A DISTINGUISHED ENGINEER DEAD.
Mr. James Mansergh, who died in England the other day, was one of the world’s leading authorities upon questions of water supply and sewage disposal. As a boy, he was a contemporary scholar with the late Professor Fawcett, England’s blind post-master-general, at Queenwood college. After serving a long apprenticeship with a firm of prominent civil engineers, he was sent to Brazil, where he built 200 miles of the first railroad to connect Rio Janeiro with the interior. Phis was, mostly, through virgin forest. Returning to England, he laid out his first sewage farm, the earliest experiment of this sort in the country. Then he went to London to undertake a vast sewerage contract at West Ham. This nearly wrecked him financially, but established his reputation, and later on he established the water and sewerage systems of many important towns, not only in Great Britain, but in other countries. He was the practical author of the first bill ever passed by Parliament, authorising the compulsory purchase of a private water plant by public authority. One of the greatest monuments of Mr. Mansergh’s engineering genius is the great Elan valley water system for Birmingham. He planned and created the whole sewerage system of Melbourne, Australia, said to be the largest contract of the kind ever undertaken, and did almost equally important work in two cities as widely apart as Colombo in Ceylon, and BudaPesth. As chairman of the Engineering Standards’ committee, he occupied a position of peculiar influence and authority in his profession.
