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(Excerpt from The American Engineers in France This book...)
Excerpt from The American Engineers in France This book is not intended to be a history or detailed account of the work done by American Engineers in France. Their work was so extensive and so varied as to put the writing of its record beyond the powers of one man, for none could know it all. It is hoped that some day the record will be properly set forth in justice to the men and for the honor of the profession, but it will be of necessity the joint product Of several collaborating authors. The first contribution that America made to the Allied cause was the raising of nine regiments of engineers, with one of which the author served. It is their work that is the motif of this book. In the writing, it has been neces sary to touch on all the fields Of engineer activity, because these regiments came in contact with every field, even if they did not invade each one, from constructing ports to digging and holding trenches, in all parts Of France from the Atlantic to the Vosges, from the Mediterranean to Flanders. Consequently there results a brief outline of what all engineers did. Perhaps, it may serve to give those who did not go overseas a picture of what is meant by engineering in modern war. 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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William Barclay Parsons was born on April 15, 1859 in New York, Manhattan, New York, United States. He was the son of William Barclay Parsons and Eliza Glass (Livingston). William Parsons was a great-grandson of Henry Barclay, second rector of Trinity Church.
In 1871 William Barclay Parsons went to school in Torquay, England, and for the four years following studied under private tutors while traveling in France, Germany, and Italy. Returning to the United States in 1875, he entered Columbia College. Graduating in 1879 with the degree of Bachelor of Arts, he continued in the Engineering School, then the School of Mines, and received the degree of Computer Engineering in 1882.
During the summer of 1881, William Barclay Parsons had been engaged as engineer for the Blossburg (Pennsylvania) Coal Company, but upon graduation he turned to railroad work and from 1882 to the end of 1885 he was in the maintenance-of-way department of the New York, Lake Erie & Western Railroad. His first books had to do with railroad problems (Turnouts; Exact Formulae for Their Determination, 1884, and Track; a Complete Manual of Maintenance of Way, 1886), and this interest in rail transportation continued throughout his life. In 1886 he began practice as a consulting engineer in New York and for the following years devoted much time to studying plans for an underground railway in the city, although he also engaged in other railroad and water-supply work, notably that of building, as chief engineer, the Fort Worth & Rio Grande railroad in Texas. In 1891 the legislature of New York created a Rapid Transit Commission and Parsons was appointed deputy chief engineer under William E. Worthen. Three years later, upon the appointment of a new commission with broader powers, under the chairmanship of Alexander Ector Orr, Parsons became chief engineer, but adverse political pressure and other difficulties caused the commission to suspend its activities in 1898.
Thereupon Parsons, acting for an American syndicate, accepted the direction of a survey for some 1000 miles of railway in China, primarily on the line from Hankow to Canton. The party passed through the then "closed province" of Hu-nan, and the success of the entire venture depended not alone on engineering skill but primarily upon the ability of the leader of the expedition to meet the extremely difficult diplomatic problems involved. Nevertheless, the mission was accomplished and the small group of American engineers, to the surprise of many of their friends, returned in safety. Parsons told the story of this adventure in An American Engineer in China (1900).
Late in 1899, Parsons was recalled by the Transit Commission, since an opportunity to begin subway construction in New York seemed at last at hand. Construction actually started in March 1900. The first subway, extending from Atlantic Avenue, Brooklyn, to Van Cortlandt Park on the West Side and to Bronx Park on the East, for which Parsons had prepared the plans and which is popularly considered his greatest engineering achievement, was at last under way. Writing of the undertaking later, Parsons said: "Some of my friends spoke pityingly of my wasting time on what they considered a dream. They said I could go ahead making plans, but never could build a practical, underground railroad. This skepticism was so prevalent that it seriously handicapped the work". Parsons not only overcame the obstacles involved in this pioneer construction, but in doing so, developed standards of design which have been adopted wherever subways have been built and still remain standard after more than a quarter century of almost continuous subway construction. After the success of the enterprise had been assured by completion of the first section in 1904, Parsons resigned as chief engineer to devote his energies to his consulting practice.
