ABSTRACT
HENNY 15.11. 1860 Arnhem/NL 14.07. 1935 Portland OR/USA David Christiaan Henny was educated at the Delft Polytechnic School in the Netherlands, graduating as a civil engineer in 1881. In 1884 he emigrated to the United States and was there engaged until 1892 in general engineering work. He then joined the Excelsior Wooden Pipe Company as chief engineer and general manager, and from 1902 to 1905 was general manager of another wood company at San Francisco. From then he was a supervising engineer for the Pacific Division of the US Reclamation Service. His work included the extensive program of dam construction in the West. In 1910 Henny began his long practice as a consultant and maintained an office at Portland OR for the remainder of his life. He was involved in a number of projects mainly in the United States in connection with land reclamation, power, and flood control. He first introduced the wooden stave pipe as a means of large pipeline for water transportation. He was an authority in dam design and contributed to the excellence of those built in the West. One of his important achievements was the invention of the Henny shear-joint, a special joint between the up-and downstream faces of concrete blocks used in the construction of massive concrete dams. This feature was successfully integrated in the Boulder Dam, then with 200 m the highest dam worldwide. It was later also incorporated in the Grand Coulee Dam on Columbia River, containing the largest amount of concrete then ever used for a dam. At the time of his death, Henny was a consultant to the Los Angeles County Flood Control District and also chairman of the Bonneville Dam Commission on the Lower Columbia River. He was a vice-president ASCE in 1932, and awarded the ASCE Norman Medal for his 1934 paper. In 1933 he was awarded Honorary Membership of the Royal Institute of Engineers, Holland. Anonymous (1935). D.C. Henny dies in Portland OR. Engineering News-Record 115(3): 102. P Anonymous (1936). David Christiaan Henny. Trans. ASCE 101: 1577-1580. Anonymous (1944). Henny. Dictionary of American biography 21: 393. Scribner’s: New York. Griggs, F.E., ed. (1991). Henny, David Christiaan. A biographical dictionary of American civil engineers 2: 50. ASCE: New York. Henny, D.C. (1898). Wooden-stave versus riveted pipe. J. Assoc. Engineering Soc. 21: 239-254. Henny, D.C. (1927). New dam will double water supply of Portland OR. Engineering News-Record 98(21): 842-846. Henny, D.C. (1934). Stability of straight concrete gravity dams. Trans. ASCE 99: 1041-1123.
