Huntington Fund for the Heritage of
Civil Engineering
The Huntington Fund for the Heritage of Civil Engineering was established in 1994 to enable the Huntington Library to be a pivotal research center in the study of the history of civil engineering and its social and cultural impact. The Fund was created through a generous gift of Trent R. Dames, co-founder of the international environmental and engineering consulting firm, Dames & Moore.
It is the mission of the Fund to:
- Advance the collection, preservation, and access of civil engineering rare books, photographs, drawings, manuscripts, and other significant research material at the Huntington.
- Encourage research use of the Huntington’s collections in order to further scholarship in the history of civil engineering and its social impact.
- Increase awareness and understanding of the history and heritage of civil engineering among scholars, civil engineers, and the general public.
The Fund will act as an endowment, the income of which will allow the Library to support fellowships for scholars studying the history and impact of civil engineering, to hold various lectures and conferences as well as develop exhibits that promote an understanding of the role and impact of civil engineering, and to preserve and catalog historical civil engineering collections obtained by the Library. An Advisory Board of civil engineers and historians of engineering has been established and the activities of the Fund for Civil Engineering will be managed by Dan Lewis, the Huntington’s Curator for the History of Science and Technology.
Civil Engineering Research Materials at the Huntington Library
The Huntington, long known as a great research center for history and literature, is also a superb location for the study of the history of civil engineering, particularly in the American and British contexts. Civil engineering is a relatively modern concept, developed around 1750 to describe engineering projects (such as the building of roads) usually undertaken by military engineers, but neither exclusively military in purpose nor executed by soldiers. The people involved in these projects came to be known as civil engineers. The 1828 charter of the London Institute of Civil Engineers describes civil engineering as:
the art of directing the great sources of power in nature for the use and convenience of man, as the means of production and of traffic in states, both for external and internal trade, as applied in the construction of roads, bridges, aqueducts, canals, river navigation and docks for internal intercourse and exchange, and in the construction of ports, harbours, moles, breakwaters and lighthouses, and in the art of navigation by artificial power for the purposes of commerce, and in the construction and adaptation of machinery, and in the drainage of cities and towns.
Over the years such new developments as railroads and electrical and hydraulic power systems came to be included within the broad domain of civil engineering. Once we see that civil engineering includes such a wide array of subjects, it is not hard to imagine that The Huntington would naturally contain much of interest in this field within its large holdings. And by focussing not just on the history of civil engineering per se, but also on its importance in social and cultural history, the significance of the Fund is quite substantial.
The Huntington's collection of early printed books contains a number of titles related to engineering and technology, including works by Robertus Valturius (De Re Militari, 1472), Vitruvius Pollio (De Architectura, 1495), Georgius Agricola (De Re Metallica, 1556), Augustino Ramelli (Le Diverse et Artificiose Machine, 1588), Domenico Fontana (Della Transportatione dell'Obelisco Vaticano, 1590), Giovanni Branca (Le Machine, 1629) and Giovanni Battista Piranesi (Le Antichità Romane, 1756). The rare book collection also includes many works relating to early English and American surveying and to the construction of British and American transportation systems including classics such as Nicholas Wood's Practical Treatise on Rail-Roads of 1825. The John Haskell Kemble Collection relating to maritime history has a great number of sources on the shipbuilding industry, harbors, and coastal surveys. The Huntington, due to Henry E. Huntington's involvement with the railroad industry, also has major holdings regarding the development of railroads in the American Southwest. The printed book collection supplements these materials by containing information on early British railroads and railroad development throughout the entire United States. The Library's great interest in the history of California and the American West has resulted in the assemblage of a vast repository of information regarding mining engineering, petroleum engineering, the papers of major Southern California architectural offices, papers regarding the building of the Colorado River aqueducts, and a number of papers of influential engineers, surveyors, and other individuals involved in engineering projects.
Civil Engineering History Fellowships
The Fund for the Heritage of Civil Engineering supports a number of fellowships for work in the history of civil engineering. Grantees will be expected to spend their fellowship period in residence at the Huntington working primarily with the Huntington’s collections but also using other local archives as appropriate. The fellowship period is usually one month, but significant projects can take up to three months. The history of civil engineering is considered to encompass all traditional areas of the discipline including those dealing with, but not limited to, construction, transportation, hydraulic engineering, power, and public health. Applications for historical research in the cultural and social impact of civil engineering projects are also encouraged. To apply for the Civil Engineering History fellowships, follow the standard procedure for Huntington fellowships and indicate in your cover letter that you wish to be considered for a Civil Engineering History Fellowship. If you need the latest information on how to apply for a Huntington fellowship, you can find it on our Fellowships page.
Current projects involving the Fund
- There will be a lecture on the evening of Thursday, April 4, 2002, at 7:30 PM, at the Huntington, by John van der Zee, entitled “The Golden Gate Bridge and its Forgotten Engineer." Mr. Van der Zee’s book Mr. Van der Zee’s book "The Gate: The True Story of the Design and Construction of the Golden Gate Bridge" spent 22 weeks on the San Francisco Chronicle's bestseller list in the 1980s, and was used as source work for the series "Building Big," broadcast nationally on PBS in October, 2000. van der Zee, a former advertising executive from San Francisco, was given access to the papers of O.H. Amman, Chief Engineer of the George Washington Bridge, Chairman of the New York Port Authority, and a consulting engineer on the Golden Gate Bridge. These materials consisted of twenty-eight volumes of engineers' reports, memos and corrrespondence, all presumably lost on Sept. 11, 2001.
Other activities of the fund currently include the following work:
- Preparation of a guide to research in the history of science and technology at the Huntington Library
- Processing of the Samuel Brooks Morris Papers at the Huntington Library
More information about the Fund
For further questions about the Fund, please contact Dan Lewis, Ph.D., Curator of Science, Technology & Transportation
Links to other sites relating to the history of civil engineering
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