🌉The Greats

Gunpowder lay a millennium in the future, so to cut the Baopingkou intake channel through the rock of Mount Yulei, Li Bing's crews heated the cliff face with burning straw and doused it with water, cracking the stone seam by seam — years of labor for a gap tens of metres wide. The finished system needs no dam: the Yuzui 'fish mouth' levee splits the Min so that flood water spills over a sacrificial weir while irrigation water flows on to the plain. UNESCO listed Dujiangyan as a World Heritage Site in 2000, still in service.

For a lighthouse on the wave-swept Eddystone rocks — where one predecessor had burned and another vanished in a storm with its builder inside — Smeaton modeled his tower on the trunk of an oak, flaring wide at the base, and cut every granite block with dovetail joints so the sea would lock the masonry tighter. He also worked out a lime mortar that cured underwater, re-solving a problem lost since Rome. The tower stood from 1759 until 1882, when the rock beneath it — not the tower — began to fail; Plymouth re-erected it on the Hoe by public subscription, where it still stands.

Telford's friend the poet Robert Southey nicknamed him 'the Colossus of Roads,' and the joke carried real weight: his Highland commissions re-engineered the infrastructure of an entire region, and his London-to-Holyhead road set standards a national highway agency would recognize. In 1820 the young Institution of Civil Engineers recruited him as its first president, and his lobbying won it the 1828 Royal Charter that made engineering a chartered profession. When he died in 1834 he was buried in Westminster Abbey, and in 1968 Britain named a new town — Telford — after him, the only British new town named for an engineer.

Washington Roebling could watch the bridge only by telescope from his Brooklyn Heights window, so Emily carried the chief engineer's instructions to the site daily — and increasingly wrote them, fielding engineers' technical questions herself until contractors assumed she was the mind behind the answers. When trustees moved in 1882 to remove her ailing husband, she addressed the American Society of Civil Engineers' allies and argued the case that kept him — and effectively her — in charge. At the opening in May 1883, Emily crossed first by carriage, carrying a rooster as a sign of victory.

The ASCE admitted the 22-year-old as a 'junior member' in 1905 — then, in 1916, when she passed the age limit for junior status and applied for the associate grade her experience plainly merited, the society refused and struck her from the rolls. She sued; the court declined to force a private society's hand. Barney went on practicing as an engineer, architect and developer anyway. In 2015 — 99 years later — the ASCE posthumously elevated her to Fellow, conceding, a century late, the standing it had denied her in life.

Teaching in Istanbul during and after the First World War, Terzaghi had almost no laboratory, so he built his own apparatus largely from scrap — improvised containers and hand-made cells — and ran hundreds of methodical experiments on how water-saturated clays compress over time. The result, his theory of consolidation, finally explained why buildings keep settling for years after completion, and became the core of Erdbaumechanik in 1925. The American Society of Civil Engineers awarded him its Norman Medal an unmatched four times.

For the 100-story John Hancock Center, completed in 1969, Khan and architect Bruce Graham put the structure on the outside: giant X-braces turning the whole facade into a rigid tube against the wind. The heresy paid for the building — it used roughly 145 kilograms of steel per square metre where the Empire State Building's generation had needed around 200, making a tower that tall commercially viable for the first time. Khan died of a heart attack in Jeddah in 1982, at 52, while working on the tented Hajj Terminal that later won the Aga Khan Award for Architecture.