Ernest Leslie Ransome

Ernest Leslie Ransome (* 1844 in Ipswich ; † 1917 in Plainfield , New Jersey ) was a British-born American civil engineer, contractor and pioneer of reinforced concrete in the USA.

Life

The grandfather had a factory for cast iron parts (especially plows) and was a Quaker , the father Frederick Ransome (1818-1893) had a factory for patented concrete building blocks (made of sand and pulverized flint ) in Ipswich , where his son Ernest Ransome an apprenticeship started. Otherwise, he was self-taught as an engineer or learned from the engineers in his family circle. Ernest Ransome went to the United States in 1870 and was an overseer at the Pacific Stone Company in San Francisco , which manufactured concrete blocks based on his father's patent. Ransome gave himself the designation superintendent , the company was probably a family business of the Ransomes and was abandoned in 1875. Later he had his own companies or companies with partners such as Ransome and Smith (from 1888) with the financial participation of the borax entrepreneur Francis M. Smith (1846-1931). From 1870 to 1897 he lived in San Francisco and Oakland (from 1880). In about 1897, Ransome moved to the east coast of New York (Brooklyn) and New Jersey to oversee his major construction projects.

In 1884 he registered a patent on reinforced concrete with helical iron bars as reinforcement and he also received further patents for reinforced concrete structures. He used the method as early as 1880 when building the Masonic Hall in Stockton , which is known from his book, but apparently no longer exists. In 1888 he built the Bourn & Wise Wine Cellar in St. Helena , Napa County , his first collaboration with San Francisco architects George Percy and Frederick Hamilton . Today it is a campus of the Culinary Institute of America . In 1890/91 he used his reinforced concrete development for two small bridges (pedestrian underpasses) in Golden Gate Park in San Francisco ( Alvord Lake Bridge , Conservatory Bridge ), which still exist today and are the first reinforced concrete bridges in the USA. Architects were again Percy and Hamilton, as before in the building of the California Academy of Sciences in 1889, but which was destroyed in the earthquake in 1906 (Ransome only built the corridors that surrounded the atrium on each floor). Reinforced concrete was met with skepticism in the USA at the time. In 1884 he built the Arctic Oil Works in San Francisco out of reinforced concrete. A breakthrough for Ransome came when, in 1902, after a fire in the building he built for the Pacific Coast Borax Refinery in Bayonne, New Jersey, in 1902, its reinforced concrete structures proved to be resilient. Ransome had previously built the Pacific Coast Borax Company building on Alameda Island in San Francisco Bay for Smith, but it was short-lived since the company relocated production to the east coast in 1897. Even its two buildings (Leland Stanford Junior Museum of Art and the Women's Dormitory Sequoia Hall , 1891) at Stanford University survived the 1906 San Francisco earthquake , unlike many of the university's brick buildings, but were unlike what was Ransome in his book claimed but badly affected. The 1903 Ingalls Building in Cincinnati was the first all-reinforced concrete skyscraper in the United States. It had 15 floors and still exists today. It was built by the local construction company Elzner and Anderson. The largest building constructed by Ransome & Smith was the United Shoe Machinery Factory in Beverly, Massachusetts (1902).

Alvord Lake Bridge, Golden Gate Park, San Francisco

He also had patents on concrete mixers and produced them.

While still in England he married Mary Dawson in 1868, with whom he had eight children. His son Frederick Leslie Ransome was a well-known geologist. His second oldest son Bernard Ransome (1874-1946) also had a construction company (Ransome Crummey and later Ransome Construction Company) and took over his father's business on the west coast when he went to the east coast. The Ransome Company still exists in California today. You were a large construction company (around 1909 to 750 workers and 1,800 horses) and mainly engaged in railway construction (Ocean Shore Railroad from San Francisco to Santa Cruz, 1906 to 1920, depots of the Western Pacific Railroad in Sacramento and Oakland). Ernest Ransome was an advisor to his son's company and probably also financially involved.

Ingalls Building, Cincinnati 1906, the first reinforced concrete skyscraper in the USA

Fonts

with Alexis Saurbrey: Reinforced Concrete Buildings. McGraw Hill 1912.

literature

Stephen Mikesell, Ernest Leslie Ransome: A Vital California Engineer and Builder. In: California History. Volume 96, Issue 3, 2019, pp. 77-96 ( online ).
Carl W. Condit: The First Reinforced-Concrete Skyscraper: The Ingalls Building in Cincinnati and Its Place in Structural History. In: Technology and Culture. Volume 9, No. 1, 1968, p. 6.

Web links

Individual evidence

↑ Life data according to Stephen Mikesell, Ernest Leslie Ransome: A Vital California Engineer and Builder. In: California History. Volume 96, Issue 3, 2019, pp. 77-96.

personal data
SURNAME	Ransome, Ernest Leslie
BRIEF DESCRIPTION	American civil engineer
DATE OF BIRTH	1844
PLACE OF BIRTH	Ipswich
DATE OF DEATH	1917
Place of death	Plainfield , New Jersey

[1] Life data according to Stephen Mikesell, Ernest Leslie Ransome: A Vital California Engineer and Builder. In: California History. Volume 96, Issue 3, 2019, pp. 77-96.