George S. Morison (engineer)
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George Shattuck Morison (December 19, 1842 – July 1, 1903) was an American engineer. A classics major at Harvard who trained to be a lawyer, he instead became a
civil engineer A civil engineer is a person who practices civil engineering – the application of planning, designing, constructing, maintaining, and operating infrastructure while protecting the public and environmental health, as well as improving existing i ...
and leading bridge designer in North America during the late 19th century. During his lifetime, bridge design evolved from using 'empirical “rules of thumb” to the use of mathematical analysis techniques'. Some of Morison's projects included several large Missouri River bridges as well as the great cantilever railroad bridge at
Memphis, Tennessee Memphis is a city in Shelby County, Tennessee, United States, and its county seat. Situated along the Mississippi River, it had a population of 633,104 at the 2020 United States census, 2020 census, making it the List of municipalities in Tenne ...
, and the Boone, Iowa viaduct. Morison served as president of the
American Society of Civil Engineers The American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) is a tax-exempt professional body founded in 1852 to represent members of the civil engineering profession worldwide. Headquartered in Reston, Virginia, it is the oldest national engineering soci ...
(1895) as well as a member of the British Institute of Civil Engineers winning that institution's
Telford Medal The Telford Medal is a prize awarded by the British Institution of Civil Engineers (ICE) for a paper or series of papers. It was introduced in 1835 following a bequest made by Thomas Telford, the ICE's first president. It can be awarded in gold ...
in 1892 for his work on the Memphis bridge. In 1899, he was appointed to the
Isthmian Canal Commission The Isthmian Canal Commission (often known as the ICC) was an American administration commission set up to oversee the construction of the Panama Canal in the early years of American involvement. Established on February 26, 1904, it was given con ...
and recommended it be built at
Panama Panama, officially the Republic of Panama, is a country in Latin America at the southern end of Central America, bordering South America. It is bordered by Costa Rica to the west, Colombia to the southeast, the Caribbean Sea to the north, and ...
.Marianos Jr, W. N. "George Shattuck Morison and the development of bridge engineering." American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) Journal of Bridge Engineering 13.3 (2008): 291-298. Accessed a

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History

Born in
New Bedford, Massachusetts New Bedford is a city in Bristol County, Massachusetts, United States. It is located on the Acushnet River in what is known as the South Coast region. At the 2020 census, New Bedford had a population of 101,079, making it the state's ninth-l ...
, he was the son of John Hopkins Morison, a Unitarian minister. At age 14, he entered
Phillips Exeter Academy Phillips Exeter Academy (often called Exeter or PEA) is an Independent school, independent, co-educational, college-preparatory school in Exeter, New Hampshire. Established in 1781, it is America's sixth-oldest boarding school and educates an es ...
and graduated by age 16. He went on to
Harvard College Harvard College is the undergraduate education, undergraduate college of Harvard University, a Private university, private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. Part of the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Scienc ...
where he was a classmate of philosopher John Fiske. Morison received a
Bachelor of Arts A Bachelor of Arts (abbreviated B.A., BA, A.B. or AB; from the Latin ', ', or ') is the holder of a bachelor's degree awarded for an undergraduate program in the liberal arts, or, in some cases, other disciplines. A Bachelor of Arts deg ...
degree in 1863 when he was just 20. After a brief break he attended
Harvard Law School Harvard Law School (HLS) is the law school of Harvard University, a Private university, private research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1817, Harvard Law School is the oldest law school in continuous operation in the United ...
where he earned a Bachelor of Laws degree and was admitted to the New York Bar. In 1867, with only general mathematics training and an aptitude for mechanics, he abandoned the practice of law and pursued a career as a
civil engineer A civil engineer is a person who practices civil engineering – the application of planning, designing, constructing, maintaining, and operating infrastructure while protecting the public and environmental health, as well as improving existing i ...
. He apprenticed under Octave Chanute, along with Joseph Tomlinson (civil engineer), Joseph Tomlinson, during the construction of the first bridge to cross the Missouri River, the swing-span Hannibal Bridge. Morison designed many steel truss bridges, including several crossing the Missouri River, Ohio River, and the Mississippi River. The 1892, Frisco Bridge, Memphis Bridge is considered to be his crowning achievement, the largest bridge he designed and the first to span the difficult Lower Mississippi River. Morison was a member of several important engineering committees, the most important of which was the Isthmus Canal Commission, where he was instrumental in changing its recommended location from Nicaragua to Panama. In ''The Path Between the Seas'', author David McCullough notes that in the Panama canal affair, "Morison emerges a bit like the butler at the end of the mystery--as the ever-present, frequently unobtrusive, highly instrumental fixture around whom the entire plot turned." McCullough believed that had Morison lived, Theodore Roosevelt would have asked him to take a major part in the building of the canal. In the 1890s, Morison developed a series of lectures — inspired by reading his Harvard classmate Fiske's book ''The Discovery of America'' — on the transformative effects of the new manufacturing power of that era. Though he collected these lectures for publication in 1898, they were not published until 1903, shortly after his death, under the title ''The New Epoch as Developed by the Manufacture of Power''. Morison died in his rooms at 36 West 50th Street in New York City, New York, and was buried in Peterborough, New Hampshire, Peterborough, New Hampshire, where he had a summer home (and designed the town library). He was the great-uncle of historian of technology Elting E. Morison (1909–1995).


