Five Decades of Engineering
NOTABLE CAREER OF OTIS ELLIS HOVEY 'S5 WHO CONTINUESTO RECEIVE HONORS OF THE ENGINEERING WORLD
IF YOU WERE to rise early enough some morning in New York to get to the lobby of the Salmon Tower, just off Forty-second and Fifth Avenue, by eight-thirty, you would very likely notice the arrival of a tall and very distinguished looking gentleman. On closer inspection you would be even more attracted, for your eye would note a wide, gently sweeping moustache and a handsome white beard, and you would be sure that the gentleman was none other than Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes. Many of the Salmon Tower office people have thought the Chief Justice was paying regular calls to their building, until they inquired and learned that the white bearded gent was Otis Ellis Hovey, one of the best known civil engineers in the country and the outstanding authority on the construction of movable bridges.
Mr. Hovey, who graduated from Dartmouth in 1885 and from Thayer School in 1889, has been taken for Mr. Hughes ever since the two had offices near one another in lower Manhattan. That was before Mr. Hughes was governor of New York, when he had a law office in the financial section and Mr. Hovey was an engineer for the American Bridge Company at 30 Church street. The two never met, but when they passed on the street they both frequently turned around to steal a quick look at the other. After Mr. Hughes became so famous, Mr. Hovey was sometimes subject to annoying little encounters, such as that which occurred one early morning last year when he was crossing Forty-second Street on the way to his office and ran into a quite tipsy individual who was coming out of a subway entrance. The tipsy man was having a hard time keeping his balance, and despite Mr. Hovey's efforts to give him a wide berth, he stumbled and fell right into Mr. Hovey. As he did so he looked up, and with a gleam of recognition muttered, "Why, Jus'ice, wha' in th' world youse doin' out so late at night?" Despite such things as these Mr. Hovey sees no reason to cut off his beard, for he started growing it sometime before Mr. Hughes began his.
HONORARY MEMBER A. S. C. E.
Now in the fifth decade of his engineering career (he'll be seventy-four years old this year) Mr. Hovey has recently been the recipient of many honors which have come in due course after a long and meritorious service to the profession. In January of this year the American Society of Civil Engineers awarded him an Honorary Membership, the highest tribute they pay to a member of the profession. There are only twenty-five civil engineers living who have been awarded Honorary Memberships; one of these is former President Hoover. Shortly before receiving this tribute Mr. Hovey had been selected as the new Director of the Engineering Foundation an organization which does work in engineering comparable to that done by the Carnegie Foundation for education. Last fall at the one-hundredth anniversary of Phi Beta Kappa at Hanover he was elected an honorary member of the Society, an accomplishment for which he was not qualified in 1885, when the Key was unavailable to students preparing for Thayer School. Mr. Hovey also has two honorary degrees: a Doctor of Engineering from Dartmouth in 1927, and a Doctor of Science from Clarkson College in 1933.
An account of Mr. Hovey's life must go back to a little Vermont town up near the Canadian border, East Hardwick, where he was born towards the end of the Civil War. He got his early education from the local school, along with supplementary lessons'in mathematics and science given him by his father, Jebez Wadsworth Hovey, who wanted Otis to be a civil engineer. One summer Otis was taken to see the construction in progress on the railroad now called the St. Johnsbury and Lake Champlain, and he was so mystified and intrigued by the surveying work that he decided then and there to become a civil engineer. An East .Hardwick boy hadn't gone off to college for more than thirty years, but Otis and his father made up their minds that he was going. He could have secured a scholarship to the University of Vermont, but his father thought they had an inadequate engineering course. Dartmouth was then decided upon, and during the summer of 1881 Otis managed a neighbor's farm and saved some money to take with him to Hanover in the fall.
One of his great uncles had gone to Dartmouth some years before; he was Edmund Otis Hovey, who graduated in 1828 and then went West to become a missionary and help found Wabash College. In Otis's class at Hanover was another relative, though a very distant one—Richard Hovey, poet and writer of Dartmouth songs. Both were descendants of Daniel Hovey, an English farmer who landed at Ipswich, Mass., in 1635.
When Otis Ellis Hovey matriculated at Dartmouth in 1881 the tuition was $60 a year, with $6 additional due for the Library fee. When he graduated four years later he had spent just $1,300 for his college education, everything included. He had to be more economical than most of his classmates, but he remembers that the average student's expenses didn't run more than $450 a year. He worked most of the time he was in college—cutting grass, serving as a student janitor in old Chandler Hall, and doing survey work for the Wilder dam and mill which were soon to be erected. It was in 1884 that football was introduced to Hanover, and just about the same time that the curve was first being tried out by baseball pitchers. Hovey was busy with his part-time jobs and didn't have much time for athletics, but he played some baseball and got into a few of the informal foot races held on the College Green. "I could run like the dickens in those days," he says today. He also played a few games of the new football, but ruined several pairs of trousers (there were no uniforms) and decided he couldn't afford this sport. No one thought of skiing in those days, and no one ever went to Smith or Boston for a week-end. Liquor, says Mr. Hovey, was bootlegged from Canada Norwich in the 'Bos, just as it was in the more recent Prohibition days.
