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This chapter describes Octave Chanute's search for accomplishments beyond a successful career. While the engineering profession gave him administrative experience, personal contacts, and status, he strived for higher goals and wanted to emulate European civil engineers, who did not just design public works but sought new challenges and possessed the energy to fight for innovation. Envisioning his career, Chanute wanted freedom to realize his personal capabilities. He wished to solve problems, to attract clients who would seek his advice as the authoritative voice on special projects, and to advise in lawsuits as an expert engineering witness. Chanute also sought recognition and respect from his peers. The chapter details Chanute's membership in the American Society of Civil Engineers; his involvement in the evolution of New York City's urban transit system; his interest in aeronautics; and his life as an independent consulting engineer.

This chapter focuses on Octave Chanute's growing interest in wood preservation. In 1880, the Department of Forestry statistics forecast that the nation's supply of white pine would be exhausted in eleven years and hardwood within twenty-five. Chanute was arguably the first American to show his concern for preserving natural resources; he demonstrated the commercial feasibility of preserving wood to slow deforestation. Gradually, railroaders recognized the need to make timber last as long as possible and they realized that increasing the life of ties decreased the cost of track repair. Chanute and his partner Joseph Card designed and erected the first large-scale American commercial wood preservation works for the Santa Fe in Las Vegas, New Mexico, in 1885; for the Union Pacific in Laramie, Wyoming, in July 1886; and for the Rock Island and other customers in Chicago in May 1886. These were the first and only works treating ties on a large scale until other American railroads followed more than a decade later.

This chapter details the start of Octave Chanute's journey toward becoming a civil engineer. Sixteen-year-old Octave read that engineers working for the expanding railroads needed to possess universal knowledge. To become a civil engineer he had much to learn, but he felt sure that intelligent and earnest work would provide his key to success. The remainder of the chapter covers various events in Octave's life including his apprenticeship on the Hudson River Railroad; his marriage to Annie James in 1857; his real estate investments; his move to Peoria, Illinois, in 1854; and his roles in the construction of the Peoria & Oquawka Railroad, Pittsburgh, Fort Wayne & Chicago Railroad, Ohio & Mississippi Railroad; Chicago & Alton Railroad, and the Union Stock Yards in Chicago.

This chapter seeks to revise the account of who built Bombay by introducing a new set of actors—Indian civil engineers who worked for the government and who also participated in the construction of major civic buildings that represented the Raj. They have been long neglected not only because their work and biographies are not well documented, but also because they have no place in this narrative. The chapter focuses on the career of one individual, Indian architect and engineer Khan Bahadur Muncherji C. Murzban. It shows that Murzban did not simply superintend the construction of buildings in Bombay; he was the architect of several Victorian buildings in Bombay.

This chapter details events following Octave Chanute's appointment as chief engineer of Erie Railway in February 1873. He also assumed additional duties as the assistant general superintendent and superintendent of motive power and rolling stock, weathering corruption, labor disturbance, rate discrimination, bankruptcies, and ever-increasing regulation in an atmosphere of cutthroat competition. Chanute also designed a bridge to connect Bradford, Pennsylvania, with the mainline in the north across the Kinzua Creek's deep ravine. This 302-foot-tall viaduct, with its single track, was Chanute's most spectacular bridge. Its bold design was of fascinating beauty, and the airy structure, with its elegant uprights, did not look as strong as it actually was. To watch a fully loaded coal train move over this “unsafe” looking viaduct was a curious spectacle, telling a triumphant tale of modern engineering.

This chapter details the selection of Octave Chanute to design and build a lasting bridge across the unbridged Missouri River at Kansas City. The offer to bridge the Missouri, the most difficult of all navigable streams, was a compliment for Chanute, but also a formidable challenge to his ambition as a civil engineer. The completion of the bridge called for the construction of about four hundred miles of connecting roads, bringing urbanization to the Kansas frontier. The thirty-seven-year-old Chanute built this rail system and connected it with eastern railroads, bringing profit to both systems. During the first 230 days of operation, 5,263 locomotives had pulled their load across the bridge, and $5,706 had been collected in tolls from street traffic. The chapter also describes Chanute's appointment as chief engineer of the Missouri River, Fort Scott & Gulf Railroad and his involvement in construction of the Kansas City & Santa Fe Railroad, Galveston Railroad, and Atchison & Nebraska Railroad.

