PROFILE: Charles H. Purcell
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Chief engineer of San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge helped pioneer interstate highway system
Copyright © 2005 by E.A. KralOne of the most distinguished civil engineers of the 20th century was Charles H. Purcell, a native of North Bend, Nebraska. He became renowned as the chief engineer of California's monumental San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge, the first ever to cross San Francisco Bay.
And during his career from 1906 to 1951, the era in which the automobile emerged as a prominent factor in American society, he also was a national highway authority who helped initiate the development of the Interstate Highway System.
At first, he held ten different positions designing or supervising construction of bridges and highways in several states, mostly in the Pacific Northwest.
Notable achievements included completion in 1914 of Oregon's first paved highway, and three years later his innovative 170-foot-long concrete arch bridge on the Columbia River Highway near Portland. He was also district engineer for the U.S. Bureau of Public Roads for seven years.
In 1928, Purcell became California State Highway Engineer, and was responsible for the design and construction of the $78 million double-deck 8 1/4-mile-long bridge between San Francisco and Oakland, completed ahead of schedule in November 1936 and realization of local dreams since 1850.
The western portion of the Bay Bridge--from San Francisco to Yerba Buena Island--consists of four towers and two main suspension spans joined end-to-end and connected with a massive central anchorage. Each tower extends nearly 500 feet above water, more than the height of the Nebraska State Capitol.
Unprecedented is the depth of the central anchorage, a 500-foot-tall structure, 220 feet of which lie below the surface of the water. It is the world's largest pier.
It crosses Yerba Buena Island through a 540-foot-long tunnel, and at the time was the largest bore tunnel in the world. The dirt from the tunnel formed the landfill for adjacent Treasure Island.
The eastern portion continued to Oakland with one cantilever span 1400 feet long (regarded at present as the sixth longest cantilever span in the world) and a series of trusses.
Because of damage during the 1989 earthquake, the eastern span is now being replaced with a newly designed suspension span. The $6 billion project, a joint venture headed by Peter Kiewit Company of Omaha, may be completed by 2013.
As State Highway Engineer and later Director of Public Works, he also transformed the California Highway System from 4,800 miles of rural main roads in 1928 to 14,000 miles of vastly improved rural and urban highways by 1950.
Included among the 640 miles of metropolitan freeways at the time were the Pasadena Freeway, completed in 1940 and considered the first freeway in the West, and the world's first four-level interchange in 1953 in Los Angeles.
Thus Purcell had established California as a pioneer in metropolitan freeway development that anticipated interstate highway design standards by at least a decade.
He was also a national highway authority, serving from 1928 to 1951 as a member of the executive committee of the American Association of State Highway Officials, which worked closely with the U.S. Bureau of Public Roads, now called the Federal Highway Administration.
In 1937, he was appointed by the U.S. Secretary of Agriculture to the twelve-person Committee on Planning and Design Policies. And in 1941 he was selected by U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt to serve on a seven-man National Interregional Highway Committee, whose final report in 1944 influenced Congress that year to authorize establishment of the national system of interstate highways.
During President Dwight Eisenhower's Administration, federal funding of a 41,000-mile network of limited access expressways was authorized in 1956.
Honors were accorded to Purcell, including posthumous recognition. In November 1955, the American Society of Civil Engineers selected the Bay Bridge as one of the seven modern civil engineering wonders of the United States.
A review of the construction of the Bay Bridge may be found in Richard H. Dillon, High Steel: Building Bridges Across San Francisco Bay (Celestial Arts Publishing, 1979). A lengthy biography was published in the June 2, 1999 Wilber /NE/ Republican, pp. 5-6.
An entry on Purcell appeared in American National Biography, Supplement 1 (Oxford University Press, 2002) 493-494. And an article was published in the August 19, 2003 Omaha World Herald.
Born in 1883 at North Bend, Dodge County, Nebraska, he was one of two children who survived to adulthood of John and Mary Gillis Purcell. Though his father died three years later, Charles remained in North Bend, where he liked to draw pictures, especially bridges, and graduated from North Bend High School in 1900.
He attended the University of Nebraska-Lincoln for his freshman year, followed by one year of employment near his uncles in Chicago, then one semester at Stanford University.
After his mother's death in January 1903, he returned to the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, and earned his bachelor's degree in 1906.
In 1914, he married Minnie Pullen, daughter of a Portland, Oregon farmer. The couple had no children. Charles Henry Purcell died in Sacramento, California in 1951, just five weeks after his retirement due to ill health. His cremated remains were placed at East Lawn Memorial Park in that city.
For more information, consult "900 Famous Nebraskans" on the Internet at www.nsea.org or www.beatricene.com/gagecountymuseum or www.nebpress.com.
