Resourceful Engineer Also Completed the
Bore Under the East River from
Manhattan to Brooklyn.
Charles M. Jacobs, the builder of the Pennsylvania Railroad tunnel under
the Hudson River, is an Englishman, fifty-six years of age. His father
wished him to go to Cambridge University, but the youth preferred to go to
work, and he did so when sixteen years old.
He entered the office of a ship-building and engineering firm in Hull,
England, and there he became thoroughly grounded in mechanical work and
drafting. He was an earnest worker, and he established a precedent in the
office by getting work to do that was usually assigned to the head men. It
was not customary then to place such reliance on young men.
"Jacobs can do it," his employers were accustomed to say when surprise was
expressed at his being placed in command of big operations. "He knows what
is to be done, and he knows how to handle his men."
When he was twenty-one he went to India as the firm's representative in
some big engineering work, and he did so well that he was sent to China,
Australia, and the European continent. He helped build several tunnels in
London, and in 1889 Austin Corbin, then president of the Philadelphia and
Reading Railroad, brought him to this country to superintend several
important changes that were to be made in the road.
Jacobs liked this country so well and was so favorably impressed by the
outlook for big engineering work that he has remained here, and has become
a citizen.
His First American Success.
He made his first notable success in the construction of the East River
gas tunnel. It was a difficult piece of work, for instead of the river-bed
of solid rock that was supposed to exist, it was found that the bed was
full of fissures through which flowed the mud and water of the river. The
contractors wished to give the bore up and try one fifty feet deeper.
Jacobs refused to do it, and the board of directors of the company, after
listening to his arguments, sided with him.
"Can it be done at the present depth?" he was asked.
"Give me the men and plant, and I'll put it through myself," he answered.
The contractors sued the company and produced a score of experts to prove
that the tunnel could not possibly be built in the way Jacobs wanted it
built.
While the courts were considering the question Jacobs kept right on
digging. He had to encounter difficulties that would have turned most
engineers back. But in the end he pushed the bore through, and the courts,
with this evidence before them, decided against the contractors. He built
the tunnel big enough for trolley-cars in case it might be wanted for that
purpose, and he constructed it so solidly that none of the silt or water
of the East River has been able to filter in.
Another Difficult Task.
In 1877 an attempt was made to tunnel the Hudson River, but the work moved
along fitfully. In July, 1880, an accident that resulted in the death of
twenty men temporarily put an end to it. Two more attempts were made, and
again the work was abandoned. A fourth company revived the scheme, and
made Jacobs the engineer. The work was just in his line, for it gave him
the opportunity to overcome big obstacles and to carry through a project
that would be of big benefit to humanity.
It was an appalling task, for the course was through shifting sand, mud,
and rock, and before it was completed it was necessary to make more than
nine thousand blasts. All these were in the tunnel direct, under the mud
and sand and fifty or sixty feet of river water. Yet the undertaking
resulted in few accidents, for Jacobs knew how to take care of his men,
and he has established a reputation for never sending one where he will
not go himself.
In his early days of wandering in India, China, and Australia he had
learned how to accomplish much by simple means. It was simply learning to
do what he called the obvious thing. But the simple, little, obvious thing
is often the hardest for most people, including engineers, to see.
How He Met an Emergency.
In the building of one of the trolley tunnels under the Hudson, a careless
opening of the doors of the shield--the cylindrical cup pushed along at
the head of the bore, and by means of which all the digging is
done--caused the flooding of one hundred feet of the tunnel. It would be
as hopeless a task to try to bail that mixture of mud and water out as it
would be to drain the Hudson River and the bay adjacent thereto. Jacobs
saved the situation by a very simple expedient.
The cup defender Reliance had just been stripped of her canvas, and Jacobs
got this big spread of sail, sank it flat over the flooded part of the
tunnel, weighted it with a mixture of clay and stone, and thus mended the
bottom of the river so that it didn't continue to leak in mud and water.
It was so very simple that few people would have thought of it.
He completed his first Hudson tunneling work on the 11th of March, 1905,
and all he said when the work was done and he had walked through was:
"There isn't much to tell, except that Henry Hudson was the first man who
crossed over the river and Jacobs was the first man who crossed under it."