G. A. Leonards

Found a hardback copy of Leonards 1962 Foundation Engineering Handbook today from one of the Contractor's lab guys. I have a copy back in Toronto (most of my stuff is there) but in looking again at the book, what a list of authors!!!
Engineering Props of Soils - Leonards!!
Soil Stabilization - Lambe
Retaining Structures - Tschebotarioff
Shallow Foundations - Sowers
Deep Foundations - Chellis (his pile book is a classic)
Underpinning - White (his underpinning book is a classic)
Culverts and Conduits - Spangler (see my earlier post)
Field Problems - Shannon and Wilson!

A veritable Who's Who of the Founding Geotechs

Bloody interesting book to see again . . . Think I'll go and learn a few things more . . . !

 

[vulcanhammer]

A few years back I was blessed with several books from the library of one of U.S. Steel's late application engineers. They included Terzaghi & Peck, Chellis, Dunham, Tschebotarioff (Soil Mechanics, Foundations and Earth Structures) and a few structural classics as well. There's great stuff there!

And, FWIW, I'm back teaching Foundations at UTC this fall:

http://www.vulcanhammer.net/utc/ence461/f2009/

http://www.pz27.net

 

[Ron]

I have tried to purchase a copy of Leonards' book. No luck.

Vulcanhammer...that's priceless. We should all be so lucky. Hang on to those!

 

[BigH]

Maybe, Ron, you will be blessed for Xmas . . . . Our company had a copy of Chellis but when the group split the mining guys took it - so it is probably lost . . . Would love a copy of it. He had a great piece of what to do when your H-pile, being driven into sand - wouldn't "set up".

Good your are busy Don . . . .

 

[Ron]

A little story about George Sowers...

Almost 30 years ago, when I was a young staff engineer working in the Materials Engineering group of Law Engineering, one of my colleagues and classmates in college had a large drilled shaft project in North Florida. He was the staff geotechnical engineer on the project. It was a very substantial project with large shafts, large loads, and some significant load testing. Lymon Reese was consulting on the load testing.

We had monthly engineering meetings, held after work in our small conference room. Usually there were 6 to 8 of us at these meetings. All were geotechs except me...I was the only structural materials guy we had. Anyway, George Sowers came down from the corporate office to check over my colleague's project, since it was a rather large project even for our firm. My colleague was so excited that George was coming to town...it was like the second coming (incidentally, my colleague was very religious and didn't imbibe in the adult beverages we usually had at dinner following the meetings). They went to the project site, and our branch manager, taking advantage of George being in town, invited him to attend our monthly engineering meeting. He said that he would and left the office. We were all sitting around the conference table waiting to get started and George walks in, tossed a 6-pack of beer on the table and said "Let's get started". My tee-totaling colleague was stunned...you could literally see his jaw drop...his hero was actually a beer drinker!! George then proceeded to be his personable self and gave us the benefit of several of his many, many war stories.

 

[BigH]

We had a 2 hour geo class of Friday afternoon from 1400 to 1600. After intermission at 1500, the beer came out for the rest of the class - prof was sad we couldn't partake in the $1/qt beer ups at The Haunt in downtown Ithaca . . . I'd like to have been there with "George".

 

[BigHarvey]

I have the french version of the book. The first chapter dealing with geology has been changed for "european geology".

I still look at it from time to time