When the American Society of Civil Engineers presented its first award for contributions to the history of civil engineering, there was but one person nominated, and he was unanimously approved. It is indeed lamentable that James Kip Finch (1883–1967) passed away, just a few days before he was officially to receive the award, on April 14, 1967.
Dean Finch’s interest in historical matters is found in his first published work, an article in the Popular Science News in 1902: “An Indian Village Site on Manhattan Island.” This was the year he graduated from Trinity School in New York City, where he was class historian.
A member of Columbia’s class of 1906, the young graduate received not only his degree of civil engineer but also membership in the honorary societies of Tau Beta Pi and Sigma Xi. Immediately following graduation, he joined Columbia University as an instructor in its summer school of surveying, which began his career as an educator-a career eventually covering almost fifty years. There was about a twenty-year period when Dean Finch was so engaged in his engineering work that he found little time for historical writing. His publications were many, over two dozen between 1911 and 192 5, and they ranged from pamphlets on the techniques of engineering drawing to texts on surveying. He wrote papers on structural engineering, hydraulics, hydrology, engineering education, and even an essay on “Why We Need Super-Power” (Commerce and Finance, May 2, 1923).
In June 1925, the dean (then an associate professor) addressed the graduating class of the Brooklyn Technical High School. His speech was entitled “The Engineering Tradition,” and with its publication it became the first of the dozens of articles on engineering history which he was to produce over the next forty years. By 1928, the dean had been promoted to full professor, and a major publishing house engaged him to prepare a definitive history of engineering. The job was undertaken with alacrity, and fifteen notebooks were filled with manuscripts before the reverses of the depression forced the publisher to abandon this great project. The dean’s correspondence at this time reflects his tenacity in seeking out facts. For example, a letter to the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago presses for documentary sources to support statements by the institute on early irrigation projects in Mesopotamia.
There is an interesting note penciled on a reprint of an article written in 1930. It says, “This is possibly the reason for the award.” The article was “French Pioneers in Engineering” (Engineering News-Record, April 24); the award was the Ordre des Palmes Academique of the French Ministry of Education. In historical studies, however, the sweep of his interests was by no means confined to any one period or area. He wrote of the Middle Ages in Europe in “Fontana, Mover of Obelisks … ” (Civil Engineering, April 1934). A few years earlier he wrote a biographical sketch of the nineteenth-century American engineer John Bloomfield Jervis (Transactions of the Newcomen Society, Vol. XI, 1930-31). But the dean always seemed to emphasize the biographical approach to history. His voluminous files on people compared with his le~s extensive (but very large) files on projects would support this surmise.
The dean’s great pride in his profession may largely account for his avocational focus on history, but anyone who engaged him in conversation might also conclude that he simply had a love of history which he naturally coupled with his profession. Had he been a lawyer, he probably would have devoted much of his time to the history of law.
When the dean retired from teaching in 1952, he did a limited amount of consulting work. It appears, however, that two subjects dominated his attention. As an educator, he had great apprehensions as to the future of his profession in the form in which he knew it. The growing trend of training young men as “applied scientists” vis-a-vis engineers greatly troubled him. He felt that many of the younger educators who were succeeding to the higher positions in technical schools were so engrossed in research work and academic solutions to engineering problems that they lacked a deep understanding of the role of the engineer in the construction industry and in society. Consequently, the dean thought that the more recent graduates were being deprived of the proper educational foundations on which they could build their engineering careers. It was, in one sense, ironical that Columbia University accorded him the honor of creating a James Kip Finch Professorship of Engineering and Applied Science.
Although the dean’s efforts to influence his younger colleagues in engineering education may have had limited impact, his prolific writings on engineering history were well received. In addition to his two books, Engineering and Western Civilization (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1951) and The Story of Engineering (New York: Anchor Books, 1960), he became widely appreciated by his fellow engineers for a series of sixteen articles in Civil Engineering under the general theme “The Engineer through the Ages,” and his series of thirty-four articles in the Consulting Engineer, “Great Books of Engineering.” The first series was largely derived from his earlier studies; but his “Great Books … ” was largely made up of new material from more recent acquisitions of data. It is most fortunate that a collection of these historical writings is planned for publication in the near future. In addition, he also contributed an important chapter dealing with the rise of modern civil engineering to Melvin Kranzberg and Carroll W. Pursell, Jr. (eds.), Technology in Western Civilization (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967).
Dean Finch’s contributions to the history of engineering are indeed great, but one should not close this memoir without noting his character as a man-truly a gentleman and scholar of the old school: Dean James Kip Finch, Civil Engineer, Educator, and Historian. NEAL FITZSIMONS* ,. MR. FuzSrMoNs, of Kensington, Maryland, is a consulting engineer and a member of the history committee of the American Society of Civil Engineers. He gratefully acknowledges the help of Mr. E. C. K. Finch, son of Dean Finch, in the preparation of this memoir.
Neal FitzSimons
Originally published as Neal FitzSimons, “James Kip Finch (1883–1967),” Technology and Culture 9, no. 4 (1968): 594–96, https://muse.jhu.edu/article/894220.
Finch, James Kip. “Transportation and Construction, 1300–1800: The Rise of Modern Civil Engineering.” In Technology in Western Civilization, edited by Melvin Kranzberg and Carroll W. Pursell, Jr. New York: Oxford University Press, 1967.
Finch, James Kip. The Story of Engineering. New York: Anchor Books, 1960.
Finch, James Kip. Engineering and Western Civilization. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1951.