John Frank Stevens

John Frank Stevens ( born April 25, 1853 in West Gardiner, Maine, † June 2, 1943 in Southern Pines, North Carolina) was an American engineer who built the Great Northern Railway in the United States and from 1906 to 1908 chief engineer in the construction of the Panama Canal was.

Life

Stevens was born in West Gardiner in rural Maine, the son of John Stevens, a tanner and farmer, and Harriet Leslie French. He went to public school in Maine two years. At the end of school in 1873, he found under gloomy economic conditions of work and decided to go to the West. For civil engineering, he came by his experience in a city planning office in Minneapolis. For two years he carried out a variety of engineering tasks, including surveying and railway construction. He was self-taught practical engineering, driven by the " single-minded tenacity of a bulldog ," as he described it himself. 1878 Stevens married Harriet T. O'Brien. They had five children, two of whom died in childhood.

In 1886, Stevens was commissioned at the age of 33 main performer at the South Shore and Atlantic Railway in Duluth (Minnesota), and was the line from Duluth to Sault Ste. Marie ( Michigan) to build on the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. Although much of his work was surveying work, he was involved in all phases of railway construction: exploration, design, planning and construction.

1889 James J. Hill presented to him as a design engineer for the Great Northern Railway to. He was the first white Americans who discovered the Marias Pass in the Continental Divide and the " Stevens Pass " in the Cascade Range was named after him. Hill promoted him in 1895 to the chief engineer and later as General Manager. During this time at the Great Northern Stevens built over 1,000 miles of railroad, including the first Cascade Tunnel.

Panama Canal

Stevens left the Great Northern in 1903 and went to Chicago, rock Iceland and Pacific Railroad in Chicago, where he became Vice President. 1905 Theodore Roosevelt dedicated it. Recommendation on Hills as chief engineer in the construction of the Panama Canal

Stevens ' main achievement in Panama was the construction of the necessary infrastructure for the channel. He renewed the Panama Railway and devised a system to dispose of the excavated material by rail and deposit. He also built accommodation suitable for sewage workers and oversaw sanitation programs and measures for the elimination of yellow fever and other diseases in the Isthmus. Stevens was against a canal at sea level as the French wanted to build it. He convinced Roosevelt of building a higher-lying channel with dams and locks.

Retreat

Stevens retired in 1907 suddenly from the sewer project back, much to the annoyance of Roosevelt, as the work turned to the construction of the canal itself. As a railway engineer Stevens had little experience in the construction of locks and dams and realized probable that he was no longer the most appropriate person for the job. Stevens might also have realized in retrospect that the Cascade Tunnel, for which he was responsible, had been built too steep. The real reasons for his retreat never became known.

After the collapse of the Russian Empire in 1917, the provisional Russian government, President Wilson asked for help in the construction of the transport system. Stevens was sent as chairman of a commission of railway experts to Russia to organize the system, including the Trans-Siberian Railway. After the October Revolution, the work was stopped. Stevens remained in the occupied by Allied Manchuria and was chairman of a committee that dealt with the administration and operation of the Chinese Eastern and Siberian Railway. He remained there until 1923, when the occupation forces withdrew. After his return to the United States, he worked as a consulting engineer and ended his career in Baltimore in the early 1930s. He retired to Southern Pines in North Carolina and died there at the age of 90 years.