Frank Crowe
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Francis Trenholm Crowe (1882 – 1946) was the chief engineer of the Hoover Dam. During that time, he was the superintendent of Six Companies, the construction company that oversaw the construction project.
Born in Trenholmville, Quebec, Crowe graduated from the University of Maine in 1905 with a degree in civil engineering. The University's Francis Crowe Society is named in his honor. Crowe became interested in the American west during a lecture from Frank Weymouth, a guest speaker from the United States Bureau of Reclamation. He signed up for a summer job before the end of the lecture. That summer job began a 20 year career with the reclamation service that would change the face of the American west. In 1924, Frank Crowe left the United States Bureau of Reclamation to join the construction firm of Morrison-Knudsen in Boise, Idaho. Morrison-Knudsen had recently signed a partnership with the larger Utah Construction Company to build dams.
While working on the Arrowrock Dam in Idaho, Crowe pioneered two practices that are crucial to the construction of large dams. The first was a pneumatic delivery system to transport cement and the second was a system of overhead cables to allow the pneumatic cement to be pumped at any point on the construction site. With this technique, Crowe built some of the largest dams in the American west, including the Hoover Dam, the Shasta Dam, and 18 other dams.
The construction of the Hoover Dam project and Frank Crowe's role (portrayed by actor Jay Benedict [1]) was dramatised in a one-hour TV docu-drama, as part of the BBC's "Seven Wonders of The Industrial World" Series in 2003 [2] available on DVD [3]
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