the title that he came to have, every chief engineer benjamin wright. it turns out has something of a question of paternity. wright like every so-called erie engineer was at best a skilled country survey are at a time when there were no trained or experienced engineers. but it was interesting to discover that before theory, wright had been fired by his land development company for failing to later wrote to their property. and more important, he was nearly fired from his erie job in the first months of construction. it seems that he was pursuing other surveying work, and on state time, and also avoiding hazardous deary fieldwork in unhealthy to rain were the first bits of the line were later he came very close to getting fired a couple of months after construction began. in 1839, the first attempt to create a professional society of american engineers with wright at its head failed when a majority voted against the society's proposed constitution. it effectively a rejection of wright himself by his peers. the present american society of civil engineers,

benjamin wright, the father of american civil engineering against a father against john rendell, a relative of randalls island, the various palin, but in albany native and very prominent family in albany, new york. news a skills survey air and the man who had just spent a dozen years laying out and mapping the future street grids of manhattan. we're here on 57 straight because 200 years ago john randolph put markers for thousands of a rectilinear blocks on what was then a very rugged and rural landscape. so john randall of the year is the background -- the path of the canal in the mohawk valley was supposed to be entirely along the southern bank of the river. using peters from the mohawk for to water the canal and now between and connecting in albany the mohawk makes a very big north toward art in the most eastern section of the mohawk river. with a false finally spilling the mohawk into the hudson. it now mandola involved himself in the process, he had been invited, he had been asked to becoming the engineer on the erie canal and has said no probably because he was still continuing his wor