Background
Theodore Cooper was born on January 13, 1839 at Cooper’s Plain, New York, United States, where his father, John Cooper, Jr. , was a physician. Both his father and his mother, Elizabeth M. (Evans) Cooper, were from Pennsylvania.
(Excerpt from American Railroad Bridges The existing and ...)
Excerpt from American Railroad Bridges The existing and the accepted types of bridges in use to-day on American railroads being the results of a true evolution, no attempt to present them intelligently would be complete without a brief sketch of the past history of bridge; in America. The rapid development of the new world and the enormous number of bridges that has been built within the limits of the nineteenth century, have furnished us with a wide experience, from which we have been able to select the good and reject much that was bad or undesirable. The pioneer life, not only of the earlier settlers, but of each genera tion to the present day, has developed to a high degree the energies, ingenuity and self-reliance of the American people. These pioneers were compelled to be men of all trades. Their limited resources and the lack of time or opportunity to seek for past precedents, impelled them to solve each problem anew. They, thought with vigor and were not fettered with the trammels of science, before they were capable of ex erting their mental faculties to advantage, as Sir Joseph Banks wrote to Thomas Paine in 1788.from transactions or american society or CIVIL engineers. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.
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Theodore Cooper was born on January 13, 1839 at Cooper’s Plain, New York, United States, where his father, John Cooper, Jr. , was a physician. Both his father and his mother, Elizabeth M. (Evans) Cooper, were from Pennsylvania.
Theodore attended the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and was graduated from it in 1858 as a civil engineer.
About 1858 Cooper acted as an assistant engineer on the Troy and Greenfield Railroad and the Hoosac Tunnel. At the outbreak of the Civil War, he enlisted in the United States navy as an assistant engineer. The gunboat, Chocura, on which he was stationed, took part in the siege of Yorktown and the battles of West Point and York River, and acted as a guardship in the Potomac during the Chickahominy campaign. At the cessation of hostilities, Cooper was detailed as an instructor in the department of steam engineering at the Naval Academy. He remained in the service of the navy until 1872. In that year he began his work in bridge construction, to which profession he was to contribute worthily. He was appointed by Capt. James B. Eads as inspector, at the Midvale Steel Works, for the steel being made for the St. Louis bridge, and afterward went to St. Louis to take charge of the erection of the bridge. After some further experience with the Delaware Bridge Company and the Keystone Bridge Company, Cooper established himself as a consulting engineer in New York City.
He was one of five engineers appointed by President Cleveland in 1894 to determine the span of the Hudson River Bridge. He acted as a consultant for the New York Public Library and the Quebec Bridge, and did work for the Suburban Rapid Transit Company, the New York and Boston Rapid Transit Commissions, and the Harlem River Commission. The results of his experience were put in permanent form through his contribution of several papers on phases of bridge construction to the Transactions of the American Society of Civil Engineers.
Cooper achieved a national reputation for railroad and highway bridge design. Some of the bridges he designed were the Seekonk Bridge at Providence, the Sixth Street Bridge at Pittsburgh, the Second Avenue Bridge over the Harlem River, New York City, the New- buryport Bridge over the Merrimac River, and the Junction Bridges over the Allegheny River.
(Excerpt from American Railroad Bridges The existing and ...)
Quotes from others about the person
"His name became universally familiar to bridge engineers through his system of locomotive and train loading for bridge design. Composed of a wheel system, representing the heaviest locomotive of that time, followed by a uniform load whose amount in pounds per foot bore a simple relation to the driving-axle load, this system proved so convenient, and was so excellently adapted to modification for increasing weight of trains and engines by simple multiplication, that it quickly won a commanding position. . Theodore Cooper also exerted a strong influence toward bringing about the adoption of wheel-load analysis for railway bridges instead of uniform-load or other methods, and the moment tables which he published made it possible to carry out the analysis rapidly and conveniently. "
