Ellis, Charles Alton; ASCE Member
(1876-1949), pg. 1155
Purchase Information
| Document type: |
Memoir |
| Part of: |
Transactions of the American Society of Civil Engineers 1970 |
| Abstract: |
Charles Alton Ellis, the son of David B. and Eliza (Lombard) Ellis was born in Parkman, ME, on June 23, 1876. He received an A.B. degree from Wesleyan University in June 1900, and a C.E. degree from the University of Illinois in 1922. |
| |
From 1902 to 1908, Mr. Ellis worked with the American Bridge Co. as draftsman, checker, squad foreman, stress analyst, and designer of steel mill and office buildings, bridges and railway structures. From 1908 to 1912 Mr. Ellis was assistant professor of civil engineering at the University of Michigan. From 1912 to 1914 Mr. Ellis was design engineer in charge of 12 to 17 men of a design squad at the Dominion Bridge Co. From 1914 to 1915 Mr. Ellis was assistant professor of civil engineering and from 1915 to 1921 he was professor in charge of structural and bridge engineering at the University of Illinois. In 1921 Mr. Joseph B. Strauss offered Mr. Ellis the post of vice-president in charge of development and design of the Golden Gate Suspension Bridge, which responsibility Mr. Ellis accepted and carried until 1932. Mr. Ellis made the general design of the bridge on teh basis of which the $35,000,000 bond issue was voted Nov. 4, 1930, and the contract bids of $24,455,300 were taken June 17, 1931. Editorial recognition of this was given by the May 19, 1938 issue of Engineering News-Record "... credit for the designing and building of the bridge belongs to the members of his (Mr. Strauss’) firm, to Prof. C. A. Ellis, then of his firm, and to the members of the consulting board ...". From 1934 to 1946 Mr. Ellis was professor of structural engineering at Purdue University. From 1948 until his death Mr. Ellis was a member of the board of consulting engineers, G. A. Maney and Associates, which designed and supervised the construction of the East St. Louis Veterans Memorial Bridge over the Mississippi River, a cantilever structure having a main river span of 964 ft. Mr. Ellis took a prominent part in this responsibility after the death of Professor Maney. Mr. Ellis, representing Mr. Joseph B. Strauss, was associated with the firm of Monsarrat and Pratley, Consulting Engineers, in the design of the St. Lawrence River cantilever bridge at Montreal (Engineering News-Record, May 19, 1938 and June 2, 1938). |
| |
Without doubt, the outstanding achievement of Mr. Ellis’ professional career was his development and design of the Golden Gate Suspension Bridge, climaxed by his analysis of the 700-ft. high towers. The tower analysis, in which a number of persons participated in one way or another, may be said to have illustrated Dr. James B. Conant’s "Tactics and Strategy of Science," ("Science and Common Sense," by James B. Conant, New Haven Yale Univ. Press, 1952). Mr. Ellis disclosed his analysis to L. T. Wyly, G. A. Maney, and Leon S. Moisseiff. The paper was published in the Proceedings, ASCE, Vol. 60, No. 1, Jan. 1934, with discussions published in the September 1964 issue of Proceedings, ASCE by Ralph A. Tudor, Leon S. Moisseiff, and A. A. Eremin. Moisseiff mentioned "... This paper is a contribution of the first order to the methods available to engineers for determining the stresses and strains in elastic frames subjected to considerable deformation and departure from their geometric form ... the final proportioning of the towers differs somewhat in the cross-sectional areas from those given in the paper ...". Maney made a check of Ellis’ analysis by the method of successive approximations, checking Ellis’ results very closely. Professor George E. Beggs made and tested at Princeton University a steel model of the Golden Gate tower, built to a scale ratio of 1 to 56. As indicated in Engineering News-Record of January 25, 1934, he reported this to some 200 engineers on January 20, 1934. O. H. Ammann and Leon S. Moisseiff discussed the results: "The soundness of the theory was demonstrated by computing the stresses in the model according to the theory and then checking the results by testing the model. The computations were made by Mr. Lienhard of Mr. Moisseiff’s office." Mr. Ellis was author of many technical publications on mathematics and structural engineering. He was a member of the American Railway Engineering Association, the American Concrete Institute, Sigma Xi, and Chi Epsilon. |
| |
On September 29, 1913, Mr. Ellis was married to Elsie L. Ney. |
| |
Mr. Ellis was elected an Associate Member on April 3, 1907, and a Member on December 4, 1922. |
|
