Jerry Kuntz (Writer)

Exploring American History through Unique Individuals

Archive for the category “Diving”

18 Mar 2016

Poignant Letter of Reference

In the summer of 1862, a wagon-maker from Charles City, Iowa returned to his former home near Detroit, Michigan in order to volunteer for the United States Army, now at war with the South. His name was Elliot P. Harrington, and six years earlier he had accomplished the most stunning feat in the history of underwater exploration to that point. However, his fame had been a brief few weeks, and did not earn him any great reward. He retired from diving and moved to Iowa to earn a living as a mechanic.

When war came, Harrington knew he had a skill that might be needed–underwater work. But he needed to document his background in that vocation. Therefore, he contacted the people who best remembered his exploits and could vouch for him: officers of the American Express Company. The following letter of reference is included in the Charles Harrington papers collection at SUNY Fredonia:

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“Office of American Express Company, Buffalo, Aug 8, 1862,

To Whom it May Concern,

In the month of August, 1852, the money chest of the American Express Company was sunk in the steamer Atlantic to the depth of one hundred and sixty feet off Long Point, Lake Erie. Was recovered by E. P. Harrington in the month of June, 1856.

For American Express Co., William B. Peck”

With this credential, Harrington was assigned work on the Union wrecking steamship Dirigo.

 

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20 Jan 2016

Bridge Engineering Nerds

I’m not a bridge engineering nerd (yet), but I have been following the new Tappan Zee Bridge construction for one reason: the “I Lift NY” derrick-crane, which is officially the Left Coast Lifter.

Here’s what it looked like yesterday from the Nyack public viewing area:

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The Left Coast Lifter is one of the largest, if not The Largest, floating derricks in the world. As such, it is the direct descendant of Bishop’s Patent Floating Derrick, which is mentioned prominently in my forthcoming book, The Heroic Age of Diving. I’m always impressed when engineers try to do something big that has never been done before, and that is what these two vessels have in common.

Here’s a video of it’s first lift job at the Tappan Zee site:

 

I recently learned that the Left Coast Lifter‘s first job out in San Francisco was not bridge construction, but salvage of a sunken tugboat. That puts it right in line with the intent of the Bishop derricks I mention in my book.

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22 Sep 2015

Albert D. Bishop and the Great Chain

Albert D. Bishop was a marine engineer from the 1830s to the 1880s, based in Brooklyn, and best known as the inventor of Bishop’s Patent Floating Derrick. His derrick was designed to use a series of block and tackle mechanisms suspended from a mast in order to lift chains wrapped around sunken hulls. As the derrick on a barge lifted a sunken ship, the barge was counter-weighted using either a catamaran or flooded water compartments.

Bishop’s design made it possible for a floating platform to lift very heavy weights with a minimum of effort and expense. It made a big impact on the business of wrecking/salvaging.

Bishop was one of the marine engineers engaged to recover the steamer Atlantic after it sank in Lake Erie in 1852. Bishop first tried to lift the wreck of another steamer, the Erie, and suffered a spectacular disaster, described in my upcoming book The Heroic Age of Diving.

Following his Lake Erie debacle, Bishop returned to the New York area and managed a successful wrecking business. He was never known to have chased after treasure ships–but in 1855 he was tempted to attempt retrieval of a valued icon of the American Revolution: links of the Great Chain that had been erected across the Hudson River near West Point to prevent passage of British war vessels.

In the years leading up to 1855, huge iron links were auctioned as remnants of the Great Chain (many of which were counterfeit), but it was thought that much of the chain was still on the bottom of the Hudson. In reality, it was later documented that the chain had regularly been retrieved from the river during winter, and that most of it had likely been hauled in and melted down. Unaware of this, Bishop brought in barges to dredge that section of the river.

He didn’t find any of the chain links, but he did recover a section of the log boom that was used in conjunction with the chain to prevent the British from attempted to ram into and break the chain. Bishop donated (or perhaps sold) that boom section to the managers of the nation’s first historic landmark, Washington’s Headquarters in Newburgh, New York.

Today, that boom section is a prominent artifact on display at the Headquarters museum. It now represents not only one of the few examples of marine fortification from the Revolutionary War, but also as a reminder of the career of one of the notable marine engineers of the Industrial Revolution in America.

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