Meet John B. Jervis

 - His Wikipedia entry.

John Bloomfield Jervis (December 14, 1795 – January 12, 1885) was an American civil engineer. America's leading consulting engineer of the antebellum era (1820–60), Jervis designed and supervised the construction of five of America's earliest railroads, was chief engineer of three major canal projects, designed the first locomotive to run in America, designed and built the 41-mile Croton Aqueduct – New York City's fresh water supply from 1842 to 1891 – and was a consulting engineer for the Boston water system.

John Bloomfield Jervis was born in 1795 at Huntington, New York, on Long Island, the son of Timothy Jervis, a carpenter, and Phoebe Bloomfield, the eldest of seven children. Jervis moved with his family to Fort Stanwix (later known as Rome) in upstate New York in 1798 when his father purchased a farm and ran a lumber business. In October 1817 at the age of 22, Jervis was hired by Chief Engineer Benjamin Wright of the Erie Canal as an axeman in a survey party to locate the canal west of Rome, New York. The role of the axemen was to clear away brush and trees along a "trace" four feet wide.(Ibid.) In the spring of 1818, Jervis became a rodman until the canal was located from Rome to Montezuma in July 10, 1818. (Ibid.) By the end of 1818, Jervis was promoted to resident engineer in charge of a canal section seventeen miles long and promoted to General Superintendent of the Eastern Division in 1824.

Jervis left the Erie Canal in early 1825 to again work with Benjamin Wright on the Delaware and Hudson Canal Company. In 1827, Jervis became the chief engineer for the Delaware and Hudson. In this position, he convinced the board of directors to test locomotives for the gravity railroad feeding coal to the canal terminal. Among the four engines imported for the experiment was the Stourbridge Lion, which was built by Foster, Rastrick and Company of England and became the first locomotive to run in the Western Hemisphere