic stability, and the characteristics of aluminum bridges. By 1930, Moisseiff's achievements in the design of long-span bridges had earned him a worldwide reputation, and in the following decade, his adopted country offered him a steady flow of honors and prizes. Among them were the Lewis E. Levy Medal of the Franklin Institute (1933), for his paper "The Design, Materials and Erection of the Kill van Kull Arch, " which had been published in its Journal the previous year; the George H. Norman Medal (1934) and the James Laurie Prize (1939) of the American Society of Civil Engineers; Columbia University's Egleston Medal (1933) for distinguished achievement in engineering; and the Modern Pioneer Award (1940) of the National Association of Manufacturers.
(This book was originally published prior to 1923, and rep...)
In his private life, Moisseiff was known for his wide learning and cultivated taste in music, the graphic arts, and the kinds of a literature of many languages, indications of a curiosity and sensitivity on the personal scale that paralleled the combination of daring imagination and great accuracy of detail in his engineering designs.
On January 5, 1893, while a student at Columbia, Moisseiff had married Ida Assinofsky. They had three children, two daughters, Liberty and Grace, and a son, Siegfried.
