author
Charles M. (Charles Mattathias) Jacobs
1850–1919
Best known for helping shape some of New York’s landmark tunnel projects, this English engineer brought bold ideas and practical skill to the great age of urban infrastructure. His surviving writings offer a firsthand look at how major rail and utility tunnels were planned and built at the turn of the twentieth century.
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About the author
Born on June 8, 1850, Charles Mattathias Jacobs was an English civil engineer whose career became closely tied to major American tunneling work. He is especially remembered for work connected with rail tunnels under the Hudson River, including projects associated with the Hudson and Manhattan lines and the Pennsylvania Railroad’s North River Tunnels.
Jacobs also published technical accounts of large engineering works, including A General Report upon the Initiation and Construction of the Tunnel under the East River, New York and a detailed paper on the New York Tunnel Extension of the Pennsylvania Railroad. Those works helped preserve the practical history of some of the era’s most ambitious underground construction.
He died on September 7, 1919. Today, he is remembered less as a literary figure than as a writer-engineer whose books and papers document the enormous effort behind the tunnels that helped connect New York and New Jersey.