Biography
Waddell was born in Port Hope, Ontario, Canada in 1854. He obtained his first degree in civil engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York in 1875, and soon traveled to Canada to work with that country's Marine Department of the Dominion before spending some time with the Canadian Pacific Railway.
He returned to the United States where he designed mines for a West Virginian coal company. In 1878, he returned to Rensselaer and taught mechanics courses until 1880. Waddell then traveled west, obtaining additional degrees from McGill University in Montreal, Quebec, and spending some time working at the Raymond & Campbell firm in Council Bluffs, Iowa.
In July 1882, he was hired as a foreign advisor by the Meiji government of the Empire of Japan and taught at the Tokyo Imperial University for a few years while he wrote two books.
Waddell returned to the United States in 1886, founding a new design company the next year in 1887 and establishing himself in Kansas City, Missouri. Waddell took on a number of challenging projects and soon demonstrated a strong ability.
Lifting and swinging bridges had been used for generations by this time, though not on the scale we know them today. Waddell was the first to come up with a modern design, originally intended to span a short channel across Minnesota Point into the harbor of Duluth, Minnesota. His design won a contest put on by the city in 1892, but the War Department objected to the design. The city built an aerial transporter bridge in that location in 1905. In 1929, it was remodeled into the Aerial Lift Bridge, similar to Waddell's design.
While the city of Chicago was the first to build a lift bridge of Waddell's design, completed in 1893, the second had to wait for his partnership with mechanical engineer John Lyle Harrington, formed in 1907. The firm of Waddell & Harrington designed a vertical lift bridge (since demolished) for the Iowa Central Railway over the Mississippi River at Keithsburg, Illinois, in 1909. The pair designed more than two dozen more vertical lift bridges over the next five years before dissolving their partnership in 1914. John Lyle Harrington founded Harrington, Howard & Ash (today HNTB Corporation) in 1914, while Waddell worked independently, joined in 1917 by his son, then doing business as Waddell & Son.
In 1920, Waddell moved to New York, New York, and consulted on various projects there including the Goethals Bridge and Marine Parkway Bridge. In 1927, he formed a new partnership, Hardesty & Hanover, which company continues to exist.
His wife died in 1934, and he died four years later, in 1938, in New York City.
Read more about this topic: John Alexander Low Waddell
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