Los Angeles herald. [microfilm reel] (Los Angeles [Calif.]) 1900-1911, 1909-01-03
The Engineer
Faces Problems
Contracting on Great Engineering
Feats Is Study in Itself, and De-
mands Men with Ideas Regarding
Expedition

IN HE contracting engineer, as you
will easily imagine from his name,
is part contractor and part engi-
neer. An engineer, pure and simple,
designs and advises what other people
are to execute. A contractor, pure and
simple, executes what some one has
designed for him. All this would be
simple as an oyster if the two pro-
fessions were bounded by definite
straight lines, but til Y are not. Their
boundaries are as irregular and in
definite as the famous seacoast of Bo-
h mia, and when you come to fit them
together there are places where they
overlap and places where no amount
of stretching will make them meet
/ have never in my life seen a thing
Involving more parts or greater COM
plication than, say, an ordinary monkey
WI nch) that was finally constructed
and used exactly as it appeared in the
original plans and specifications. And,
beginning at the monkey wrench, you
RAY go as far as the Panama canal,
and, whatever undertaking you choose
to study, the same apparently inevita-
BILE differences between designing
things and doing things, between paper
engineering and field engineering, will
appear. The contractor will be criti-
cising the designer for his impractical
details; the designer will be criticising
the contractor for his rough-and-ready
disregard of the same-no doubt with
perfect good nature, but from a radi-
cally different point of view.
After the paper engineering is all
done the actual field engineering begins
to call forth the real ingenuity. There
is a large undertaking (the Detroit
river tuneD in progress at the present
time which is a striking example. 1t
calls for a pair of railway tunnels
across a swift river full of ice in win
ter full of ships in summer and having
nothing under it but stiff blue mud to
build on. In order to be sure of the
best way to do it, the railway en-
gineerS and the contracting engineers
all got their heads together beforehand
and argued it out. They finally agreed
first to dig a deep trench across the
stream through the stiff mud by means
of a floating dredger having a long
handled spoon projecting down from it
"a mighty spoon with a 60-foot handle,
holding a few carloads at time, work
ing ponderouSly and blindly along
under water (but none the less Surely)
by virtue Of enormous chains and snort
ing engines. They decided next to
lower from a barge into this trench a
criss- crossed foundation Of steel beams
= and to place it on the mud bottom at
exactly the right location and height;
after that to build a pair of long steel
tubes or tunnel sections together side
by side into a floating vessel with their
ends closed alright; and having navi-
gated the cumbrous craft exactly to the
required spot on the rivers surface, to
open the air valves-"scuttle the ship, "
in other words-and sink it exactly into
its foundation cradle at the bottom of
the trench. Having sunk a goodly fleet
of such extraordinary craft precisely in
line without mishap, they planned to
secure them by pouring concrete
around and over their intersections
from another barge having three long
elephants trunk Spouts to let down
through the water, and finally to pump
out all the water from their interior
and line them heavily with more con-
crete, which will form permanent and
deep-buried thoroughfare after the iron
exterior of the original fleet shall have
rusted away.
But after all their arguments and
conferences beforehand an engineering
paper, in commenting on the project,
recently stated that THE general plans
were described and illustrated in our
issue of 49,. but important changes
have been made in the actual execu-
ton of the work. Small wonder a.
that; for countless complicated left
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