Florence O'Sullivan c. 1635-1705? Cork-born Florence O'Sullivan was a soldier-adventurer with a record of involvement in the Caribbean on behalf of British interests before he joined the Carolina at Kinsale in 1670 on its way to a new colonial settlement on the south-eastern coast of North America. He became the second surveyor of the colony, supervising the development of the Charlestowne settlement and the setting out of the Oyster Point location that became the site of the modern city of Charleston. Maligned by sectoral interests, he survived to become a prominent landowner in the area, and his tenure as a captain of the coastal watch there is commemorated in the name Sullivan's Island.
Christopher Colles 1738-1821 Perhaps the most gifted and versatile of all of the Irish-born professionals in the early Federal period, Colles was born into a prominent family of Kilkenny stone-cutters and building supervisors. He came to America in the years immediately before the Revolution, having enjoyed a career as an architect in Ireland, where he was associated with the Italian David Ducart on projects such as the Limerick Custom House. His family background was in stonework and the service of architects and the gentry in regard to the construction of mansions and he quickly established himself in Philadelphia, where he lectured on hydraulics and pneumatics, produced a design for a steam engine, made proposals for lock navigation on inland waterways, and devised a practical delivery and distribution solution to New York's pressing scarcity of drinkable water. The British ruined his early work on this in their avenging sweep through the city, and following a brief assignment as a gunnery instructor, he bagan work on plans for a canal linking the middle reaches of the Hudson River with Lake Erie via the Mohawk River, which he surveyed as far as Wood Creek in 1785. Again his ambitions were frustrated and he spent the next quarter of a century in miscellaneous manufacturing activities while continuing to produce notes and monographs on mathematical and physical problems. A friend of Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton (who died in an 1804 duel related to the harnessing of New York's water resources), Colles provided a semaphore-based telegraph system to American forces during the war of 1812. He spent some of his later years as Superintendent of the American Academy of Fine Arts, and died in relative poverty in 1821. His portrait is to be found in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Thomas Freeman 1764-1821 This exceptional Irish-born master of measurement gained the acquaintance and confidence of major figures in the early Federal period, including Alexander Hamilton. An early surveyor of the site for the Federal capital, he soon became the leader of major expeditions to map the Red River Valley, establish the Alabama-Tennessee boundary, and survey all lands south of the Tennessee River.
Michael Tuomey 1805-1858 Born in Cork, where he was home-schooled with the assistance of a gifted grandmother, this natural scientist worked first as a teacher in England and Virginia before embarking in the early 1840s on a journey of geological discovery that brought him into contact with the leading minds of the day. His growing reputation led to pioneering work as state surveyor (in South Carolina and Alabama) and university professor. His surveys and discoveries led to the establishment of several major industries and infrastructural projects in these states during the next century and a half, including the Ravenel Bridge in Charleston Harbour, opened in May 2005.
William Mulholland 1855-1935 Born in Belfast but raised in Dublin, William Mulholland emigrated to New York at the age of fifteen, spending some years at sea before taking up a job as a ditch digger in the developing city of Los Angeles in the late 1870s. Night classes allowed him to add to his knowledge, and within a short time he was working as a designer and supervisor of hydraulic systems for the city, being appointed its chief engineer at the age of forty and gaining nationwide notice for his innovative sluicing concept of dam construction at the Silver Lake reservoir, completed in 1906. For the next twenty years he worked on implementing a plan to provide a secure water supply to the fast-growing city, a vision that was reealised with the completion of the controversial Los Angeles Aqueduct that transported water from the Owens River in the Inyo Mountains 238 miles to the north. Although his career and reputation were badly affected by the collapse of the St. Francis Dam in 1928 with the loss of 500 lives, Mulholland's acceptance of reponsibility, resignation and pro-active investigation of the safety of other dams in the system meant that he con tinued to enjoy respect and regard among peers and public alike. He lived to the age of 87, honored in his last months for his early work on the 242-mile Colorado Aqueduct, dedicated in the year of his death and completed six years later. Mulholland Drive in Malibu is named for him.
Michael O'Shaughnessy 1864-1934 Born on the Limerick-Tipperary border and educated at the Queen’s Colleges in Cork and Galway, O'Shaughnessy worked as a railroad engineer after emigrating to America. He specialised in the construction of small-gauge systems, working on tunnel construction in Hawaii, where he was responsible for a fifty-mile conduit as part of an island-wide irrigation system. He arrived in San Francisco in time to witness the total destruction of the city’s water infrastructure in the earthquake of 1906. In planning a replacement, the city fathers looked to a vision which would not only provide for the city’s urgent domestic needs, but also anticipate the hoped-for resurgence of the entire area and its commercial/industrial base. The proposal that emerged encompassed not only the construction of a massive reservoir, but also the building of a dam for power generation, a pipeline installation to carry water 160 miles from its source in Yosemite National Park, and a distribution network for the electricity generated. By the time the proposal was accepted and financed, after much lobbying by O'Shaughnessy in Washington, he had been appointed City Engineer. In the meantime an enterprising journalist, who was also an engineer, asked why he had to suffer a twice-a-day ferry ride to Marin County, when a bridge would speed the journeys of himself and thousands of other inhabitants of the area. O’Shaughnessy responded positively and researched the costs of such a project, which looked prohibitive until a young engineer named Strauss produced a 4000-foot long suspension bridge design which, he said, could be delivered for a quarter of the lowest previous estimate. O’Shaughnessy set about his lobbying mission again and in November 1932, the contract for what would become the Golden Gate Bridge was awarded. He retired in the same year and two years later the Hetch-Hetchy Project, as it came to be known, delivered the first water and electricity from the centre of the vast 600-square-mile watershed that he had designed.
In the early years of colonization and independence on the North American continent, the boundaries between the interests and work of discoverers, surveyors, scientists and engineers were not always obvious. Territorial expansion and land speculation required a commercial instinct, a taste for adventure and good surveying skills (George Washington had all three)
Measuring, Mining and Managing
