Philip Walter Henry

Philip Walter Henry. [Born] 1864. Engineer. Member of the Century for forty-seven years.

Civilization, it is said, is transportation and if that be true Mr. Henry was a great civilizer. For this is the man who first paved the streets of Buenos Aires, who built railways, roads, canals and piers in China, Haiti, Argentina, Venezuela, Bolivia, Spain, and the United States, and who laid a thousand miles of asphalt paving in the streets of sixty American cities.

But as he wrote in 1908 a prophetic article on “The Wearing Surface of the Future Road,” so he was soon prophetically into the development of oil wells and refineries and other construction projects in many parts of the world.

And, great and busy engineer that he was and good Centurion that he was, he studied the cultures of the countries in which he worked; and at the age of seventy-five translated beautifully Calderon de la Barca’s great plays—the Spaniards say as great as Shakespeare’s.

Modest, he responded when asked how he had gotten so much done that the answer was easy: He had, he said, gotten an early start because, having become bald very young, he looked older than he was.

Source: Henry Allen Moe Papers, Mss.B.M722. Reproduced by permission of American Philosophical Society Library & Museum, Philadelphia

Henry Allen Moe
Henry Allen Moe Papers, 1947 Memorials