WORKING HIS WAY
Hovey wanted to go on to Thayer School after he got his B. S. degree in 1885, but didn't have the money, so decided to stay out a few years and work. That summer he obtained work on the Hoosac Tunnel & Wilmington Railroad which was being built between Hoosac Tunnel, Mass., and Readsboro, Vt. One of his assignments on this job was to work on the designs for a bridge near the Massachusetts-Vermont boundary. The assignment proved so tough that he decided he'd better learn something about bridge designing, and he made up his mind then to specialize in it. He then got a job with the Edge Moor Iron Company at Wilmington, Del., and was with them until the fall of 1887, when he returned to Hanover to start working towards his C.E. degree at Thayer. However several months before graduation, in February, 1889, he received a telegram from Washington University at St. Louis offering him an instructor's position in their engineering school, and it looked so good that he accepted. He had to leave Hanover immediately, but had done such creditable work that Director Fletcher of the Thayer School mapped out a correspondence course so he could finish with his class, and Hovey sent regular reports back from St. Louis and received his C. E. that June.
The following year he fortunately obtained a position with the late George S. Morison, probably the greatest bridge engineer of his time. He worked with Morison for six and a half years, and was placed in charge of his Chicago office. Construction jobs he worked on at this time included the viaduct approaches for the Memphis Bridge across the Mississippi, the entire design for the superstructure of the Belief on taine Bridge across the Missouri north of St. Louis, the Alton Bridge at Alton, 111., and the Leavensworth Bridge at Leavensworth, Kan. As early as 1895 Hovey did considerable designing and estimating work for a 3200-foot suspension bridge across the Hudson River at Fifty-ninth Street, Manhattan. Plans for this same bridge have been announced every other year or so since, but work on it had never begun.
EXPERT BRIDGE ENGINEER
In 1896 Mr. Hovey became Engineer of the Union Bridge Company, and for four years he was stationed at their Athens, Penn., office, in charge of designs for all sort of bridge and other construction work. In 1900 he became associated with the American Bridge Company, the largest concern of its kind in the world, and after a long period of service which saw him promoted to positions of the highest responsibility, he finally resigned in 1934 to comply with the company's seventyyear-old rule. From 1900 to 1904 he was an engineer of design in the company's office at Pencoyd, Penn., and in the latter year came to New York to take charge of the engineers and draughtmen engaged on designs at the home office. In 1907 he was made Assistant Chief Engineer of the company, and took charge of various work in connection with railway and highway bridges, railway turntables, and various other steel structures. During his last three years with the American Bridge Company, Mr. Hovey was head Consulting Engineer of the organization. He has worked on hundreds, even thousands, of bridge designs, and there is hardly a country in the world today where one could not find some bridge construction which bears marks of his ingenuity. He has made several trips abroad. He went to London in 1898 to sell 332 bridges to a British concern for the Orange Free State Railroad in Africa, to Constantinople in 1904 to investigate the possibility for placing a span across the Bosporus, and he made several journeys to Panama when the Canal was under construction. Mr. Hovey's contributions to the field of movable types of bridges have been particularly noteworthy. The two-volume work, "Movable Bridges," on which he worked almost every night and week-end between 1921 and 1926, is a definitive and analytical study of considerable merit, and is practically the sole authority in the field today. Another work is his treatise on "Steel Dams," which was published only a few years ago. Several inventions have also been patented by Mr. Hovey, the most important being some complicated, esoteric mechanisms concerned with the movements of railroad turntables and steel derricks.
No THOUGHT OF RETIREMENT
Mr. Hovey had no idea of retiring when he resigned from the American Bridge Company in 1934; "I wouldn't know what to do if I weren't working," he stated to friends at the time. He immediately opened an office to do private consulting work, and now, even with his recent appointment as Director of the Engineering Foundation, he continues his consulting business. He spends every morning in his Salmon Tower office, then goes to his other office at the Engineering Societies Building on West Thirty-ninth Street to give the rest of the day to the Foundation's affairs.
Mr. Hovey lives with his wife in an apartment on Riverside Drive. He met Mrs. Hovey, when she was Martha Wilson Owen, in Chicago shortly after he finished school, and married her in Lafayette, Mich., in 1891. The Hoveys have two children, Otis Wadsworth Hovey, Dartmouth '15 and Thayer School '17, who is now a civil engineer with the Carnegie-Illinois Steel Company in Pittsburg, and Mrs. P. O. Davis, of New York City. There are two grandchildren, a boy and a girl of Mrs. Davis'. Mr. Hovey's two main outside interests are photography and music. He took up the former about fifty years before the advent of the candid camera, for a purely business reason. A hard-boiled official for whom he was doing a dam job at Chicopee, Mass., kept complaining that very little progress was being made. Hovey fixed up an improvised camera and took pictures of the dam every week or so, something in the nature of before and after shots, just to prove to his boss, when he dropped around, that the work was coming along as fast as could be expected. He's kept up his photography ever since, and has always enjoyed developing his own pictures. Mr. Hovey thinks he might have had a fairly good singing voice if he hadn t ruined it by overexertion when he was an adolescent. For some years now he's been a capable flute player, and he finds no better relaxation, he says, then to lock himself in a room and play the flute for thirty minutes. Mr. Hovey takes the flute quite seriously; it is, he thinks, "an unnecessarily tortured instrument." He's a member of the New York Flute Club, and is in regular attendance at the seven meetings they hold in the city every year. In the summers he and Mrs. Hovey go up to Hartford, Vt.. there they have a summer home, only a few miles from Hanover.
OTIS ELLIS HOVEY '85
