Essays on the History of Transportation and Technology
Essays on the History of Transportation and Technology
Emory Kemp is the founder and director of the Institute for the History of Technology and Industrial Archaeology at West Virginia University, where he also served as a chair and professor of civil engineering and a professor of history. This collection of essays encompasses over fifty years of his research in the field of the history of technology.
Within these twelve essays, Kemp describes and analyzes nineteenth century improvements in building materials such as iron, steel, and cement; roads and bridges, especially the evolution of the suspension bridge; canals and navigable rivers, including the Ohio River and its tributaries; and water supply systems. As one of the few practicing American engineers who also researches and writes as an academic, Kemp adds an important historical context to his work by focusing not only on the construction of a structure but also on the analytical science that heralds a structure’s design and development.
Foreword, Lance E. Metz
Preface
Introduction, Robert Kapsch
1. The 1959 Wheeling Custom House: A Harbinger of Iron and Steel Skeletal Framing
2. Charles Ellet Jr. (1810-1862): Portrait of an Engineer
3. A Thoroughfare Through the Howling Wilderness: The Weston & Gauley Bridge Turnpike, Emory L. Kemp and Janet K. Kemp
4. The Pulaksi Skyway—Railway Economic Theory Applied to Superhighway Design, Dara Callender and Emory Kemp
5. James Finley and the Origins of the Modern Suspension Bridge
6. French Movable Dams in America
7. Building the Tennessee-Tombigbee Waterway
8. Bejamin Franklin Thomas and the Introduction of the French Needle Dam into the United States
9. John Jervis and the Hydraulic Design of the Old Croton Aqueduct, Emory Kemp and Edward Winant
10. The Muskingum Navigation
11. French Movable Dams on the Great Kanawha River
12. The Little Kanawha Navigation, Larry Sypolt and Emory Kemp
Acknowledgments
About the Authors
