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Biography of Theodore Dehone JudahName: Theodore Dehone JudahBirth Date: 1826 Death Date: November 2, 1863 Place of Birth: Bridgeport, Connecticut, United States Nationality: American Gender: Male Occupations: engineer Theodore Dehone Judah Theodore Dehone Judah (1826-1863), American engineer and railroad promoter, developed the plans that led to construction of the first transcontinental railroad.Theodore Judah was born in Bridgeport, Conn., where his father was an Episcopal minister, but the family moved to Troy, N.Y., while he was still young. He attended the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, the first private engineering school in the world. After graduation he took a job helping build the Troy and Schenectady Railroad. Then, in rapid succession, he worked for three other railroads, planned and built the Niagara Gorge Railroad, helped build the Erie Canal, and erected a large bridge in Vermont.Following the example of a brother who had gone to California in the gold rush of 1849, Judah went west in 1854, shortly after marrying. Two years earlier a group of California promoters had conceived of a railroad from Sacramento, where ships arrived from San Francisco, up to the …showed first 150 words…
…showed last 150 words…the Pacific Railroad Convention of 1859. In 1860 his announcement that he had discovered a practical route through the forbidding Sierra Nevada enhanced the prospect of congressional action. In the following year he succeeded in bringing together the group of men--Collis P. Huntington, Leland Stanford, Mark Hopkins, and Charles Crocker--who would eventually build the Central Pacific Railroad. On July 1, 1862, with Southern opposition removed by the ongoing Civil War, Congress passed an act to aid the construction of the transcontinental railroad.But Judah did not live to see the road completed. Disagreements arose with the Huntington group, and they offered to buy Judah out for 0,000. He died on Nov. 2, 1863, from typhoid fever contracted while crossing the Isthmus of Panama on his way back to New York. Further Reading There is no full-length biography of Judah. Some information on him is in Lucius Beebe, The Central Pacific and the Southern Pacific Railroads (1963). |