Personality

According to David McCullough, Morison was "arrogant, inflexible, most unpopular, a man who was easy to admire from a distance." According to Elting Morison, his great uncle was rude to waiters, hired a substitute during the American Civil War, Civil War, and "invariably referred to Mexico as Pjacko." He "had, like Zeno of Elea, Zeno, a conviction that time was a solid. If he made an appointment to confer with a person at 3:15 P.M., as he always put it, at 15:15 hours, that was when they met. Those who arrived earlier waited; those who came at any time after 15:15 never conferred at all." Morison read the ''Anabasis (Xenophon), Anabasis'' in Greek, the ''Aeneid'' in Latin, and the dime novels of Archibald Clavering Gunter in English. "He thought that people who were good with animals, particularly horses, were popular with their fellows and loose in their morals. When he himself drove a horse, he brought it to a full stop by saying, 'Whoa, cow.'" One Sunday Morison walked out of church when the minister preached that silver should be coined at a ratio of 16 to 1, telling the minister that "he should never try to deal with a subject he obviously didn't understand." Of his neighbor, composer Edward MacDowell, Morison said, he was "a man with whom I had absolutely nothing in common." Between 1893 and 1897, Morison, a bachelor, built a house of about 57 rooms so, he said, that he would "have a place to eat Thanksgiving dinner and to watch the sun set over Mount Monadnock." A fellow engineer, one Fullerton L. Waldo, wrote that he hated eating lunch with Morison, "but I'd trust his judgment sooner than that of any other engineer I know."


See also

* Alton BridgeAlton Bridge, Spanning Mississippi River between IL & MO, Alton, Madison, IL
/ref> *Bellefontaine Bridge * Burlington Rail Bridge * Cairo Rail Bridge * Maroon Creek Bridge *Merchants Bridge * Frisco Bridge * Taft Bridge


References


Sources


Historic American Engineering Record (Library of Congress)
– Survey number HAER NE-2. 500+ data pages discuss Chief Engineer George S. Morison and his many bridges * Gerber, E., Prout, H. G., and Schneider, C. C. (1905). “Memoir of George Shattuck Morison.” Trans. Am. Soc. Civ. Eng., Volume 54, 513–521.


External links

*
Bridges by Morison
at Bridgehunter.com * – Partial listing of Morison's Bridges


Personal stories
by the descendant Elting E. Morison (1986) {{DEFAULTSORT:Morison, George Shattuck 1842 births 1903 deaths Phillips Exeter Academy alumni Harvard Law School alumni People from New Bedford, Massachusetts People from Peterborough, New Hampshire 19th-century American engineers American civil engineers American railroad mechanical engineers Harvard College alumni