Author: lilyanr

While workplace safety is a legal obligation with all forms of employment in 2018, such concerns were rarely considered in 1931. Case in point is this photograph of these surveyors nonchalantly triangulating points along the sheer cliffs of the canyon without harnesses. OSHA (Occupational Safety and Health Administration), the institution in charge of the creation and enforcement of workplace safety regulations, would not come about until 1971, forty years after this photograph was taken.

NARA Series: Boulder Canyon Project Series, 1948-1966. Record Group 48: Records of the Office of the Secretary of the Interior, 1826-2009. National Archives Identifier: 2292774

How to capture the breadth of a recently surveyed land before the invention of the digital camera and its movable viewpoint? Water Project worker B.C. Noe approached this challenge with a do-it-yourself solution, involving a steady hand and a little tape. Like his composite photo below, the photos in this collection which portrayed panoramas, often of the untouched landscape before the beginning of a project (similar to Fortification Mountain and Hemenway Wash in the Boulder Canyon series), were regularly framed photos attached at the sides. This imitated a modern splicing effect and folded out over the report page.

During the Boulder Canyon portion of these water projects, old and new technology was used when deemed necessary. It is interesting to note the use of diesel-powered compressors to level grounds for creating highways and pathways for railroads, then opting for older steam-powered locomotives to haul building materials to the dam’s construction site. 

The irony is not lost in using the new methods to make way for the old.

Below are pictured the 19th-century style, 90-ton locomotive used in this 1929 report, hauling materials by the car at 50-tons each and the newer diesel compressor that makes new railways possible (both shown as the bottom image on each page).

NARA Series: Boulder Canyon Project Series, 1948-1966. Record Group 48: Records of the Office of the Secretary of the Interior, 1826-2009. National Archives Identifier: 2292774

In the Boulder Canyon planning images, this is exemplified by the map showing the water pathways planned from just south of St. George, Utah and tracked down to Yuma, Arizona and finishing in the Gulf of California. The location was not the main interest in the axes of this chart, but rather the elevation above sea level and the rate of flow captured by the project. What results is a diagram that emulates a meandering river but actually shows the flow of water based on elevation and rate, regardless of geographic location. The ingenuity of the Engineers utilized the decreasing elevations and the South-West orientation of the Colorado River to create this map doppelganger, which represented important data in an eye-pleasing manner.