This chapter traces the rise of civil engineers as federal employees within the Federal Inspectorate for Works to Combat Drought (Inspetoria Federal de Obras Contra as Secas), and the influence of August Comte’s positivism on their approach to sertão development. It outlines the priorities and accomplishments of IFOCS’s first director, Miguel Arrojado Lisboa, and the climate theories and regional development models that guided him—most notably the work of the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation. The analysis highlights that both elite and popular resistance to smallholder irrigated cultivation influenced the drought agency’s preference for dam-building over other development efforts. National resistance to aiding the sertão is emphasized, along with the need drought engineers felt to retain the support of northeastern legislators—by providing them the infrastructure landowners desired—in the face of southern Brazilians’ opposition to supporting the drought agency. The chapter closely examines the experience of engineers on the front lines of drought aid: their disillusionment in the face of extreme misery and inequality, and their negotiations on behalf of the men “enrolled” as workers on their public works projects. Two final sections focus on drought-related policy decisions and debates under northeastern President Epitácio Pessoa during the 1920s.

This chapter details Octave Chanute's contributions to the development of aeronautics. Early in his working life, Chanute had become interested in the unconventional topic of manned flight, but in the interest of his career and social standing, he did not discuss it publicly. Now approaching what he considered the end of his professional career, this seemed an opportune time to investigate mechanical flight. In the mid-1890s Octave Chanute developed the most modern and successful glider up to that time. He systematically approached the problems necessary for flight and had moved solutions forward through experimentation, observation, and communication. Chanute had also begun an international conduit, vital for the exchange of ideas and encouragement as the invention of the airplane evolved.

This chapter challenges some common understandings of Asian and Japanese societies' relationship to the natural environment. It begins with a consideration of natural forces that shaped the Echigo Plain—what it calls “natural construction”—and goes on to discuss some of the ways in which human society has sought to alter the plain to make it safer for human habitation, with particular emphasis on efforts to ameliorate flooding. It looks at Japan's history of reliance on the construction of riparian facilities to address flood hazard risks as well as to provide water for irrigation and urban populations. The chapter describes several civil engineering projects that illustrate the important role played by the controlling urge even in premodern times before turning to the Okōtsu Diversion Channel spanning the years 1870 and 1931. It argues that the Okōtsu Diversion Channel and similar projects provide evidence of the ways riparian construction altered the environment.

This chapter examines the history and politics of watershed management around the Panama Canal. It situates the emergence of canal-related water scarcity concerns and the new administrative response—watershed management—within the historical context of the development of forest hydrology science, institutional tensions between civil engineers and foresters around water management, and the global dissemination of “watershed” as a concept. Drawing on archival and ethnographic research, the chapter explores the sociopolitical challenges and conflicts around establishing a new administrative watershed region across a space where the Panamanian state had previously pursued development through agriculture. Tensions between canal authorities and rural people have turned on the different ways that environments have been incorporated into transportation and agricultural infrastructures. Using a political ecology approach, the chapter argues that Panamanian forests were transformed into naturalinfrastructure through the organizational work of linking rural landscapes with an engineered system and national and international institutions.

This chapter details Octave Chanute's contributions to the effort to develop flying machines. By the early days of the twentieth century, the ancient taboo of flight slowly emerged as a thoroughly modern inquiry of science. To realize his personal goal of witnessing sustained mechanical flight, Chanute freely shared what he had learned; for him, technical information was a public commodity and he impressed on his correspondents the need to share what they had discovered so that future investigators could avail themselves of the known and take problems to the next level. By linking his many correspondents into an informal network, Chanute provided motivation and became the focal point of a far-reaching international community of flying machine experimenters.

The introduction situates the story of African American beaches within the broader social and environmental history of the coastal South. It explains why black landownership proliferated along southern coasts and waterways in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries, and how the coastal South during this period differed in key respects from the region as a whole. It surveys the landscape of racial segregation and black exclusion in leisure and recreational spaces, and explains how black beaches served a vital function in the forging of black communities and cultures under Jim Crow. It introduces the book’s main themes, including the concept of “coastal capitalism,” and discusses the important legislative acts, federal agencies, and social, economic, and technological changes and developments that were instrumental in facilitating its rise.

This chapter details the early years of Octave Chanute. In 1838, six-year-old Octave arrived in America with his father Joseph Chanut, who had accepted an offer to teach in one of the three major colleges in antebellum Louisiana. The eldest of three, Octave left the security of his life in Paris, where he lived with his mother, grandmother, and two younger brothers, to move to America with a father he barely knew. A new life, so different and not Parisian at all, began for Joseph and Octave. Joseph home-schooled his son, and his French-speaking colleagues supplied a teaching curriculum according to their expertise, usually communicating in their mother tongue. They not only taught the youngster to read and write, but also to tell the truth and observe the general rules of etiquette. In September 1846, Octave entered the Coudert Lyceum in New York for an education different than what he had received from his father and other professors in Louisiana. After graduating in August 1848 with a degree similar to a high school diploma, Octave selected the Hudson River Railroad as his path into the future.