William Barclay Parsons was appointed to the Isthmian Canal Commission in 1904, and early in 1905 went to Panama as a member of the committee of engineers which subsequently reported in favor of a sea-level canal. Later, appointed to the international Board of Consulting Engineers, he joined the majority of the board in advocating this type of construction, although in 1906 President Roosevelt approved a lock canal. In 1904 Parsons was also appointed, together with the famous British engineers, Sir Benjamin Baker and Sir John Wolfe Wolfe-Barry, to membership on a board to pass on the plans of the Royal Commission on London Traffic. He always considered his selection for the post one of the greatest of the many honors which came to him.
Among his other engineering activities in these years were work as consulting engineer to the Massachusetts Railroad Commission, advisory engineer on traffic problems to Cambridge, San Francisco, Toronto, Detroit, and other cities, and consultant on large hydraulic works such as the Salmon River, MacCall Ferry (now Holtwood), and Mohawk hydroelectric developments. In 1905 he undertook to carry through the construction of the Steinway Tunnel under the East River in New York. In order to hold the franchise this work had to be completed in a very short time and Parsons, by building an artificial island near the south end of Blackwell's Island and working from four headings, accomplished the difficult task. In 1905, he had also been appointed chief engineer of the Cape Cod Canal. Completed in 1914, it joined Massachusetts and Buzzard's bays and demonstrated that a canal without locks could be built between two bodies of water where considerable tidal differences existed.
In 1916 Parsons was acting as chairman of the Chicago Transit Commission, but upon the entry of the United States into the World War, he became senior member of the first group of American officers to go to France, a board of engineers appointed to report on the military engineering problems and requirements for engineer troops there. In July 1917 he joined his regiment, the 11th United States Engineers, in England, and he served with them as major, lieutenant-colonel, and colonel until the end of the war. He participated in the engagement at Cambrai, where, suddenly attacked by the Germans while making railroad repairs, the engineers fought with picks and shovels, also in the Lys defensive, and the Saint-Mihiel and Argonne-Meuse campaigns.
His book, The American Engineers in France (1920), is a valuable and interesting record of these activities. He was cited for "specially meritorious services" and received decorations not only from the United States but also from Great Britain, France, Belgium, and the State of New York. After the war, he was transferred to the Engineers Reserve Corps with the rank of brigadier-general, and again took up his engineering practice. One of the last great works of his firm (Parsons, Klapp, Brinkerhoff & Douglas of New York) was the international vehicular tunnel passing under the Detroit River and joining Detroit with Windsor, Ontario. Opened in 1930, it was the third great vehicular tube in America. In its design and construction older methods were used in new ways, and a new design for tunnel lining was developed. In connection with a trip to Yucatan in the early 1900's, Parsons became interested in the Maya ruins, and later, when he was appointed a trustee of the Carnegie Institution, he encouraged the undertaking of archeological exploration and preservation of these remarkable remains. He also found time to make an exhaustive study of engineering history. Although he published a book entitled Robert Fulton and the Submarine (1922), his historical interest centered particularly on engineers and engineering of the Renaissance, and he gathered a remarkable collection of early books and prints relating to this period.
A loyal alumnus of Columbia, Parsons became a member in 1897 and chairman in 1917 of the board of trustees of his alma mater. He took an active part in establishing the University on Morningside Heights. Holding that "it is not the technical excellence of a design which governs, but the completeness with which it meets the economic and social needs of the day, " he insisted that the duties of the engineer demanded a broad, rather than a narrowly technical type of training, and his influence had much to do with placing engineering education at Columbia on a higher professional plane. Parsons naturally received many honors and was a member of many engineering organizations. He was a trustee of the New York Public Library and of the Carnegie Institution of Washington, and chairman of the administrative board of the Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center in New York, where his sudden death occurred. He died on May 9, 1932.
(Excerpt from The American Engineers in France This book...)
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On May 20, 1884, William Barclay Parsons had married Anna De Witt Reed, daughter of the Reverend Sylvanus and Caroline (Gallup) Reed of New York. They had a son and a daughter.
