William Ezra Worthen

William Ezra Worthen (March 14, 1819 – April 2, 1897) was a Harvard-educated American civil engineer. He was President of the American Society of Civil Engineers in 1887, and elected an Honorary Member in 1898.

Biography William E. Worthen was born in Amesbury, Massachusetts on March 14, 1819. His father, Ezra Worthen, was one of the creators of Lowell, Massachusetts as a center of manufacturing, and the first Superintendent of the Merrimac Mills. William E. Worthen graduated from Harvard College in 1838 and commenced the profession of civil engineering under the tutorship of Samuel Morse Felton, an assistant in the office of the then prominent engineer Colonel Loammi Baldwin Jr.

In 1840 Worthen was with George Washington Whistler on the Albany and West Stockbridge Railroad, commencing with the preliminary surveys of the road and remaining until its completion, 7 miles of the construction work having been under his immediate charge. Returning to Lowell he was again engaged with Francis in hydraulic work and the construction of the lower end of the Northern Canal. He then designed and built a dam and the mills on the Suncook River at Suncook, New Hampshire. He also designed and constructed a dam and mills for the Boston Manufacturing Company on the Charles River at Waltham, Massachusetts and the Suffolk, Tremont, Lawrence, Appleton, and Hamilton Mills at Lowell. He reported on the water supply of Lowell and for a time was in charge of the cotton mills and machine shops of the Boston Manufacturing Company as Acting Superintendent. The committee was composed of Worthen, James B. Francis, and Theodore G. Ellis. William Worthen also served on the ASCE committee that investigated the failure of the South Fork Dam, which caused the Johnstown Flood of 1889. That ASCE investigation report was not published until two years after the disaster. A detailed discussion of the South Fork dam investigation, the participating engineers, and the science behind the 1889 Johnstown flood was published in 2018.

Worthen was a frequent contributor to the professional discussions of the Society and presented the following papers:

Improvement of Sedimentary Rivers Transactions Vol XX page 280 Concrete Sewers at Mount Vernon NY Vol XXIV page 898 Steam Heating Vol XXIV page 206

This very incomplete sketch will give some idea of the varied practice which had occupied Mr Worthen during a long and most active professional life there being scarcely a branch of civil or mechanical engineering wherein his professional fitness has not been conspicuous in a marked degree. It has not been his lot to project or carry to completion great works of internal improvement such as challenge the admiration of the unthinking public but in a very unobtrusive way he had been continually rendering that essential service toward the furthering of enterprise without which the best conceived projects would prove abortive. To a remarkable power of rapid generalization seemingly incompatible with painstaking accuracy he united an almost intuitive perception of the requisite expedients of detail and design. His quickness in technical analysis, combined with the before mentioned qualities, has rendered possible the successful completion of many important works with which, owing to a forgetfulness of self his name is scarcely associated A retentive memory to sift and treasure the facts in science and art which extended study, had opened up to him the tact of judicious selection and application originality and boldness at times bordering on audacity and a positiveness that silenced all opposition have been the characteristic features of his long practice. Whatever Mr Worthen may have owed to study or experience in the arts of construction his acknowledged genius, using the word in its strictest sense, stamped him as an engineer nascitur non fit.

Worthen was paralyzed by a stroke in December, 1896, and died in New York City on April 2, 1897.