Frank Crowe
Frank Crowe or Francis Trenholm Crowe (born October 12, 1882 in Trenholmville , Estrie , Québec , † February 26, 1946 in Redding (California) ) was an American engineer. As chief engineer and senior site manager, he was involved in the construction of the Hoover Dam . During that time he was the operations manager of Six Companies , the construction company overseeing the construction project.
He was born in Trenholmville, attended the "Governor Dummer Academy", and studied at the University of Maine , where he received a degree in civil engineering in 1905 . The “Francis Crowe Society” of the university is named in his honor. Crowe became interested in the American West during a lecture given by Frank Weymouth, a visiting professor at the United States Bureau of Reclamation (USBR). He signed up for a summer job before the end of the lecture. With this job began a 20 year long career at USBR that changed the face of the American West. In 1924 Crowe left the Bureau of Reclamation to go to the construction company "Morrison-Knudsen" in Boise, Idaho. Morrison-Knudsen had previously briefly partnered with the larger Utah Construction Company completed to dams to build.
While working on the Arrowrock Dam in Idaho , Crowe introduced two techniques that are essential to the construction of large dams. The first was a pneumatic conveying system for transporting concrete and the second was a system of wire ropes that could be used to pump the pneumatically conveyed concrete to any point on the construction site. Using this technique, Crowe constructed several of the major dams in the American West including the Hoover Dam , Parker Dam 150 miles below Hoover, the Copper Basin and Gene Wash dams on the Colorado River Aqueduct, and the Shasta Dam in northern California. All of these dams were important, but none reached the importance of the Hoover Dam.
Crowe retired in 1944 from his 81 km² ranch near Redding , California, where he died of a heart attack on February 26, 1946.
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The Hoover construction project and Frank Crowe's role (played by actor Jay Benedict) were dramatized in an episode ( docu-drama ) of the 2003 BBC television series Seven Wonders of the Industrial World .
The construction and Frank Crowe's role in it was also shown in the series of The History Channel America: The Story of Us in episode 9 with the title "Bust".
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- ↑ America The Story of Us - Episode 9: BUST - ( Memento of the original from October 1, 2012 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , History.com, accessed November 26, 2012
Web links
- Seven Wonders of the Industrial World
- Frank Crowe , accessed November 26, 2012
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Crowe, Frank |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Crowe, Francis Trenholm |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | American engineer, chief engineer and senior site manager at the Hoover Dam |
| DATE OF BIRTH | October 12, 1882 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Trenholmville , Quebec |
| DATE OF DEATH | February 26, 1946 |
| Place of death | Redding, California |