Stephen Harriman Long

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Stephen Harriman Long (born December 30, 1784 in Hopkinton , New Hampshire , † September 4, 1864 in Alton , Illinois ) was an American explorer , geographer , surveyor , civil and railway engineer. He explored the Midwest , designed locomotives and was one of the pioneers of structural engineering in the USA .

Stephen H. Long after a painting by Charles Willson Peale, 1819

Life

Long studied from 1805 at Dartmouth College with a bachelor's degree in 1809 and a master's degree (MA) in 1812. In between he was a teacher in Pennsylvania and New Hampshire. From 1815 he was a lieutenant in the US Army Corps of Engineers (under the direction of General Joseph Swift ), where he taught mathematics for a year at West Point , and from 1816 major under the command of Andrew Jackson , who had just defeated the British in New Orleans . In 1817 he led an expedition that explored the upper reaches of the Mississippi as far as the Saint Anthony Falls . In 1819 he married Martha Hodgkiss and in the same year led the Yellowstone Expedition to explore the Missouri River to Yellowstone (also named Atkinson-Long Expedition after the two commanders Long and Colonel Henry Atkinson - who commanded the soldiers involved). They started in St. Louis with a steamboat specially developed by Long. They came to Council Bluff and set up their winter quarters there ( Engineer Cantonment ). Overall, however, the expedition turned out to be a costly failure. In 1820, instead of continuing the exploration of the Missouri, he led an expedition to explore areas in the Midwest that had come to the United States in the Louisiana Purchase , in particular they looked for the sources of the Arkansas River , Red River and Platte River . Areas that bordered Spanish territory were explored, which was a political priority at the time. He could not explore the Red River because he encountered hostile Indians. As in his previous expedition, he accurately described the native Indian tribes. In his final report from 1820, he considered the prairie areas from Nebraska to Oklahoma to be uninhabitable (he called them Great Desert ) and recommended them as buffer areas to colonial powers in North America such as Spain, Russia and England. In 1823 he led an expedition to the border area with Canada , explored the upper reaches of the Mississippi, the Red River of the North and the Minnesota River . His expedition maps were later important for planning new railway lines.

Meeting with the Pawnees in the Yellowstone Expedition 1819

In addition to his topographical work for the military, he advised railway companies as an engineer, for example during the construction of the first lines of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad . In 1826 he received his first patent for a steam locomotive, which was followed by many more. In 1832 he was involved in founding a short-lived company to manufacture his locomotives, which gave up due to production problems, and in 1836 he organized a survey of a possible railway line from Belfast (Maine) to Québec for the state of Maine , which also failed. From 1837 to 1840 he was a senior engineer in the construction of the Western and Atlantic Railroad in Georgia and was on leave from the military during this time. In 1838 he became a major member of the newly formed US Corps of Topographical Engineers, in which he became a colonel in 1861 and at the same time senior topographical engineer in the US Army. In 1863 it went up again in the US Corps of Engineers. In the Civil War he was on the side of the northern states .

Long dealt with bridge construction and designed the Jackson Bridge near Baltimore in 1830 , which he published. He developed the statics of the truss bridges he designed and acquired several patents. With his writings on bridge construction, he is one of the pioneers of structural engineering in the USA alongside Squire Whipple . Long's designs and recommendations received praise from Karl Culmann and, in the 20th century, from Stephen Timoshenko .

Fonts

  • Edwin James : Account of an expedition from Pittsburgh to the Rocky Mountains: performed in the years 1819 and '20, by order of te Hon. JC Calhoun, sec'y of war, under the command of Major Stephen H. Long: from the notes of Major Long, Mr. T. Say, and other gentlemen of the exploring party , 2 volumes plus Atlas, Philadelphia 1822/23.
  • Description of the Jackson Bridge together with directions to builders of wooden framed bridges . Sands and Neilson, Baltimore 1830.
  • Observations on wooden, or frame bridges . 1830/31.
  • Narrative of the proceedings of the Board of engineers, of the Baltimore and Ohio rail road company, from its organization to its dissolution, together with an exposition of facts, illustrative of the conduct of sundry individuals . William A. Francis, Baltimore 1830.
  • Description of Colonel Long's bridges with a series of directions to bridge builders . 1836, Philadelphia 1841.
  • Report on a reconnaissance for a rail road from the coast of Maine to Quebec : Respectfully inscribed to His Excellency, Robert P. Dunlop, Gov. of Maine, 1836.
  • Specification of certain improvements in the construction of wooden, or frame bridges . 1837.
  • Improved brace bridge . 1839.
  • Specifications of a brace bridge and of a suspension bridge . Philadelphia 1839.
  • Voyage in a six-oared skiff to the Falls of Saint Anthony in 1817 . Henry B. Ashmead, Book and Job Printer, 1860; 2nd edition 1889.
  • James's Account of SH Long's expedition, 1819-1820 . 4 volumes. AH Clark Cleveland, Ohio 1905.
  • Navigational wireless . Chapman and Hall, London 1927.

literature

  • WH Goetzmann: Army Exploration in the American West, 1803-1863 . Yale University Press, New Haven 1959, 2nd edition, University of Nebraska Press, 1979.
  • Richard George Wood: Stephen Harriman Long 1784–1864: Army engineer, explorer, inventor . Arthur Clark, Glendale, California 1966.
  • Lucile M. Kane, June D. Holmquist, Carolyn Gilman (Editors): The northern expeditions of Stephen H. Long: the journals of 1817 and 1823 and related documents . Minnesota Historical Society Press 1978.
  • DA Gasparini, C. Prevost: Early nineteenth century developments in truss bridge design in Britain, France and the United States . In: Construction History , Volume 5 (1989), pp. 21-33.
  • FE Griggs, AJ DeLuzio: Stephen H. Long and Squire Whipple: the first American structural engineers . In: Journal of Structural Engineering , Volume 121 (1995), pp. 1352-1361
  • Karl-Eugen Kurrer : The History of the Theory of Structures. Searching for Equilibrium , Ernst & Sohn 2018, p. 65f and p. 1024f (biography), ISBN 978-3-433-03229-9

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ This was possible from 1824 through a resolution of the Congress for Military Engineers
personal data
SURNAME Long, Stephen Harriman
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American civil engineer, railroad engineer, geographer, and explorer
DATE OF BIRTH December 30, 1784
PLACE OF BIRTH Hopkinton, New Hampshire
DATE OF DEATH 4th September 1864
Place of death Alton (Illinois)